Friedrich Sunder and the boundaries of gender

The article explores the gendered imaginary in the Gnadenleben of Friedrich Sunder (1254–1328) and the formation of clerical masculinity in the context of feminine devotional life. Friedrich Sunder worked as a convent chaplain for a Dominican female community and lived within the convent's area. In his book Sunder employs language, images and devotional practices that can be considered in medieval culture to have been feminine. Almost simultaneously, however, he applied masculine roles and emphasised his own manliness. Although Sunder accepted female forms of religiosity and wrote on practices that were considered especially suitable for women, at the same time his priestly masculinity was defined by the physical boundary the cloister created between the enclosed feminine religiosity and that of a pastoral masculine priesthood. His discussion of gender within the mystical frame defined the boundaries of his own masculinity in the web of different traditions of both the proper way of life and the gendered nature of religious practices.     

Implications of gendered environmental knowledge in water allocation processes in central Australia

The existence of gendered knowledge has been identified as a significant feature of Indigenous Australian culture, and the importance of considering the implications of gendered environmental knowledge in collaborative cross-cultural natural resource management has been highlighted. There is a lack of case studies that demonstrate how Indigenous women's knowledge and laws can be provided for in resource management contexts. From collaborative research with Anmatyerr women in central Australia, we discuss the implications of gender bias in relation to gendered knowledge in natural and cultural resource management, with a specific focus on Anmatyerr women's involvement in providing inputs about the cultural values of water within water allocation planning processes. This research highlights Anmatyerr women's own perspectives of their roles in contemporary contexts and identifies the existence of cultural change and continuity in relation to rights and responsibilities around water.     

Gender and Translation: Writing as Resistance in Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo

This essay argues that translation in Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man) (1947), as well as in related pieces, functions for Primo Levi as a key means for claiming and potentially repairing manhood. In its capacity to reposition meaning, translation functions as a powerful vehicle for affirming agency, particularly gendered agency. What emerges in Levi's writings, particularly in Se questo's “Canto of Ulysses” chapter, is the figure of the translator as resistance fighter: the man who uses his intellect, his love of languages and other men, and his desire to communicate in order to combat the assault on humanity perpetrated by Nazism and sustained by its legacy. In this Levi's writing exists on a continuum with the cultural work of the founding members of Giustizia e Libertà and, accordingly, complicates Italy's postwar understanding of partisan activity. Throughout Se questo è un uomo and related works, translation proves a vital if imperfect means for reclaiming manhood and for asserting the possibility of friendship across cultural, regional, ethnic, and gender boundaries.     

Gender Binary and the Limits of Poststructuralist Method

In contemporary gender history, the story about the making of the gender category is inseparable from the concept of ‘gender binary’. It at once signifies a research agenda and constitutes a persistent problem pervading feminist analysis itself. On the one hand, it points to the massive historical record of persistent inequality between the sexes. On the other hand, the concept of ‘gender binary’ undergirds gender history's analytics, which empowers historians to pursue, expose and deconstruct the binary organisation of gendered – woman/man – identities as well as social relations and discursive formations that produce them. In both capacities, the concept carries a rich repertoire of connotations, which informs and influences the gender category: those of radical distinction, opposition, mutually exclusive and exhaustive differentiation, hierarchy, domination, oppression – in all their myriad historical forms. As a result, it captures the entanglement of gender – in theory, an open‐ended category – in binary, that is, negatively and positively determined connotations of feminine and masculine and, consequently, in a particular, historical form of heterosexual subjectivity, the one structured like a binary system. The entanglement of gender history's foundational category – gender – in the binary systems of assigning difference has had many critics. What has been left unexamined however and what gives this article its focus is the poverty of gender as a binary device to analyse those gendered identities that constitute heterosexual relations but do not fit the binary matrix. The goal in this article is to enable the conditions for the continuous development – not abandonment – of the gender category and our theoretical framework. To do that, I explore how the gender category became a binary category, tightly identified with connotations of asymmetry and hierarchy, by undertaking a deconstructive rereading of a foundational work by one of the discipline's most influential poststructuralist theorists – Joan Scott. I conclude by arguing that in order to address the problem of gendered, heterosexual identities that do not fit the binary matrix we need to revisit the concept of dichotomy and differentiate it from binary connotations of difference found in heteronormative gender systems.     

“SEEING” THE PAST: TEXT AND QUESTIONS OF HISTORY IN THE RĀJATARAṄGIṆĪ

Traditional scholarly opinion has regarded Kalha?a's Rājatara?gi?ī, the twelfth‐century Sanskrit chronicle of Kashmiri kings, as a work of history. This essay proposes a reinvestigation of the nature of the iconic text from outside the shadow of that label. It first closely critiques the positivist “history hypothesis,” exposing its internal contradictions over questions of chronology, causality, and objectivity as attributed to the text. It then argues that more than an empiricist historical account that modern historians like to believe it is—in the process bracketing out integral rhetorical, mythic, and didactic parts of the text—the Rājatara?gi?ī should be viewed in totality for the kāvya (epic poem) that it is, which is to say, as representing a specific language practice that sought to produce meaning and articulated the poet's vision of the land and its lineages. The essay thus urges momentarily reclaiming the text from the hegemonic but troubled understanding of it as history—only to restore it ultimately to a more cohesive notion of historicality that is consistent with its contents. Toward this end, it highlights the concrete claim to epistemic authority that is asserted both by the genre of Sanskrit kāvya generally and by the Rājatara?gi?ī in particular, and their conception of the poetic “production” of the past that bears a striking resonance with constructivist historiography. It then traces the intensely intertextual and value‐laden nature of the epistemology that frames the Rājatara?gi?ī into a narrative discourse on power and ethical governance. It is in its narrativity and discursivity—its meaningful representation of what constitutes “true” knowledge of time and human action—that the salience of the Rājatara?gi?ī may lie.     

Who does the work in sustainable households? A time and gender analysis in New South Wales,Australia

Households in the affluent West have become an important target of government and NGO campaigns to encourage more environmentally sustainable behaviours, but there has been little research into the gender implications of such policies. This article investigates the role of gender and time in the sustainability practices of six heterosexual households with young children, committed participants in the Sustainable Illawarra Super Challenge programme in 2009. Women spent more total time on sustainable practices, and did so more often. Men's contributions related mostly to gardening and transport, in longer blocks of time. In these households, sustainability became a highly gendered practice because of the different roles in homemaking. Women resisted constructions of themselves as being closer to nature, and shouldered expectations of sustainability as part of their roles as mothers and household managers. They experienced time as overlapping and fragmented, with no distinction between work and leisure. Men contributed to sustainable practices mainly through activities understood as leisure, in longer blocks of time. Our temporality lens also illustrates the gendered ways that old practices become deroutinised and new practices reroutinised. While men were often responsible for the labour and upfront time required to start or research a project, the responsibility of everyday implementation and habit-changing commonly fell to women. These findings illustrate how gendered analyses help identify both opportunities for, and constraints against, change towards sustainability. Opportunities include the strong connections between both mothers' and fathers' understanding of good parenting and the importance they attach to household sustainability. Constraints include the temporal challenges faced by households, and how these interact with wider structural and labour roles.     

Writing Gender into History and History in Gender: Creating A Nation and Australian Historiography

This paper reflects on the impact of gender in the writing of history by considering the reception of Creating A Nation, the first gendered history of Australia. It argues that while there has emerged an impressive volume of feminist history and with it has come an important acceptance of women's historical experience, the reception of ‘gender’ within the historical profession has paradoxically been ambivalent and ambiguous. This is the case because of an unease about feminist theory and its relevance to history. There also remains a prevailing belief that a gendered neutral historical place exists, to which historians can retreat.     

What's Missing? Gender,Reason and the Post-Secular

Abstract

This article considers whether contemporary debate about the "post-secular" has overlooked the extent to which, as a concept or epoch, it may be "gendered." Jürgen Habermas has suggested that there is something "missing" from secular reason in the shape of transcendental and metaphysical values; but I will contend that the debate is in danger of neglecting the central role of gender—so integral to the conceptual and political formation of modernity—in any rethinking of the symbolic of the post-secular. As feminist theorists have long been reminding us, many of the same processes that gave birth to modernity's elevation of public reason, impartial and non-contingent subjectivity, and models of the free, self-actualizing autonomous agent facilitated by the formation of liberal democracy, were not actually neutral or universal; but highly gendered. They rested on binary representations of women and men's differential nature; and they conceived of differential and gendered division of labour which often precluded women's claiming full humanity, let alone full and active citizenship. So gender, and women, are also in danger of disappearing from this new post-secular chapter in the debate about religion, politics and identity. This article examines how this omission might be corrected, and will outline what might be some of the most significant issues at stake.     

Gender and Language in Ethnographic and Evolutionary Perspectives

Much research in the field of language and gender has been hampered by unquestioned a priori dualistic assumptions about contrasting gender roles for men and women. The works reviewed here all demonstrate that simplistic dualistic beliefs about what are typical male or female ways of speaking do not hold water. The variables that determine speech styles are complex and mutually interactive: place of residence, class, formality, age, and gender, and others. Women are just as capable of directive speech as men, and men, of hedged speech. Dualistic thinking about gender serves only to reinforce current hegemonies.     

Work,Gender & History in the 1990s and Beyond

By the end of the 1980s, having amply demonstrated that the study of class could no longer be separated from the study of gender, feminist historians were advocating a new gendered history of work. At the beginning of the 1990s, American historian Ava Baron identified four problems that women's labour history had left unresolved: the need to move women's labour history out of its ghetto; an explanation for the mechanisms of sexual difference in labour relations; the theorisation of women's and men's ‘consent’ to oppression; and an understanding of the differences among women. The quest for a gendered labour history required new conceptual tools and new theoretical approaches. This paper tests this agenda against research on work and gender in the last decade of Gender & History. The moves toward the interrelation of public and private, work and family, as well as toward the construction of identities calls into question whether work remains a distinctive historical field.     

Beneath the “Zunami”: Jacob Zuma and the Gendered Politics of Social Reproduction in South Africa

Abstract: In April 2009, African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma was swept into power in South Africa's fourth democratic general election. To date, this political “Zunami” has largely been presented as either a leftist rebellion against Mbeki's neoliberalism, a reassertion of patriarchal “traditionalism”, or an example of Zulu ethnic mobilization. This article draws on a long‐term ethnographic study to provide a critical gendered perspective on Zuma's rise. It argues that Zuma resonates with many poor South Africans, including women, in part because of his ability to connect the personal and political in ways that talk to South Africa's “crisis of social reproduction”. A key point the article emphasizes—one virtually absent from contemporary discussions about Zuma—is the profound gendering of growing class divisions, specifically the way this manifests itself in huge reductions in marital rates and heightened gendered contestations.     

GPC Ten Years On: is self-reflexivity enough?

In the 10 years since the first issue of Gender, Place and Culture was published, feminist geography has grown, matured, become part of the normal curriculum in most departments of geography. The need to consider gender as a fundamental aspect of social life has become accepted wisdom. We have much to celebrate. Over the same period, increasing attention has been paid to questions of racialisation, and to projects that set anti-racism on the academic agenda. While I would argue that, socially as well as academically, we have made more progress in overcoming gender barriers than racial barriers, a growing body of work recognises the intersection, indeed the simultaneity, of sexism and racism, as well as classism, ableism and homophobia. Such recognition has characterised the pages of Gender, Place and Culture from its very first issue. Indeed, no paper that addresses issues of social exclusion from a geographical perspective would fail nowadays to make several references to articles in this journal. Theoretically, the connection between gendered and racialised social constructions heightens social awareness of the ways in which social exclusion occurs. It is now received wisdom, well beyond the narrower confines of feminist and anti-racist scholarship, that human attributes are the result of social construction and, while many controversies rage over the findings—and the social effects—of the postmodern ‘turn’, this fundamental theoretical tenet is hardly questioned by intellectuals of the early twenty-first century. Broader attention has now been focused on issues of what kind of society—and what kind of theoretical underpinnings—will replace a world in which social constructions such as gender and ‘race’ are taken for granted. Perhaps the most significant general trend of the last decade, then, has been the fact that our journal has played such an active role in the transition from the early 1990s' struggle to overcome essential ideas to today's struggle to re-place essential ideas with a new geometry of human relations. Significant historical events on every social front emphasise the difficulties of that transition, both theoretically and empirically.     

Regendering space and reconstructing identity: Bedouin women's translocal mobility into Israeli-Jewish institutions of higher education

This article offers a geographic perspective on the mutually constitutive relations between institutions of higher education and Bedouin women's gendered spaces, identities and roles. Situated beyond Bedouin women's permitted space and embedded in Israeli-Jewish space, institutions of higher education are sites of displacement that present Bedouin women students with new normative structures, social interactions and opportunities for academic learning. As such, they become a discursive arena for the articulation and reconstruction of their previously held conceptions and identities. Often the journey to institutions of higher education signifies for Bedouin women the first opportunity to venture out of their community. Traveling to the university as students, returning home as educated women and embarking on professional careers outside tribal neighborhoods and villages involves moving across and beyond different locales. Such translocal mobility necessitates constant negotiation between seemingly contradictory cultural constructs and the development of varied spatial bridging strategies. The article seeks to contribute to Bedouin gender studies by going beyond the functional role of higher education institutions as well as the gendered hierarchies of women's mobility, placing emphasis, instead, on the effects of socio-spatial contextuality that shapes Bedouin women's experiences.     

Dithyrambs and Ploughshares: The Cycle of Creation and Criticism in Nietzsche's Aesthetics

Pairing Thus Spoke Zarathustra with On the Genealogy of Morality foregrounds tensions between artistic creation and critical interpretation in Nietzsche's work. From The Birth of Tragedy to his genesis of the concept, Will to Power, Nietzsche describes the real, or “what is,” in terms of a creative, form-giving force. We might therefore read Zarathustra—a linguistically experimental, richly allegorical, self-reflexive, modernist prose poem—as the pre-eminent, artistic mode of philosophical expression, at least for Nietzsche. But Zarathustra is followed by a sober Abhandlung (treatise), which professes a scientific goal of “getting to the bottom of things” by uncovering the contingency, origin, and fabricated nature of supposedly eternal, “given” values. These instantiations of Nietzsche-the-artist and Nietzsche-the-critic suggest art's “double” or contradictory nature—a nature that accents its kinship with philosophy. Zarathustra and the Genealogy, read together, hint that the destruction of idols—or de-constructive, critical interpretation more generally—is not just supplemental to, but a necessary moment within the aesthetic itself.     

Concepts of Necessity in Voltaire's Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne

The eleventh-century Chanson de Sainte Foy is a paradigmatic example of early Romance textuality. Composed in southwestern France and intimately tied to the saint's cult centered around the abbey at Conques, an important site on the French pilgrimage road to Santiago, the almost 600-line poem is among the earliest examples of an extended narrative poem in Romance. Nonetheless, the place of composition and the language of the text remain a controversy. Most editors and linguistic studies of the text have identified its language with the French department of the Aude, specifically around the vicinity of Narbonne, thus rejecting a more southerly Catalan locus of composition. While widely recognizing the poem's cultural matter, this article argues for a stronger Catalan presence in the language of the poem. Specifically, the author examines forms of the so-called Pyrenean definite article derived from Latin IPSE in light of contemporary dialect features of the Catalan of the Eastern Pyrenees.     

Did Women Have a Transformation of the Roman World?

Despite intense and interdisciplinary interest in the transition from antiquity to the middle ages, work on women and gender generally remains marginal to the dominant paradigms for understanding political and social change in the period from c. 300 to c. 800 ce . This article critiques these interpretations from a gendered perspective and also reviews recent work on women and gender in late antiquity, Byzantium and the early medieval Europe. By outlining similarities and contrasts between women's lives in early medieval western and Byzantine cultures, it emphasises the diversity of women's experience. Suggestions about how to envisage a fully gendered history of this period conclude with a call for radically new approaches to the study of the transformation of the Roman world.     

“Let Me Come to Tell You”: Loide Shikongo,the King,and Poetic License in Colonial Ovamboland

In this paper, I explore cultural discourse, gender and the subjectivities of local people on the frontier of empire in mid‐20th century southern Africa. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial “Ovamboland”), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated. The narrative of a remarkable woman’s life and her poetry is told to understand how gender in relation to other forms of identity was constructed in different cultural discourses. I argue that both the Christian mission’s cultural discourse and the South African colonial administration’s efforts to masculinise the “native” political authority gendered Owambo elite women whose identities had previously included “gender” only as a rather contingent component. The example of Loide Shikongo, however, also shows that many Owambo continued to pursue heterogeneous, and sometimes ambiguous, strategies in their claims to Christian models of modernity.     

The poet becomes poem: The missing object and Petrarch's ends in the Canzoniere

This article considers the role of the object of desire in Petrarch's Canzoniere. Deconstructive and post-deconstructive readings tend to emphasize the fragmentation and instability of the subject position—specifically, the figure of the poet who is metamorphosing or falling apart. Other readings of the Canzoniere, especially by feminist and psychoanalytic critics, have reappraised the place and function of the beloved. One implication of these conflicting readings is to repolarize the object/subject distinction. Developing a line of inquiry that acknowledges both threads, this article looks at the several endings—the last poem in the cycle, the “Poem to the Virgin,” Petrarch's ending as a subject, and the form of the envoi—to explore a new view of the object's function within the process of subject formation.     

‘Gender hates men’: untangling gender and development discourses in food security fieldwork in urban Malawi

This article examines the social construction and contestation of gender and gender roles in the city of Blantyre in Malawi. In fieldwork on gendered household roles related to food security, interviews with men and women revealed a distinct set of connotations with the word gender, which reflected Malawians’ historical and contemporary engagement with concepts of development, modernity, and human rights. We denote the Malawian concept of gender as gender in order to distinguish the word participants used in interviews from the more widely accepted conventional definition. We then use this distinction to highlight the ways in which ideas of gender equality have been introduced and received in the Malawian context. The urban setting of the research is key to drawing out the association of gender with Westernization, bringing into focus the power dynamics inherent in the project of translating global discourses of gender rights and gender equality into meaningful social change in developing countries. Gender in Malawi denotes a top-down (and outside-in) process of framing Malawi’s goals for gender equality. This creates political constraints both in the form of resistance to gender, because it resonates with a long history of social change imposed by outside forces, and in the form of superficial adherence to gender to appear more urban and modern, especially to a Western researcher. Local understandings of gender as gender undermine efforts to promote gender equality as a means to address Malawi’s intense urban poverty and household food insecurity.