Space,Gender and Institutions in Processes Creating Difference

Along with a number of scholars in feminist, English-language geography, the author makes a case for renewed attention to be paid to causal processes of differentiation in the analysis of geographies of gender. In particular, she argues for a greater concern with the gendered spatiality of organisations and institutions themselves, rather than seeing them as ‘black boxes’, or unchanging and exogenous aspects of the contexts to be analysed. The paper discusses the manner and the extent to which feminist geographies have examined differentiating processes associated with three notional ‘sites’ examined closely in feminist geography: the city, the family and the nation.     

Pocketing the Difference: Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth–Century Britain

This study situates pockets as significant gendered objects in the dress and lives of men and women in the period from the 1790s to 1914. Using surviving examples and a diverse range of visual and documentary sources, it examines the role of pockets in the consumption of personal possessions and money, and explores how pockets occupied a special place in relation to the body and its gestures. By revealing differences in the way men and women used their pockets, the study concludes that pockets embodied change and complexity within the consumption of fashion and the construction of gender.     

From humanitarian relief to humanitarian intervention: victims, interveners and pillars

Current humanitarian crises are bedeviling the United Nations, relief agencies and governments. Efforts to provide food and other basic supplies to traumatized populations are frequently stymied by uncooperative regimes, violent militias, remote locations, high costs and complicated operations. As a result, humanitarian relief operations that have focused primarily on food distribution must be radically revised to encompass the much broader agenda of humanitarian intervention, which entails an aggressive, multilateral role within states. Five ‘pillars’ are proposed—basic needs, public security, political dialogue, human rights/justice and sustained economic development—on which to base future humanitarian interventions.     

西方文化视野中的男女会话风格与性别差异

文章从语言与性别研究的多种理论框架入手,探讨西方文化视野中社会性别差异在会话风格中的具体体现,比较分析不同的理论框架对两性会话风格差异的阐释,指出会话风格的性别差异主要来自心理和社会文化因素的影响。幼年时期人们通过交往活动而形成的性别观念,在家庭和社会环境影响下不断得到加强,从而逐渐形成符合各自性别身份的会话风格。     

From humanitarian exceptionalism to contingent care: Care and enforcement at the humanitarian border

Throughout the world, increasingly securitized and militarized border enforcement efforts have made transnational migration an increasingly deadly endeavor for unauthorized migrants. The deadly consequences of unauthorized migration has compelled the emergence of what William Walters refers to as the humanitarian border—the concentration of humanitarian aid and services along the edges of the global North. This paper expands on Walters work through an in-depth analysis of the emergence and transformation of the humanitarian border in southern Arizona, USA. Through an examination of transformations in how migrant care is provisioned, overseen, and regulated in southern Arizona, this paper traces a shift from humanitarian exceptionalism to contingent care whereby care is increasingly linked with enforcement efforts. In doing so, this analysis illustrates how care functions as a technology of border enforcement, increasing the reach of the state to govern more bodies and more spaces.     

East Timor and the new humanitarian interventionism

The fate of East Timor provides a barometer for how far the normative structure of international society has been transformed since the end of the Cold War. In 1975, the East Timorese were abandoned by a Western bloc that placed accommodating the Indonesian invasion of the island before the protection of human rights. Twenty‐five years later, it was the protection of the civilian population on the island that loomed large in the calculations of these same states. Australia, which had sacrificed the rights of the people of East Timor on the altar of good relations with Indonesia, found itself leading an intervention force that challenged the old certainties of its ‘Jakarta first’ policy. The article charts the interplay of domestic and international factors that made this normative transformation possible. The authors examine the political and economic factors that led to the agreement in May 1999 between Portugal, Indonesia and the UN to hold a referendum on the future political status of East Timor. A key question is whether the international community should have done more to assure the security of the ballot process. The authors argue that while more could have been done by Australia, the United States and officials in the UN Secretariat to place this issue on the Security Council's agenda, it is highly unlikely that the international community would have proved capable of mobilizing the political will necessary to coerce Indonesia into accepting a peacekeeping force. The second part of the article looks at how the outbreak of the violence in early September 1999 fundamentally changed these political assumptions. The authors argue that it became politically possible to employ coercion against Indonesian sovereignty in a context in which the Habibie government was viewed as having failed to exercise sovereignty with responsibility. By focusing on the economic and military sanctions employed by Western states, the pressures exerted by the international financial institutions and the intense diplomatic activity at the UN and in Jakarta, the authors show how Indonesian political and military leaders were prevailed upon to accept an international force. At the same time, Australian reporting of the atrocities and how this prompted the Howard government to an intervention that challenged traditional conceptionsof Australia's vital interests, is considered. The conclusion reflects on how thiscase supports the claim that traditional notions of sovereignty are increasinglyconstrained by norms of humanitarian responsibility.     

Gender and morals in Spanish Catholic youth culture: a case study of the Marian Congregations 1930-1936

Jesuit-run Marian Congregations proliferated in 1930s Spain. Drawing on literature produced for their members, this article demonstrates how gendered understandings were fundamental to the congregations' symbolic delineation of an uncontaminated Catholic space. Visions of an incorrupt male elite abound, reinforcing the Jesuits' educational mission among future leaders and opinion-formers. In contrast, the purity of women and children was seen as a sign of society's moral health. Modesty was the quintessential female virtue. Yet, the cult of the Virgin Mary suggested that the virginal female body was both tool and symbol in the struggle against a fallen world. Girls were, therefore, charged with the task of moral guardianship. Such campaigns were emblematic of Spanish Catholicism's tendency to proffer religious solutions to social problems.     

Hunger in the land of plenty: The complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela

Oil-rich Venezuela is being hit by the largest crisis in living memory. Now, more than 4.8 million Venezuelans have fled the country in search of food and safety. News about migration and humanitarian aid dominate. Yet, many Venezuelans stay and seek alternative strategies to cope with scarcity and insecurity. Ad hoc solutions mainly depend on alternative economies in the borderlands that do not always fit within frameworks of human rights and rule of law, but do provide relief and produce opportunities along with new inequalities that (un)willingly sustain the crisis. Amid collapsing state infrastructures, these transborder economies tie into the global trade of basic supplies, narcotics, drugs, natural resources and human trafficking that operate in the interface of the legal and the illegal. The complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is as much about poverty and scarcity as it is about wealth and abundance benefiting only a very few. An ‘anthropology of abundance’ allows us to grasp these underlying socio-economic dynamics that turn crisis management into crisis maintenance.     

Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive Power in Gender and Development

Gender and development has grown enormously as a field over the last thirty years. In this introduction, we interrogate the ambivalence that underpins feminist engagement with development and examine what current dilemmas may suggest about the relationship between feminist knowledge and development practice. In recent years, there has been growing frustration with the simplistic slogans that have come to characterize much gender and development talk, and with the gap between professed intention and actual practice in policies and programmes. Questions are now being asked about what has become of ‘gender’ in development. This collection brings together critical reflections on some ideas about gender that have become especially resonant in development narratives, particularly those that entail popularization and the deployment of iconic images of women. This introduction explores more closely the issues raised by such myth‐making, arguing that these myths stem from exigencies within the politics and practices of development bureaucracies, within the difficult politics of feminist engagement with development policy and practice and within feminist politics itself.     

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.     

The psychologization of humanitarian aid: skimming the battlefield and the disaster zone

Humanitarian aid's psycho-therapeutic turn in the 1990s was mirrored by the increasing emotionalization and subjectivation of fund-raising campaigns. In order to grasp the depth of this interconnectedness, this article argues that in both cases what we see is the post-Fordist production paradigm at work; namely, as Hardt and Negri put it, the direct production of subjectivity and social relations. To explore this, the therapeutic and mental health approach in humanitarian aid is juxtaposed with the more general phenomenon of psychologization. This allows us to see that the psychologized production of subjectivity has a problematic waste-product as it reduces the human to 'Homo sacer', to use Giorgi Agamben's term. Drawing out a double matrix of a de-psychologizing psychologization connected to a politicizing de-politicization, it will further become possible to understand psycho-therapeutic humanitarianism as a case of how, in these times of globalization, psychology, subjectivity and money are all interrelated.     

Gender representation in geography: Singapore

ABSTRACT

This paper explores key skills required by potential employers of geography graduates. Academic ability combined with a variety of transferable skills such as communication, organisation and self-motivation appeal to many of the employers questioned. Graduates can face potential difficulties expressing these key skills in standard application forms and interviews. Extracurricular activities and previous employment can provide impressive ways to display skills relevant to the job. Key skills are dynamic; graduates need to keep pace with ever changing expectations particularly with regard to information technology.     

Russia,humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect: the case of Syria

Western analysis perceives Russian approaches to issues of humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as running counter to western‐inspired international norms. This debate has surfaced with some vigour over Russia's policy in the Syria conflict where, in order to protect its strategic interests in Syria, an obstructionist Moscow has been accused of ignoring humanitarian considerations and allowing time for the Assad regime to crush the opposition by vetoing a resolution threatening to impose sanctions. While Russian approaches are undoubtedly explained by a desire to maximize its growing political influence and trade advantages to serve its legitimate foreign policy interests, and while Moscow's attitudes to intervention and R2P exhibit important differences from those of the major western liberal democracies, its arguments are in fact framed within a largely rational argument rooted in ‘traditional’ state‐centred international law. This article first highlights key arguments in the scholarly literature on intervention and R2P before going on to examine the evolution of Russian views on these issues. The analysis then focuses on the extent to which Moscow's arguments impact on international legal debates on the Libya and Syria conflicts. The article then seeks to explore how Russian approaches to intervention/R2P reflect fundamental trends in its foreign policy thinking and its quest for legitimacy in a negotiated international order. Finally, it attempts to raise some important questions regarding Russia's role in the future direction of the intervention/R2P debates.