Gendered frontiers of land control: indigenous territory,women and contests over land in Ecuador

Agricultural and rural land has become the site of considerable policy, governmental and scholarly concern worldwide because of violence and dispossession, food insecurity and contests over private property regimes. Such issues are highly gendered in territories with majorities of indigenous populations where overlapping legal regimes (statutory, multicultural, customary) and histories of dispossession have created complex spatialities and access patterns. States' formalization of indigenous rights, neoliberal restructuring and land appropriation are the backdrop to Ecuadorian women's struggles to access, retain and pass on land. Despite a burgeoning literature on Latin American indigenous territories, women are often invisible. Using collaborative research among two indigenous nationalities, the article analyses the political–economic, legal and de facto regimes shaping women's claims to land and indigenous territory. Focusing on Kichwa women in the rural Andes and Tsáchila women in a tropical export-oriented agricultural frontier area, the article examines the criteria and exclusionary practices that operate at multiple scales to shape women's (in)security in tenure. Women's struggles over claims to land and territory are also discussed. The article argues that Latin America's fraught land politics requires a gendered account of indigenous land–territoriality to unpack the cultural bias of western feminist accounts of multiculturalism and to document the racialized gender bias across socio-institutional relations.     

Living with patriarchy and poverty: women's agency and the spatialities of gender relations in Afghanistan

This article examines the spatialities of gender relations and women's oppression in urban Afghanistan under conditions of poverty and strict patriarchy. Using empirical data from biographical interviews with Afghan women from urban households in Kabul, Herat, and Jalalabad, the article questions how gender as social relation and gender as difference is lived and experienced among the urban poor in Afghanistan. Looking at urban livelihoods through the lens of feminist geography helps to better understand the gendered spaces of home and the outside world, of households as sites of security and violence, and of urban contexts and ethnic affiliations. The approach allows for reflection on women's subjectivities and their own understandings of gender inequality and injustice. Examining the gendered geographies in urban Afghanistan shows how social difference is lived under conditions of patriarchy and poverty and how women's agency contributes to the livelihoods of their households.     

Local gender contract and adaptive capacity in smallholder irrigation farming: a case study from the Kenyan drylands

This article presents the local gender contract of a smallholder irrigation farming community in Sibou, Kenya. Women's role in subsistence farming in Africa has mostly been analyzed through the lens of gender division of labor. In addition to this, we used the concept of ‘local gender contract’ to analyze cultural and material preconditions shaping gender-specific tasks in agricultural production, and consequently, men's and women's different strategies for adapting to climate variability. We show that the introduction of cash crops, as a trigger for negotiating women's and men's roles in the agricultural production, results in a process of gender contract renegotiation, and that families engaged in cash cropping are in the process of shifting from a ‘local resource contract’ to a ‘household income contract.’ Based on our analysis, we argue that a transformation of the local gender contract will have a direct impact on the community's adaptive capacity climate variability. It is, therefore, important to take the negotiation of local gender contracts into account in assessments of farming communities' adaptive capacity.     

Young women and public leisure spaces in contemporary Beijing: recreating (with) gender,tradition, and place

Feminist geographers and leisure scholars have long argued that one critical way to understand gendered norms and expectations is through examining women's access to and experiences of leisure activities. Set in the context of the rapid economic, political, and social changes that have taken place in Beijing over the past half century, this article draws on in-depth interviews and extensive participant observation to explore the role of newly available public leisure spaces in the lives and leisure of young women in Beijing, in particular by examining the way that these spaces provide an opportunity for the negotiation of new gender norms and identities. Through an analysis of the interaction of gender norms and practices with women's use of and behavior in public leisure spaces, we argue that women's behavior in public leisure spaces in contemporary Beijing remains strongly circumscribed by gendered norms. Rather than their presence itself constituting a challenge to gender expectations, in many cases their leisure behavior and experiences serve to reinforce the social norms that masculinize public leisure spaces. In spite of this, however, the findings of this research suggest that public leisure spaces may, in some cases, provide women with a place from which to challenge gender norms.     

Postfeminist possibilities: unpacking the paradoxical performances of heterosexualized femininity in club spaces

One of the ways in which the heterosexualization of women's bodies is made apparent is through the blatant promotion of Ladies' Night at night clubs. These are typically weekly events, of which women are granted complimentary entry by club operators. Ladies' Night is thus popularly construed as a time and space in which men can gain access to many ‘heterosexy’ female bodies. The deliberate deployment of specific kinds of (post)feminine bodies and subjectivities—slim, savvy, and sassy—in club promotional material is often couched in discourses that highlight female expression, consumption, and autonomy. Such a celebratory rhetoric of women as empowered actors seems to suggest that traditional gendered expectations of women as self-reserved, timid and vulnerable to sexual aggression are archaic and are no longer valid. In light of this, I investigate how women negotiate a postfeminist terrain within the context of Singapore's night clubbing scene. By employing qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, ethnographic work, and discourse analysis, I argue that clubs are paradoxical spaces for performing gendered and (hetero)sexualized selves that vacillate between affirming and subverting heteropatriarchal regimes. In so doing, this paper hopes to contribute to the scholarship on feminist geography by bringing recent debates on postfeminism into a productive conversation with the literature on (hetero)sexuality and space.     

Universalized categories,dissonant realities: gendering postconflict reconstruction in Nepal

International agencies, nongovernmental organizations, governmental agencies, and development policy-makers have sought to incorporate ‘gender mainstreaming’ into postconflict policies and programs in an effort to ameliorate the unequal gender impacts of war. This article uses narratives of widow heads of household collected through field research in Nepal in 2008 and 2011 to illustrate how postconflict development discourses purporting to engage with gender not only take a narrow view of gender (i.e., by equating it to women-focused activities), but also neglect the complex and dynamic realities of women's lives. Postconflict interventions employ simplistic assumptions that neglect gender-specific postconflict insecurities and oppressions (such as systematic violence against women). By neglecting the crucial significance of social networks for widows' survival, postconflict reconstruction assumes women to be individualized receptacles for development/empowerment. The crucial role of social networks in constraining women's agency is obscured. At the same time, assumptions of homogeneity ingrained in universalized categories such as ‘widow’ and ‘conflict-affected’ obfuscate women's multiple identities, roles, and agency in their struggles for survival. The insights emerging from field research suggest a greater attunement of postconflict development interventions to women's lived experiences and social settings.     

Interspatial gender asymmetries in early Soviet Siberia

The article addresses gendered power asymmetries within indigenous communities of early Soviet Siberia and their shifts during the transitional period between the Russian Empire and the totalitarian Soviet state. The concept of entangled relational spaces is the main analytical tool of this article. Seeking to overcome identity-based essentialisms, the article deconstructs gender identity and demonstrates how it can be articulated and interpreted in different relational spaces. It extends the argument that oppressions are produced by various social categories (intersectionality) by adding that a single social category may beget various forms of oppression and that heterogeneous gender asymmetries are produced and manifested across different relational spaces. Evidence deriving from predominantly indigenous sources authored by women enabled the discussion of gendered power asymmetries in economic, legal, and political spaces produced by corresponding relations. Economic and demographic crises, which the indigenous peoples of Siberia endured in the 1910s–1920s, reduced gendered power asymmetries in economic spaces making women less dependent on men. On women's initiative the shifts then spread to legal spaces and, with the support of the Bolshevik government, affected political spaces. These shifts were closely connected to the early Soviet attempts at dialog with indigenous people, decolonizing Siberia and liberating indigenous women, and gave way to instrumental policies.     

Wife Seclusion and the Spatial Praxis of Gender Ideology in Nigerian Hausaland

In much of Nigerian Hausaland the prevailing religio-cultural ideology of female seclusion (if not always the practice) impinges on married Muslim Hausa women to a greater, or lesser, degree. This article examines the intimate relationships between space, gender and ideology in contemporary rural Hausa society, showing the social construction (and connectedness) of gender identities and associated spatial identities, thus illustrating how spatial praxis is based on hegemonic patriarchal gender ideology. Observations and interview material gathered from a village case study in Kano State demonstrate how gender divisions correspond with the ideology and contemporary practice of wife seclusion. Intersecting patterns of gender, space and time are revealed by detailed analyses of time- and space-use data, which scrutinise men's and women's daily activities and mobility patterns. The cross-cutting of gender with class, age and marital status is shown to be highly significant in determining everyday experiences of spatial praxis, especially for women. A materialist feminist theoretical framework is used to explain this gendered geography of Nigerian Hausaland in which men's and women's worlds are spatially segregated, yet complexly interlocked and interdependent beyond simple public‐private divisions of ‘female’ household compounds (private space) and ‘male’ public space. For this peasant society, aspects of the rural economy and ideology emerge as powerful factors in determining the nature of seclusion as part of gender praxis. It is argued that due to various cultural and religious factors socio-economic development in Northern Nigeria has not been translated into improved autonomy for Hausa women.     

Commodification of indigenous crafts and reconfiguration of gender identities among the Emberá of eastern Panama

This article examines the recent involvement of Emberá indigenous women from eastern Panama in the production and commercialization of handicrafts for national and international markets, using life stories collected in two Emberá communities. Emberá women's increased participation in market economies provides a critical medium through which dominant norms of gender roles are partly reworked and new subjectivities are forged, providing them temporary spaces of authority from within to negotiate relationships with men in domestic spaces. The study does not look for obvious shifts of power inside the household. Instead, it conceptualizes handicraft activities and the conflicts they spark as discursive sites, thus focusing on how women (through their work and purchases) understand themselves and their roles, and how power operates through competing discursive constructions of ‘women’, ‘men’, or ‘work’ in everyday practices. This approach produces a nuanced understanding of the complex reconfiguration of gender relations, and the particular shapes that changing social interactions and meanings of femininity/masculinity take, and it challenges dominant representations of indigenous societies as static and inexorably harmed by capitalist transformation. Findings demonstrate that indigenous women's experiences and realities are multifaceted and dynamic, and that the outcomes of market economies in indigenous communities are complex and ambiguous, rather than uniform and necessarily oppressive.     

The gender dimension of the agrarian transition: women,men and livelihood diversification in two peri-urban farming communities in the Philippines

Based on parallel field research conducted in two peri-urban villages in the cities of Naga and Valencia, the Philippines, this article deploys gender analysis to understand livelihood diversification in the context of agrarian change. In analyzing the role of state organizations and NGOs in (re)producing gender differences, hierarchies, roles and identities within agrarian settings, it brings poststructuralist and postcolonial theory into conversation with political economy to explore how gender is at stake in daily livelihood struggles. Specifically, attention is drawn to how structural constraints and institutional discourses still render livelihood diversification a gendered project, and how state and other development organizations are continuing to perpetuate gender inequalities and reinscribe normative gender discourses, particularly around masculinities and women's reproductive roles, in agrarian communities.     

Women's ecological oral histories of recycling and development in coastal Yucatán

This article addresses the formation of the Chen Kole ‘Lob women's recycling cooperative and its relationship to urbanization, plastics consumption, and the exclusionary spaces of conservation-as-development in coastal Yucatán, Mexico. Increasing amounts of plastic containers and other nonorganic garbage contaminate backyards, protected wetlands and marine areas, and individual homes located in low-lying floodable areas. However, in this region, the majority of sponsored economic development programs are directed at managing men's activities in sustainable fishing and ecotourism within natural protected areas. Both women's work and urban issues such as recycling and waste management have frequently been excluded from state policies and development practice. I draw from oral histories of women's experience in the home, in conservation space, and as participants in grassroots plastics recycling to underscore what motivated women to become involved in recycling and garbage cleanup, and how women came to be considered local professionals who maintain clean spaces. These histories underscore the links between gendered work, urban practices, and conservation-as-development, and how women's urban recycling work affects social differences and ecological decline within vulnerable coastal areas.     

En route to New York: diasporic networks and the reconfiguration of female entrepreneurship in Senegal

This article examines the influence of migration and transnational social networks on female entrepreneurship. It interrogates shifting patterns of market development, juxtaposed to the lure of new economic opportunities for women entrepreneurs located at the periphery, Senegal. I critically analyse how a distinct and classed category of Senegalese women entrepreneurs navigates international spaces and legal restrictions in attempts to launch profitable economic ventures in metropolitan centres such as New York City and negotiate new forms of representation and agency in contentious socio-economic spaces. By interrogating the complex interplay between women entrepreneurs and diasporic communities, I weave an often-missing gender perspective into the analysis of the emergence of female transnational entrepreneurship and diasporic social networks. This article demonstrates that diasporic social networks, transnational markets and spatial interconnections, while contributing to market revitalisation and expansion, are nonetheless fraught with tension. Diasporic social networks embody paradoxical positions. They represent an enabling economic transactional space, while embodying an informal social space that nonetheless remains sites of power struggles deeply embedded in gendered, sociocultural and economic dynamics that transfer from local to transnational contexts.     

Kitchenspace: Gendered territory in central Mexico

Drawing on extensive ethnographic field research with multiple women and kitchens in two central Mexico communities, this article argues for kitchenspace—indoor and outdoor spaces where food preparation takes place—as gendered territory. Using a feminist political ecology approach, it explores private and semi-public space in the everyday, household kitchen and the fiesta or ‘smoke’ kitchen at the center of community celebrations. Marked as gendered territory by distinct social boundaries and gendered, discursive strategies, kitchenspace is vital to the maintenance of traditional forms of organization and generational transmission of cultural and embodied knowledge. This article questions assumptions about ‘the kitchen’ as a site of social isolation and women's oppression that often characterize feminist approaches. It considers embeddedness in local social and spatial contexts and the importance of everyday life in private and public spaces.     

Gendered water spaces: a study of the transition from wells to handpumps in Mozambique

In many parts of rural Africa, women and children spend a lot of time collecting water. In the development literature, the water collection task is portrayed as oppressive, arduous, and disliked by women. Eliminating this activity from women's lives is believed to empower them, yet there has been little research investigating what actually happens at the water source or how women themselves perceive the time spent there. This research is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in five rural communities in the northern province of Nampula, Mozambique. Over this year, handpumps were constructed in communities where people previously collected water from distant shallow wells and rivers. This article compares the social interactions and activities between the customary water sites and the handpump through the lens of gendered space. The customary water sites are controlled by women and highly valued for their social attributes. While clean water is more accessible at the handpumps, men often regulate access to the technology and social activities are limited. This article contributes to feminist geography and political ecology by showing how differences in the materiality of water spaces interact with local norms to shape social interactions and gendered subjectivities, and how, in turn, men and women contribute to the production and meaning of these spaces. I argue that the handpumps open up new spaces for men and women to negotiate gender roles and (re)define their associations with modernity and development.     

‘I've had it with them!’ Younger migrant women's spatial practices of conformity and resistance

This article examines how younger migrant women from Turkey maneuver the public and private spaces of their everyday lives in a neighborhood in Germany, and how they challenge and affirm the patriarchal practices and gender norms that husbands, fathers, and older migrant women seek to impose within and outside private homes. Younger migrant women selectively comply with gendered and generational norms of veiling and dress, while at the same time also reworking gender roles, and avoiding and transgressing masculinist spaces. Younger migrant women's practices and spatial representations in mental maps reveal the complex entanglements of compliances and resistance, and dispel simple assumptions of being overwhelmingly victimized by their potentially violent men that are so prominent in contemporary Western societies.     

Stigmatized Spaces: Gender and Mobility under crisis in South Sulawesi,Indonesia

The economic downturn in Indonesia (1997‐99) has changed the context of gendered spatial mobility in South Sulawesi. For low-income migrants in the region, the monetary crisis has not only reorganized the labor market, but it has also brought about an intensification of the stigma placed on young women's independent residence in an export processing zone. Household surveys and in-depth interviews with migrants and members of their origin and destination site neighborhoods, both before and during the economic retrenchment, illustrate that ideas about women's sexual morality are a key part of the context within which migration decisions are gendered. The article situates survey and interview findings within an overview of Indonesia's recent development history, economic crisis, and official state gender ideology. The article argues that migrants and their communities have identified the ‘prostitute’ as a female-gendered metaphor for the crisis, and finds that post-1997 narratives of women's mobility increasingly revolve around normative judgements regarding young women's independent mobility and sexual behavior.     

Bridewealth1 and the Autonomy of Women in Melanesia

Considering bridewealth in Melanesia from the angle of women's autonomy, in this introduction we review and analyse the various elements of this marriage practice that reveal its place in the symbolic, social and economic worlds of women. With an accent on social transformation, we discuss women's autonomy and agency in relation to the constraints that bridewealth puts on their lives, and on how they engage with it. Knowing what bridewealth is, and how the rules of reciprocity that it indexes obligate married women, the focus is on women's ability to act within these constraints or to redefine their contours, particularly with regards to economic and reproductive agency. The article, which serves also as the introduction for the special issue on bridewealth in the journal Oceania, discusses themes analysed in the collection, such as the moral prospects of bridewealth today, its relation to ‘capital’ in twenty-first century Oceania, the triad value/valuables/valuers, and the empowerment of women. It concludes with thoughts on gender inequality.     

Women's and Children's Quarters in Golden Gate Park,San Francisco

This paper explores the mythic domesticity encoded in the Children's Quarter in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. The play area, opened in 1888, represented a new genre of gender-specific public space developed in urban parks in the late nineteenth century. In welcoming women to the public domain of the urban park, gendered spaces such as the Children's Quarter signified a complex response to changing class and gender identities in the nineteenth-century city. Imposing a domestic structure on women's public presence, the Children's Quarter modeled a middle-class domestic ideal, affirming women's essential association with the private sphere even as it welcomed them to the public sphere of the urban park.     

Feeling sexual transgression: subjectivity,bodily experience,and non-normative hetero-erotic practices in women's cross-border sex in Costa Rica

Participating in sexual tourism and cross-border sex, heterosexual Euro-North American women are a targeted social group whereby accusations, such as ‘fucking gringa’, label them as sexual transgressors for violating multiple boundaries of heteronormativity. The complex power dynamics of women's cross-border sex are due to negotiations of race, gender, and class that are played out in specific locales and political economies of desire. Within these dynamics, women are agentive social actors and exert considerable sexual agency in their desires for local men who are positioned unevenly vis-à-vis tourist women's mobilities within erotic markets. Yet women's hetero-erotic sexual practices, which are experienced at the level of the body, cannot be assumed; looking at the lived experiences of women as sexual trangressors in these spaces promises to complicate non-normative heterosexuality and the gendered dynamics of (straight) transnational sex. Using critical ethnography and a performance approach to writing that places subjectivity at the center of the ethnographic record and analysis, this article conveys an ‘insider’ or emic account of women's transnational sex taking place in a Caribbean region of Costa Rica renown for women's sexual and romance tourism. In taking this approach, I aim to show how heterosexuality, hetero-erotic practices, and cross-border sex are not always what they seem and a glimpse into ‘the subjects’ worlds in their words' (Madison, Soyini. 2005. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. London: Sage, 174) has implications for theory concerned with the body and performance as fundamental to the social production of sexual transgression.