Gendered networks and migration decision-making in Northern Vietnam

This paper examines the gender aspect of migrant networks, particularly the different ways networks are expected to assist men's or women's migration during migration decision-making processes. Through the case study of a farming community in Northern Vietnam, it shows that migrant networks are not gender neutral and, more importantly, men and women capitalise on different functions of networks to facilitate their migratory endeavours. Whilst men tend to be connected to relatively more extended networks primarily for practical support, women are more likely to be tied to family networks, which provide them with not just information and practical support but also social protection. These gender-specific expectations and uses of migrant networks have important implications for men's and women's mobility. The paper provides new insights into the way migration choices are made by men and women and at the same time underscores the importance of understanding migrant networks in researching migration.     

The New Men's History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History

Historians with feminist commitments have expressed reservations about men's history and men's studies. This unease has existed more or less from the first appearance of men's history as a specialised area of inquiry, and shows no signs of abating. The first part of this article explores the sources of this unease. It discusses several guiding premises of men's history and shows that they tend to lead to the occlusion of men's gendered power over women. Nonetheless, the scrutiny of the gender of men is the logical outgrowth of several decades of theoretical and empirical work on gender–witness the many historians of women and gender who have recently turned their attention to the systematic study of manliness and masculinity. With the help of examples drawn from the scholarship on the history of the British colonies in America and the early United States, the second part of this article enumerates several strategies for successfully highlighting men's gendered power in histories of manliness and masculinity.     

Child Poverty in the American States: The Impact of Welfare Reform,Economics, and Demographics

This article identifies the predictors of child poverty rates at the state level before and after the adoption and implementation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The analysis shows that the most important state‐level factors that influence child poverty rates are demographics, the health and viability of the state economy, and often the generosity, inclusiveness, and quality of state welfare programs. States with large numbers of black citizens, and those that score highest on infant mortality, teen births, births to unmarried women, children living with a parent without a high school degree, and children living with a single parent have the highest rates of child poverty. Child poverty rates are lowest in states that suffer less unemployment, and in wealthier states. States that score higher on per capita personal income, tax revenues, and taxable resources have lower child poverty rates. While specific “tough” welfare policies adopted by some states seem to have no impact on child poverty rates, we tested for the first time a sophisticated measure of the overall quality of state welfare programs. The analysis reveals that the global quality of a state's welfare programs is often an independent predictor of child poverty. States with the most generous, inclusive, and supportive welfare programs have done the best job of lowering and containing child poverty.     

Grandfathering as spatio-temporal practice: conceptualizing performances of ageing masculinities in contemporary familial carescapes

This study examines the spatio-temporalities of the intergenerational caring practices that contemporary grandfathers engage in with their grandchildren, in order to critique old men's constructions and performances of ageing masculinities and the gendering and ageing of contemporary carescapes. Findings are based on thirty-one qualitative interviews and two participant observations, conducted in the north-west of England with men who are grandfathers. The concept of carescapes (Bowlby, Gregory and McKie 1997) is employed to explain that grandfathering is both spatially and temporally organized. Findings suggest that men construct distinctly masculine spaces of care later in life, contingent on both their resistance to spatially embedded ageism and their comparisons of grandfathering to previous lifecourse subjectivities, such as fathering. Complexity and diversity in how men negotiate these factors are also apparent and are explored. There is evidence for example that some men's performances of ageing masculinities contribute to the maintenance of a gendered division of labour in family care work, while others perform alternative masculinities that offer potential to transform gendered carespaces. This is further mediated by intergenerational interactions with children and grandchildren. Focus on old men who are grandfathers necessarily complicates geographical perspectives on the spatio-temporalities of multiple masculinities, ageing and informal familial care.     

‘I Just Like to Kill Things’: Women,Men and the Gender of Sport Hunting in the United States, 1940–1973

This paper examines women's place in sportsmen's magazines and their role in the creation of sport hunting's image in the post‐war United States. It argues that sport‐hunting women were not challenging post‐war constructions of femininity or domesticity. Nevertheless, sportsmen attacked women's attempts to construe hunting as heterosocial recreation, fearing that they would undermine hunting's cultural significance. Instead, the dominant, male‐authored discourse connected authentic hunting to a new post‐war formulation of masculinity that revolved around militarism and the emotional bonds between men developed through battlefield experiences. This analysis takes seriously both men's and women's interpretations of a cultural practice historically associated with one sex, in order to reveal how gender identities are constructed and contested.     

Twentysomethings and twentagers: subjectivities,spaces and young men at home

This article examines young men's (aged 18–25 years) meanings of home and practices of homemaking, comprising material and social relations. The discussion contributes to three areas of geographical interest: home, masculinities and youth. Both geographies of home and masculinities have begun to consider men's experiences and meanings of home, but young men's domestic practices remain largely unexamined. Geographical work on youth has examined housing transitions, but the gendered experiences of young men need further interrogation. To provide insight into young men's homemaking, this article presents qualitative case studies drawn from fieldwork that investigated relations between masculinities and domesticities in Sydney, Australia. Young men are arguably out-of-place at home in conventional discourses of gender and space, but homes are nevertheless crucial sites for shaping masculine subjectivities. Masculinities and homes are co-constituted through domestic practices, generating diverse intersectional subjectivities and spaces. In this article, three subjectivity-space, or masculine-domestic, relations are discussed, which also counter the centring of heterosexual couple family homes in domestic imaginaries: young men in parental homes, share-housing and ‘alternative’ family homes. I examine similarities and differences across and within these masculine domesticities. This multiplicity of ‘youthful masculine domesticities’ offers a set of qualitative examples for use in public rhetoric that seeks to redress uneven gender dynamics in contemporary domestic life.     

Black sisterhood: The situation of urban aboriginal women and their relationship to the white women's movement 1

The article argues that Aboriginal women in urban aboriginal society experience very different oppressions than do white women in urban white society. Aboriginal women believe that their greatest oppression is racism not sexism. When their objective conditions are examined it becomes obvious that this is indeed so. In fact Aboriginal women are statistically better educated and better employed than are Aboriginal men. Other economic and societal factors combine to produce a situation whereby a black woman's status within her own society is very different to that of her white sisters. Black women are more likely to be heads of household; more likely to be political leaders and less likely to be child‐burdened than their white counterparts. Consequently women's movement demands such as abortion, child‐care, the right to work and sexual liberation are not given high priority by the Aboriginal women's movement. Aboriginal women's demands stem from the politics of poverty and discrimination. These are caused by racism not sexism.     

Responding to the ‘crisis of masculinity’: the perspectives of young Muslim men from Glasgow and Edinburgh,Scotland

Debates about the so-called crisis of masculinity have tended to focus on the experiences of white working class young men and black young men to the exclusion of other groups of men. This article seeks to redress this omission by exploring young Muslim men's knowledge and understanding of the crisis of masculinity and the ways in which they respond to such discourses. Using qualitative data collected during interviews and focus groups with young Muslim men – mainly of Pakistani heritage – living in Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland, I demonstrate that young Muslim men's responses to the crisis of masculinity debate are informed by a complex range of issues including their own class position, familial and related gendered expectations alongside the young men's interests in sport and leisure activities.     

Competition,cooperation and resistance: women in the political field in Iraq

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003 many women supported the process of transition and became active in political parties and coalitions. A wide range of groups were also formed which pursued women's rights agendas and, in many cases, included a call for peace and reconciliation and charity activities for women and children. However, female political action and the field of women's rights remain divided by the same multiple boundaries of belonging which affect Iraqi society itself; women operate in specific ethnic and denominational, local and regional settings, and they support nationalist, secularist, left‐wing or Islamist agendas. Women's rights—whatever the direction—can be of major or minor concern. This article outlines female political action and draws attention to the key issues which are discussed, in particular, by secular feminists in Iraq. In so doing, the article highlights how women in Iraq have not only lost, as a wide range of observers argue, but have also benefited from the restructure of the political landscape. Female political activists are still faced with old and new social, cultural, legal and political obstacles. The article argues that when women support narratives that leave men's superiority untouched, they are not simply victims of men or ‘false consciousness'; women either compete and cooperate, or they reject ideological narratives and power relations, while pursuing agendas of individual interest. Yet, despite competition among women and women's groups, and women's loyalty to agendas controlled by men, radical overtones that resist male domination can be heard— and should be supported.     

Womanliness in the Slums: A Free Kindergarten in Early Twentieth‐Century Edinburgh

This paper considers the intersection of Spiritual Motherhood, early childhood education and child welfare in early twentieth‐century Edinburgh. Its focus is St Saviour's Child Garden (SSCG), which opened in the Canongate, in November 1906, part of the Free Kindergarten movement that emerged in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century. The paper focuses on the SSCG's founder Lileen Hardy, in order to trace the development of this new approach to child welfare and women's work in Britain. It discusses her training at the Sesame House for Home‐Life Training in London, her move to Edinburgh, and the network of predominantly women reformers, whose interests ranged from urban reform to medical welfare, she found there. It shows how this network facilitated the founding of the SSCG and discusses the form it took and Hardy's implementation of a modified form of Froebelian praxis. In so doing its concern is to show how Free Kindergarten forms part of a wider history of social welfare and urban reform as well as to the history of early childhood education, and to move attention away from the men usually associated with innovations in Scottish social reform like Patrick Geddes, and onto a group of women who created a women and child‐centred proto‐Welfare State in pre‐First World War Edinburgh.     

Redefining Men's Sexuality,Resignifying Male Bodies: The Argentine Law of Anti‐Venereal Prophylaxis, 1936

By analysing governmental, legal and medical sources, this article examines Argentina's first national law of anti‐venereal prophylaxis enacted in 1936. It argues that two aspects of the law, the abolition of legalised prostitution and the mandatory prenuptial medical exam and certificate for men, especially signalled a shift in the state's concern for men's sexuality. The essay demonstrates that this shift was based on the legal and medical recognition of men's reproductive role, its impact on the health of the family and the biological destiny of the nation, and the consideration of the male body as a carrier of venereal diseases and an agent of contagion. This interest in men's sexuality was also the result of the limits the state confronted in its attempts to target women. The law imposed new controls over men because the medical surveillance of prostitutes had proved to be a sanitary failure, and the medical examination and certificate for single women was rejected since it went against beliefs regarding female purity and virginity. This article shows how, under the influence of eugenics, the state turned to the sanitary surveillance of men to prevent venereal contagion and to assure healthy procreation by assuming a new interventionist and paternalist role as the guarantor of public health, the promoter of the hygienic family, and the entity responsible for the protection of wives and children through the control of the male body.     

Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth‐Century Britain

Eighteenth‐century England is, for many scholars, the time and place where modern domesticity was invented; the point at which ‘home’ became a key concept sustained by new literary imaginings and new social practices. But as gendered individuals, and certainly compared to women, men are notable for their absence in accounts of the eighteenth‐century domestic interior. In this essay, I examine the relationship between constructs of masculinity and meanings of home. During the eighteenth century, ‘home’ came to mean more than one's dwelling; it became a multi‐faceted state of being, encompassing the emotional, physical, moral and spatial. Masculinity intersected with domesticity at all levels and stages in its development. The nature of men's engagements with home were understood through a model of ‘oeconomy’, which brought together the home and the world, primarily through men's activities. Indeed, this essay proposes that attention to how this multi‐faceted eighteenth‐century ‘home’ was made in relation to masculinity shifts our understanding of home as a private and feminine space opposed to an ‘outside’ and public world.     

Women's Work in Urban Bangladesh: Is there an Economic Rationale?

The general phenomenon that women in Bangladesh engage less frequently in market work than men is commonly explained as the lack of response of female labour to economic imperatives due to the overarching influence of purdah. However, this emphasis on a cultural rationale for gender-differentiated work behaviour diverts attention away from the deep-rooted economic inequalities at the societal level. This article examines women's work in urban Bangladesh from a female labour supply and demand perspective that is rooted in the socio-economic institutional context. The study finds that, despite the strong gender segregation of economic roles, women's roles are more flexible and lend themselves to changing household strategies more easily compared to men's. The evidence indicates that female labour market participation is largely the outcome of the supply effect shaped by the pattern of gender roles and gender-specific access to human capital. Consequently, women are relegated to low-skill market activities and have lower earnings than men, even without any overt discrimination in labour demand. The covert discrimination that leads women to pursue a different pattern of labour use than men is the fundamental gender bias of socio-economic institutions that govern household allocational decisions and dictate gender-specific behaviour.     

The Impact of Program Design on Enrollment in State Children's Health Insurance Programs

The success of State Children's Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP) in expanding insurance coverage among low‐income children varies considerably across states. Scholars have looked to different program characteristics to explain this variation, but have arrived at disparate conclusions regarding the impact of one of the most significant design choices—the decision to create a new program or to pursue increased child health insurance rates through an expansion of the existing Medicaid program. This study suggests that understanding the impact of programmatic choices requires a more careful consideration of the mechanisms through which these different program designs might influence enrollment than has been offered in previous research. Employing a multilevel governance framework, it suggests that there is a hitherto unexplored indirect impact, where design choices influence administrative behavior, which in turn influences enrollment success in SCHIP programs. It is important to understand the effect of administrative design choices because this is one of the key areas in which states exercise discretion in the implementation of many federal programs.     

The Company Owns the Mine but They Don't Own Us: Feminist Critiques of Capitalism in the Coalfields of Kentucky in the 1970s

This article examines women's involvement in the Brookside Mine strike of 1974, which captivated US audiences and provided women with an unprecedented public platform to challenge the class and gender system undergirding coalfield capitalism. During the strike, female kin of miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, started a club to support striking miners and their families and to organise picket lines; they were joined by women from across the region and country. With the strike as their foundation these women generated a women's movement that revealed the specific ways class and gender inequality shaped their lives, defined by the heavy‐duty care work characteristic of the coalfields. This article argues that the Brookside women's support of striking miners was fundamentally about gendered class inequality: the denigration of working‐class, female caregivers alongside the devaluing of men's labour. Using collective memory and individual experience as their interpretive devices, the Brookside women forged a class‐conscious feminism. In it they exposed the traumas of coalfield capitalism, shone a light on women's unpaid care work (one of the foundations of corporate capitalism) and destabilised the gender and class hierarchies that defined coalfield communities.     

‘Facing it Together’: Early Caregiving Responses to Vancouver's HIV/AIDS Epidemic

This article utilises oral history interviews with long-term survivors and caregivers in Vancouver, British Columbia to foreground the importance of gay men's early HIV/AIDS caregiving work. Caregiving was essential to the health and resilience of Vancouver's gay community and served as a political response to homophobic discourses that demonised gay men and devalued the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS. This analysis of the practical and political significance of HIV/AIDS caregiving demonstrates that historians must find better ways to recover the often-untold histories of men's caregiving and domesticity and appreciate their significance to the success of social movements.     

Writing about a different kind of medical history: a critical review of Zaizao bingren by Yang Nianqun

After the implementation of China's Reform Policy and the dissolution of the Cold War system, the conditions in Japan for conducting scholarly research on China's modern history changed drastically. We can categorize Japanese research on China's modern history since the 1980s into two components: the relativization of the Chinese Revolution and a rediscovery of the uniqueness of Chinese society. Some historians, however, continue to point out that an alternative vision of history that integrates detailed research results already achieved within individual areas of history has not yet replaced the conventional revolution‐based paradigm. It is indisputable, as they emphasize, that breaking away from the so‐called revolution‐based viewpoint of history in Japan has created diverse visions of history and has contributed to a more substantial body of work pertaining to China's modern history. The question of what kind of new vision we should search for, however, remains unanswered. Recent overviews of modern Chinese history in Japan were expected to answer this question. This paper is intended as a general review of recent trends and expected developments in Japanese research on China's modern history by introducing the most important overviews written by Japanese scholars. We are not concerned here with individual case study research.     

‘Turning Sex into a Game’: Gogodala Men's Response to the AIDS Epidemic and Condom Promotion in Rural Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT Rugby league is the national sport of Papua New Guinea and the game's huge popularity and international profile has been used in recent condom promotion campaigns in the nation's fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In this paper, I argue that the promotion of condom use through rugby league requires a national campaign strategy that includes understandings of condom use and masculinity at the rural level. I demonstrate this through a study of Gogodala men's understandings of the epidemic and condom use in Western Province. The Gogodala are a Christian‐based society and many blame the national condom promotion strategy for an increase in promiscuity and for ‘turning sex into a game’. Condom availability in this rural area continues to be restricted to a family planning program that promotes Christian values and excludes unmarried men. I explore the male condom dilemma where young men are more concerned with avoiding accusations that their sexual behaviour puts them at risk of contracting HIV despite acknowledging the preventative value of using condoms. In this context young men disassociate themselves from the disease and condom use through a process of calculated risk or risk minimisation.     

‘If You Find Out Who Her Father is I Would Be Interested to Know’ The Kwermin in an Eastern Min Context

In this paper the peripheral position of the Kwermin in the Min regional context is discussed through a focus on two gift‐presentations, those of bridewealth and those presented to fully initiated men at the end of their initiatory process. The items of the traditional bridewealth gifts are discussed as well as the debate that emerged, after the discontinuation of this traditional presentation, whether Kwermin should take up the large bridewealth payments introduced from the highland Bimin or go back to an earlier custom of sister‐exchange (abu) between clans without great emphasis on bridewealth. However, it is suggested that the present day monetary claims, without their actual payment, may eventually serve to strengthen the previous practice of abu. The gifts presented following full initiation are referred to as Afek's pubic hair and it is shown how these presentations can be understood as being Afek, or essential aspects of this highland's originating ancestor, creating novices as true men who are then presented to Afek in a way similar to the way wives are presented to husbands. It is suggested that such presentation of man to ancestress partly explains patriarchal Kwermin men's reluctance to fully accept highland ideology, preferring to maintain their allegiance with the cultural hero of the lower mountains and the lowlands, Webnok.     

Ethnographic Understandings of Gender and Economic Transition in Siberia: Implications for Planners and Policy Makers

Economic transition has been defined by neo-liberal restructuring policies and understandings. Using ethnographic data from Omsk, Russia, I examine structural adjustment policy implementation in the context of socially constructed gender norms. These policies have complicated implications for women and men's economic survival. The ethnographic understandings gained from interviews with women provide vital information that would improve planning processes in Omsk. For example, using an economic gardening approach to support women's small business development and workforce development targeting survivors of violence would advance women's economic self-sufficiency. I suggest that if planners use ethnographic understandings they will be able to more effectively respond to planning challenges such as poverty, education and health care issues.