The (un)lettered frontier: power and literacy in the eastern Andes of Charcas,seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

In colonial Latin America, notaries played a critical role in the generation of written, objective truth in an uncertain world. But were notaries indispensable? By the mid-seventeenth century, Spanish communities in the eastern Andean borderlands of the Audiencia of Charcas had not only begun to do without notaries, but even actively and sometimes violently kept them out of their jurisdictions. Borderland communities became spheres of legal activity where the ability to create law without notaries implied not only the transfer of writerly resources to new agents, but also a shift in the modalities of power and authority within the frontier. The impact of such a legal regime was not merely local. At times, frontier officials used their ability to create un-notarized documents as a tool to resist the spatial hierarchies of center and periphery, sometimes neutralizing the claims of officials in the Audiencia of Charcas to jurisdiction over local matters, while actively promoting local ties to the king.     

Our women must return home: institutionalized patriarchy in colonial central Nyanza district, 1945-1963

Colonial policies and practices were very instrumental in the creation of the Luo Diaspora. This Diaspora extended far beyond the physical and cultural boundaries of Central Nyanza as was constituted by the colonial administration. To colonial officials, this Diaspora represented "detribalized natives" responsible for social decay and immorality in the colonial townships. Similarly, to the male elders in the rural areas, this Diaspora was an affront towards destabilizing tribal authority and sanctions, which governed Luo moral order, Luo marriage, and Luo identity as it existed prior to colonialism. This article uses patriarchy as an analytical framework to understand how male elders and colonial officials collaborated to assert control over young women under suspicion of prostitution. The article argues that the Ramogi African Welfare Association (RAWA) was a post-war patriarchal institution which was used by male elders, with the encouragement of the colonial officials, to intimidate, harass and repatriate young women seeking wage employment within the emerging colonial townships. In this article, I use archival and field data gathered from Central Nyanza between 1999 and 2002 to illustrate how institutionalized patriarchy threatened many women and young girls seeking to migrate to colonial towns in order to exploit the limited economic and social opportunities that colonialism provided.     

“Madam,you ought to be the man such times as these”: gendered confrontations and the Runaway Scrape

This article examines the power dynamics between men and women during the “Runaway Scrape.” During this chapter of the Texas Revolution, the situation looked bleak for the Texas army as they withdrew towards the Louisiana border to avoid the Mexican onslaught. Women, slaves, and the men not engaged in battle joined the retreat. This study focuses on the gendered contestations between those fleeing the attack. Women often found themselves challenging the authority, decision-making, character, and even manliness of their male counterparts; some casting aspersions on the masculinity of a wide array of historical actors, ranging from deserters to government and military officials.     

‘I am going,with or without you’: autonomy in Bolivian transnational migrations

Autonomy has often been seen as a precondition for achieving gender equality, yet feminist scholarship has been rather ambivalent towards it. In this article, I explore this ambivalence by drawing on the experiences of migrant women, particularly mothers, focusing on the ways in which they negotiated their mobility with their partners. By analysing women's experiences of migration within a context of multi-sited and longitudinal, itinerant ethnography, I historicise their life accounts and place them within a broader framework of social and economic structural changes. On this basis I explore the concept of autonomy, particularly in relation to the exercise of women's agency within a context of market-oriented neoliberal reforms. I also question the potential of women's autonomy for gender equality and argue that there are at least two reasons for feminist scholars to continue being ambivalent towards autonomy.     

Problematic Conjugations: Women’s Agency,Marriage and Domestic Violence in Indonesia

Abstract:

This paper examines women’s experience of domestic violence within marriage in Makassar, South Sulawesi. It analyses the meaning of marriage for men and women, the roles of men and women within marriage, shifts in marriage practices – particularly the shift from arranged to “love” marriage – and unequal gender positions within marriage. We discuss some salient issues in the “margins of marriage” in Indonesia: polygyny and constructions of masculinity that condone the practice of polygyny/affairs, and attitudes towards divorce, particularly for women. We then examine women’s perception of the causes and triggers of domestic violence as revealed by fieldwork data, using the lens of women’s agency. Our findings are that women perceive that their expressions of agency – for instance in challenging men’s authority, moral righteousness and adequacy as breadwinners – are the most common triggers for male violence within marriage. Finally, we discuss the difficulty for women of escaping domestic violence, thereby getting some purchase on the relative capacity of women to resist, deflect or deal with the violence.     

Contentious Realities: Politics of Creating an Image Archive with the Negev Bedouin in Southern Israel

This paper discusses the politics of creating an image archive amidst local Bedouin historicity in Southern Israel. To do so, it summarizes an archival initiative conducted during my fieldwork in Rāha?, Israel between 2011 and 2013, which broadly examined the presence and values of images in their society. I suggest that members compete over historical resources in attempts to augment limited cultural capital in the Negev, making efforts to collect and exhibit ‘shared’ histories contentious. This is particularly the case when local societies consider archival images rare artefacts and thus objects to be owned and protected. This paper concludes that control over archives and image objects, and the past, present, and future ideals to which they are used, is far from uniform amongst peripheral peoples in the Middle East. Visual evidence and the histories and presents it serves are indelibly localized within the prevailing status negotiations and current spatial divisions between Bedouin members in the Negev.     

Restructuring women’s work; labour market and household gender regimes in the Greater Latrobe Valley,Australia

This article examines the impact of economic restructuring on gender relations. It examines the implications of labour market change for households within a region, in this case the Greater Latrobe Valley, Victoria, Australia. The argument is that the unchanging gender structures of the labour market constrain the intentions and efforts of individuals within households to significantly alter household gender relations. The analysis considers how restructuring has reshaped the regional labour market since 1996, changing opportunities for both men’s and women’s employment. Despite these changes, the regional labour market continues to be underpinned by a ‘male breadwinner’ gender regime and significant occupational and industrial gender segregation. Drawing on four vignettes, the analysis shows that the impetus towards greater gender equality in the household is constrained by a stagnant and stable labour market gender regime.     

It Doesn't Matter: Some Cautionary Findings About Sex and Representation From School Committee Conversations

One of the most important findings in the field of gender and politics is that women elected officials at the state and national levels do a better job than men of representing the interests of women, children, and families. This paper uses school committees to ask the same question about women elected officials at the local level. Thus the question that guides this paper is: Does it matter for women if women are elected to this local political institution? If it does matter, then we should “hear” women's distinct ways of participating through their discussions at committee meetings. The study finds, in contrast, that in this political institution women and men behave in remarkably similar ways when separated by committee roles, and that women elected officials in this political institution spend very little time addressing issues affecting girls in public education.     

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.     

Global aspirations and local (dis-)connections: A critical comparative perspective on tramway projects in Casablanca and Jerusalem

This article puts emphasis on the political representation of tramway projects in Casablanca, Morocco, and Jerusalem, Israel/the Palestinian territories. In this paper, we discuss both tramway projects as flagships of national worlding strategies that try to promote the respective city on global markets of attention, competing for international investors and tourists. As such, they are majorly driven by national political interests, fostering the hegemonic position of the central state in cooperation with private actors. The tramways are aimed at portraying modernity as well as political and economic stability, while aspiring to a supposed international urban world-class. At the same time, governments frame tramways as tools to promote socio-urban integration and to improve local transport systems. However, the paper shows that although governments are eager to stress the integrative role of tramways, they continue with violent politics of urban exclusion at the same time. Thus, the integrative wording behind tramway planning has to be understood against political (and economic) pressures to regain political legitimacy in a moment of crisis - both domestically and internationally. Consequently, the paper uses interview data and applies methods of discourse analysis to shed light on the worlding of tramways and its ambivalent practices of symbolic inclusion and exclusion.     

Women,Communities, Neighbourhoods: Approaching Gender and Feminism within UK Urban Policy

In recent years some commentators have looked at successive waves of UK urban policy from the perspective of gender, although these commentaries have been somewhat marginal within wider discussions of urban policy and politics. This article seeks to make the case for a renewed emphasis on gender, which moves beyond tracing the role of men and women in relation to urban policy programmes, in two particular ways. First it is argued that a more sophisticated analysis of the gendered nature of urban governance is needed, in other words how forms of gendered labour, subjectivity and power work through and within policy projects; and second that there should be a wider consideration of what feminist visions of cities and politics, both past and present, might contribute to the project of a critical, and hopeful, analysis of urban policy and politics. The paper seeks to make a practical as well as theoretical intervention in relation to gender and feminist perspectives on UK urban policy. It is argued that there has been a silence around such issues in recent years, both in analysis and in policy discourses, and that this silence has masked how gendered labour and power has often been woven into urban governance. For example, forms of women‐centred organising have been relied on in a range of government projects seeking to build community and participation within poor neighbourhoods. Such reliance may be increasing in a context of austerity. As well as this critical analysis of current policy, the paper argues for the reinvigoration of feminist visions of cities that suggest different framings of aspects of urban life. For example, rethinking the lines between public and private spheres might result in different forms of housing or sites of civic participation. Through engaging anew with such perspectives cities might become more just, caring, and equal for all.     

“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.     

Military Rule,Political Manipulation,and Jewish Settlement: Israeli Mechanisms for Controlling Nazareth in the 1950s

This article explores the first decade of relations between the State of Israel and the city of Nazareth, which after the 1948 war constituted the largest and most important Arab center in the new Jewish state. It focuses on the strategies employed by central government officials to retain state control over the all-Arab city and surrounding region, highlighting the integrated use of military, political, and spatial mechanisms. The Nazareth municipal elections of 1954 emerge as an important milestone in this process, compelling officials to intervene in local politics and to take immediate concrete steps towards establishing the Jewish town of Upper Nazareth.     

‘Subjective Testimonies’: Women Quaker Ministers and Spiritual Authority in England: 1750–1825

It was generally believed by historians that the increasingly formal regulation of belief and practice in the Society of Friends (Quakers) during the eighteenth century led to a decline in the influence and authority exercised by women in the denomination. Recent research has indicated, however, that although women were denied equal status and roles in the Society's new disciplinary bodies, the period also saw them beginning to outnumber men as the principal upholders of charismatic spiritual leadership through the ministry. These conflicting trends suggest that there were tensions and ambiguities within Quaker discourses on the meaning of gender and its implications for the exercise of religious authority. Using the testimonies of religious experience constructed by women ministers, this paper explores those discourses and illuminates the ways in which they were exploited, questioned and transformed by women. It argues that belief in the equal capacity of men and women for divine service was cut across by the conviction that sexual difference played a crucial part in shaping religious experience. Ministering women negotiated and manipulated the relationship between spirituality and femininity, both to understand themselves as instruments of divine power and to challenge the establishment of a male hierarchy in their church.     

‘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.     

南朝刘宋免官制度初探

免官是刘宋政权处罚罪吏的一种常用手段。刘宋政权在政治运作中广泛采用免官手段处罚直接威胁封建专制政权的犯罪、职务犯罪、军事犯罪、妨害社会管理秩序的犯罪、违礼犯罪等,且犹以惩罚直接威胁封建专制政权的犯罪和职务犯罪两大类为主。刘宋皇帝控制了免官起复权,但刘宋时期对罪吏免官后再叙的期限是没有严格规定的。刘宋免官制度对于强化皇权、整饬吏治、提高行政效率有着积极作用。     

An Empirical Assessment of Devolution's Policy Impact

This article evaluates the influence of devolution on perceived and actual policy outcomes at the local level in the United States. Proponents of devolution often argue that the transfer of policymaking authority to a lower level of government allows subnational officials to more effectively address problems on the government's agenda. We provide one of the first empirical evaluations of this implicit assumption of devolution. We utilize data from 100 counties in one state, North Carolina, that were the recipients of additional welfare policymaking authority in 1997 to provide a preliminary assessment of devolution's consequences and policy impact. We then investigate the recipient governments' ability to bring about positive change using three prominent indicators associated with welfare policy. Our findings provide evidence that devolution matters quite significantly to the perception of policymaking effectiveness; however, devolution's actual impact on policy outcomes is mixed.     

Material Footprints: The Struggle for Borders by Bedouin‐Palestinians in Israel

In the following article, borders become an epistemology for reading the social and political history of settler geographies, and their particular manifestation in the southern Naqab region of Israel. It takes as its starting point the idea that borders are activated in an assemblage of encounters; and that they act as markers, not only of the power of the settler state to rupture and control indigenous life and mobility, but of the multiple resistances that divert, disrupt and unsettle settler movements and spaces. Based on more than three years of fieldwork with the Unrecognised Bedouin‐Palestinian communities of the Naqab, the article investigates the significance of borders in spaces the state has conceived and structured as empty and dead. In exploring the multiple modes of resistance and resilience that constitute Bedouin struggles for recognition in Israel, it finds relevance in the lines they carve out, and the living spaces that persist and evolve in their shadows.     

Have sex will travel: romantic ‘sex tourism’ and women negotiating modernity in the Sinai

Since the 1970s, studies on western women's ethnosexual tourist–local relationships have tended to focus on the beaches of the Caribbean and have come to one of two main conclusions – either they are no different from the overtly exploitative relationships of heterosexual male sex tourists or they are different because they involve a softer, caring element of romance. This article proposes that both positions have led to constrictive, circular research that highlights the racialised and economically disparate nature of these exchanges but mostly ignores the importance of imaginative and emotional geographies caught up in such relationships. Based on fieldwork interviews with men and women in the resorts of the South Sinai, Egypt, I argue that these encounters can be seen as examples of a modern subjectivity that are defined by and take place within imagined (fixed) constructions of landscapes, native third world masculinity (in this case Arab/Bedouin), femininity (white, heterosexual, western), freedom and love (spiritual and physical): all presented in some form of opposition to a particularist idea of modernity and viewed through a filter of selective (and spatially circumscribed) histories. By adding a geographical dimension, this article aims to open up the current debate on female sex tourism to a wider range of issues and reveal more of the conflicts, tensions and imaginations that make up these encounters.     

Female Personifications and Masculine Forms: Gender,Armour and Allegory in the Habsburg–Valois Conflicts of Sixteenth-Century Europe

This article examines the visual and material culture of sixteenth-century elite ceremonial armours and the paradoxes inherent in using images of women to decorate them between 1525 and 1550. It argues that foreign invading forces and their allies exploited or inverted traditional gender binaries associated with the classical and humanist iconography of the Italian Renaissance, particularly its female allegorical forms, to visually signify power relationships between combatants during the Italian Wars. Rather than simply embodying masculinity, elaborate ceremonial armours with images of women are revealing of both ideals of masculinity and femininity during times of war. These portrayals were part of wider conversations about gender and power, about the strength and weaknesses of women, and, ultimately, women's inferior status to men, which were utilised in allegorical forms to make claims to authority on these elite forms of male dress.