Managing Difference: Gender and culture in humanitarian emergencies

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has a mandate to respond to crises of human displacement on a global scale. The ways in which the organization conceives of gender and culture in this humanitarian context are problematic because they tend either to essentialize 'woman' and 'culture' in the planning process or to minimize the meaning and implications of these differences vis-a-vis gender policies which focus on integration. In this article, the discourse of 'UN humanism' is analyzed, noting a long-standing tension between culture as shared humanity and culture as a pivotal basis of difference. Drawing on current research relating to UNHCR's gender policies and on initiatives against violence towards refugee women in camps, the implications of overarching frameworks which attend to gender and cultural differences are discussed. Strategies to avoid authenticating or fixing categories of difference, on the one hand, and to avoid treating gender and culture as simply variables, on the other, are proposed in the context of emerging transnational feminist practices. Transnational approaches point to important interventions which may serve to unravel the dominant discourses of UN humanism and vulnerable groups that continue to organize UN refugee and humanitarian operations today.     

'Heart' and 'Wing', Nation and Diaspora: Gendered discourses in Singapore's regionalisation process

In this article the authors offer an analysis of Singapore's state-vaunted 'go-regional' policy as a case study to illustrate the argument that not only are the 'nation-state' and 'diaspora' structurally interdependent and embedded in the discursive frame of each other, but also that the way they interlock is shaped by particular gender ideologies and relations. In the same way as the state articulates nationalism by appealing to men and women as gendered subjects, the appropriation of transnational space as part of the regionalisation drive serves to extend and elaborate 'genderic modes of discourse'. Beyond state discourse, the authors examine individual and family strategies in straddling the gap between 'nation' and 'diaspora', between being at 'home' and 'away'. In arguing that the 'go-regional' policy is a pervasively masculine construction, the authors give specific attention to the way gender divisions of labour are transnationalised and further entrenched, the gendering of diasporic workplaces, and the construction of women-in-diaspora as 'moral wives'. The arguments are grounded mainly in research material garnered from in-depth interviews with Singaporean economic migrants (and non-migrants) to China.     

Women's Cotton and the Spaces of Gender Politics in Northern Cote d'Ivoire

This article seeks to contribute to the gender and 'development' literature by showing how gender struggles over women's economic autonomy from cotton growing are played out at multiple geographical scales. The main argument is that 'men' and 'women' do not simply negotiate over cash cropping within the household. Women in particular find it necessary to 'jump' the scale of the household in order to secure productive resources for cash cropping. Drawing upon the notion of 'scalar politics,' this article illuminates the multiple processes and scaled spaces in which women's economic autonomy expands and contracts around the cultivation of cotton. It is inspired by feminist political ecological approaches to examine how the micro-politics of gender interact with meso- and macro-level agroecological and political economic processes affecting women's poverty and empowerment. Based on longitudinal research in northern Côte d'Ivoire, it shows how women of different sociocultural and economic standing negotiate access to productive resources at multiple scales, and how some men seek to restrict these initiatives. As women search for solutions to contradictions in gendered social relations of production, at different geographical scales, they have simultaneously dispersed the site of gender struggles to other locations (the marketplace and women's personal fields). Male household heads now find it necessary to contest women's cotton growing in these gendered spaces in their attempt to control their wives' labor.     

Negotiating gender dynamics in heteronormativity: extramarital intimacy among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea

This article examines the liminal space that exists both as a structural condition engendered by transnational migration and as a state that is self-consciously carved out by migrants. It demonstrates that this space provides the grounds for migrants to develop ‘deviant heterosexuality’, such as extramarital relationships while simultaneously causing dilemmas and contestation of gender dynamics in conjugal and familial relationships. Drawing on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, I elucidate the extramarital relationships among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea. By incorporating discussions of ‘queer heterosexualities’ and Hubbard's geographical engagement of sexuality into analysis, I argue that migrants' extramarital practices are shaped not only by dominant discourse, but also through the particular social and spatial positioning of individuals. First, I demonstrate that the liminal space gives migrant Filipino workers a certain degree of autonomy from the power and ideological interventions of both sending and host societies. Second, I highlight the liminal space that is extended by migrants themselves, especially through the increasing economic ability and mobility of migrant women, which can reconfigure the modes of heteronormativity and gender structure in conjugal, familial and extramarital relationships. In the end, I argue that transnational migration results not only in provisional liminality but also prolonged liminality through migrants' initiative in pursuing their desired heterosexuality and their endeavour to convert extramarital relationships into long-term intimacy. This study contributes to the discussion of the interplay between heterosexuality/heteronormativity and gender in recent human migration.     

Marketing Fabrics and Femininity in Interwar France

Abstract

This article examines discourse about the gender of garments and dress fabrics in the French fashion media, using Roland Barthes's 'informal semiotics' of modern consumption, and particularly his notion of the fashion magazine as a 'machine' articulating the meaning of fashion, including the gender implications of fashion and fabrics. The article also tracks the response of French couturiers and textile manufacturers to anxieties about gender ambiguities in ladieswear between the two world wars. The first part analyzes coverage of chemise dresses and ladies' suits in 13 illustrated magazines: four fashion magazines, three fashion supplements, three trade magazines and three society magazines. The second part of the article explores the attitudes of textile manufacturers' associations, of prominent woollen and silk producers, and of their marketing campaigns, to more androgynous styles using the same sources, professional bulletins, and the minutes of the Silk Manufacturers Syndicate (Chambre Syndicale des Fabricants de Soieries).     

Forests of Pleasure and Pain: Gendered practices of labor and livelihood in the forests of the Kumaon Himalayas,India

This article examines the dominant gender and environment discourse in India and argues that, so far, analyses of gender and environment have pursued a utilitarian and mechanistic understanding of the nature-society relationship. By focusing on gendered practices of livelihood, narrated memories, and oral accounts of embodied pain and pleasure in the forests of the Kumaon Himalayas, India, the author discusses the conceptual limitations that inform this discourse and argues for a culturally and geographically embedded understanding of nature-society relationships. It is argued that places of nature are not just biophysical entities, isolated from local, regional, and global relations of power, but are dialectically constituted by local politics of place, history, and ecology and are constitutive of social relations. In Kumaon, the identities of women are constituted through, always entwined with, everyday practices in the forest, and culturally specific notions of proper behavior, 'good mothers,' and 'dutiful wives' are mapped in the overlapping domains of village and forests. Such a view of the nature-society dynamic, it is argued, is critical for a grounded and locally meaningful understanding of how gendered relations are operationalized in nature and for insights into thinking about policy issues.     

Transnational (Counter) Topographies

Noting that much of the literature on transnationalism is gender blind, we consider what a focus on gender brings to understanding transnationalism. Tracing a feminist itinerary shows that there is nothing inherently transgressive or emancipatory about transnationalism. Rather, the effects are contradictory and complex, and must be assessed within specific times and places. Gender relations are often transformed through transnational migration, although 'gains' in gender equity tend to be uneven, hard fought for, and sometimes impermanent. Rather than weakening the nation-state, transnationalism is bound up with remaking the nation, often within renewed patriarchal norms of national belonging. So too, while transnationalism can open up new spaces of belonging, we argue that this is accomplished through specific connections between places rather than through (an often romanticised) deterritorialised mobility. Finally, we consider what feminist counter topographies can bring to transnational feminist politics.     

‘Generation Emigration’: the politics of (trans)national social reproduction in twenty-first-century Ireland

Placing social reproduction at the heart of the experience of migration, this article attempts to move beyond regulatory discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice or ‘the Skype generation’. Following a review of feminist literature on social reproduction, the article returns to research with Irish women migrants and non-migrants in the 1990s to demonstrate how technologically mediated ‘time-space compression’ and its promise of transnational proximity actually gave rise to the experience of gendered ‘time-space expansion’. The Irish Times' ‘Generation Emigration’ (GE) project is then introduced as a site in which similar gendered dynamics emerge as contemporary technologically mediated connections between emigrants and the homeland are celebrated through a compensatory (trans)nationalist discourse that competes with but also compensates for framings of emigration as national tragedy. The article suggests that discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice, or new globalised practice serve to bring emigration into being in circumscribed ways and to produce emigrants as particular kinds of ‘recognisable’ subjects. It asks how the work of social reproduction in the context of emigration might be posed anew in ways that challenge dominant assumptions regarding the location and composition of the population to be reproduced. By moving beyond these regulatory discourses of emigration, and by emphasising the dynamics of technologically mediated transnational social reproduction, the article identifies the racialised heteronormative assumptions that intersect with national and global projects of economic production and social reproduction to produce uneven gendered effects.     

Spatial Displacements: Transnationalism and the new social movements

This paper looks at connections between transnationalism and the new social movements in the USA. Drawing on feminist and 'queer theory' critiques of totalising 'lesbian-feminist' and 'radical feminist' arguments, as well as on the neo-Marxist analyses of transnationalism, I argue that it is possible to theorise transnational 'flexible accumulation' in terms of gender, race and sexuality as well as class. I analyse David Harvey's argument about the role of the 'spatial fix' and 'temporal fix' in post-modernity. I compare Harvey's approach to the analysis of post-modernity with Mike Davis's more local/global analytic. I contrast their approaches with the ways that the notion of displacement can be applied to the deconstructive reading of narrative and representational texts. I conclude with an analysis of the way transnationalism is displaced, as multiplanetary capitalism, in C.J. Cherryh's science fiction. Cherryh links the construction of spatialities to ways of constructing gender, species, and sexualities, as well as to changes in the mode of production. Her heroines, too, as translators, knowledge brokers and political intriguers, are centrally involved in the crisis of accumulation in the novels' fictive universe. In this way, Cherryh's fictions, and her heroines' actions, produce an implicit theorisation of accumulation, based on gender, and sexuality, as well as class.     

From ‘motherland’ to ‘daddy state’: A genealogical analysis of the gender undertone in China's nationalist discourses

This article examines the gender undertone of China's nationalist discourses, especially in familial metaphors of nationalism, and how such an undertone shapes people's understandings of state authority and state-citizen relations. Conventional nationalist discourse of the ‘motherland’ evokes the image of an insulted and raped mother as the symbol of national humiliation and calls for actions from patriots (masculinised in the discourse). In recent years, however, we have seen the emergence of a new discourse that depicts the nation-state as a rich, powerful and masculine ‘daddy’. Using discourse analysis and Foucauldian genealogical methods, this article argues that the discursive development has to be analysed against China's historical backgrounds, especially considering new standards of masculinity and femininity in the era of economic reform. Capital is equated to masculinity and righteousness, whereas femininity is shaped by the middle-class values of consumerism and political disengagement. The ‘daddy state’ discourse conjures strong paternalistic power from China's economic capacity that can be projected onto challengers of state authority, while also constructing the nationalist public as feminised consumers whose consumerist enjoyment relies on patriarchal state protection.     

Lost boys,invisible girls: stories of Sudanese marriages across borders

Forced migration challenges and changes gender relations. The transnational activities of refugees resettled in the West create gender asymmetries among those who stay behind. This article explores the transnational marriages of young southern Sudanese women (‘invisible girls’), who either stayed in Sudan or remained in refugee camps in Kenya, to Sudanese men who were resettled to America, Canada or Australia (‘lost boys’). Incorporating gender as a relational category into the analysis of transnational practices that migrants and refugees engage in is important. The article argues that there is a need to put feminist analysis at the centre of transnational processes resulting from (forced) migration. It looks at the connections between different geographical locations, the impacts of the migration of young refugee men on bridewealth and marriage negotiations and the gender consequences for young women, men and their families. It is argued that transnational activities, such as marriage, contest, reconfigure and reinforce the culturally inscribed gender norms and practices in and across places. Transnational marriage results in ambiguous benefits for women (and men) in accessing greater freedoms. Anthropological analyses of marriage need a geographical focus on the transnational fields in which they occur. The article seeks to deepen understanding of the nuanced gendered consequences of transnationalism. It shows how gender analysis of actions taken across different locations can contribute to the theorisation of transnational studies of refugees and migrants.     

Gender and Welfare Reform in Post‐ Revolutionary Mexico

This article discusses the impact a gender and woman's history conference had on the development of my own research and writing. ‘Las Olvidadas’ was a conference held at Yale in the Spring of 2001, and was the first in a series of Mexican women's and gender history conferences organised. My own research, on the gendered nature of the welfare state in Mexico, explores how class and race intersected with gender to produce a welfare system that, while particular to Mexico, also nevertheless had much in common with other Latin American countries. These conferences shaped both my views of gender, but also the importance of the transnational to historical research.     

Colonial Matriarchs: Garveyism,Maternalism, and Belize's Black Cross Nurses, 1920–1952

This article analyses the politics of Belize's Black Cross Nurses in their heyday in order to bring into dialogue the historiography on gender in the transnational Garveyite movement to which the middle‐class Nurses belonged, and the historiography on maternalism. It complicates the claim that Garveyite women were subordinated within the movement and resisted its gender norms, and addresses the lack of attention to maternalist politics among non‐white women in colonised settings, where racial anxieties strengthened middle‐class attachment to bourgeois respectability. By analysing the Nurses's relations with the colonial state, poor urban mothers and middle‐class men, the article concludes that their maternalism served to reproduce class and race hierarchies, and colonial rule, even as it strengthened middle‐class women's political autonomy and legitimacy.     

Thai wives in Singapore and transnational patriarchy

International marriage migration is a fraught terrain of gender and power relations. Based on research among Thai women married to Singaporean men, we argue that patriarchal outcomes – a distinctive system of transnational patriarchy – result from a complex interaction of women, men and nation-states. We draw on Deniz Kandiyoti's insights into patriarchal bargains as a productive framework through which to identify key elements in the making of transnational patriarchal relations. This article provides a detailed account of conditions in Thailand, Singapore and the contact zones in which Thai women and Singaporean men negotiate marriage migration. Relating this case to previous research, particularly among Filipina migrant women, demonstrates points of commonality while also highlighting the importance of attending to difference and diversity among transnational contexts.     

Exercising Exit,Voice and Loyalty: A Gender Perspective on Transnationalism in Haiti

This article explores gendered patterns of migration and transnationalism in Haiti. A combination of factors has prompted extensive rural–urban migration and emigration over the last three decades: violence, repression, economic collapse and the implementation of neo‐liberal reforms have left many Haitians with few options other than to seek a new life elsewhere. Although many Haitians abroad naturalize and take citizenship in host countries, emigration does not mean that ties to their homeland are severed. Indeed, a substantial number of Haitians remain intimately connected to Haiti, visiting, sending remittances and gifts, investing in land and exercising political voice in Haiti and in their country of residence. This article focuses on the gender dimension of Haitian migration and transnationalism drawing on Hirschman's typology of exit, voice and loyalty. These options are uniquely gendered. Although most analyses of transnational citizenship focus on men, women and women's movements in Haiti have also benefited from transnational organizing and the transnational links forged over the past three decades. Through migration, women have participated in changing the financial architecture and political landscape of Haiti. Expressions of voice and loyalty by women are challenging traditional gender roles in Haiti and contributing to an emerging transnationalism that has profound effects on Haitians and their communities at home and abroad.     

The Liberal Paradox and the Politics of Asylum in Australia

This article interprets the politics of asylum in Australia in light of what James Hollifield calls ‘the liberal paradox’; that is, the trend amongst contemporary states towards greater transnational open-ness in the economic arena alongside growing pressure for domestic political closure. It begins with an outline of Australia's recent history of economic reform and of the discourse of globalisation that has been employed to legitimise the changes wrought by this transition. Focusing on the period from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the article provides an account of anxieties associated with these changes and an analysis of government strategies to secure the support of disaffected sections of the electorate. Asylum policy is analysed in this context. The article shows how the policing of asylum seekers constitutes performances of political closure designed to assuage those made vulnerable by Australia's neoliberal economic trajectory. It argues that these politics of asylum are indicative of the tensions between transnational engagement and territorial closure faced by neoliberal states more generally.     

'New Programming' and the Influence of Transnational Discourses in the Reform of Regional Policy in Italy

Recent developments in regional policy in Italy may be interpreted as outcomes of a mutual fertilization between two distinct policy discourses, concerning the reframing of regional programming in the framework of a reform of the State, and the promotion of local initiatives in a perspective of endogenous development. This paper presents a critical itinerary of the mutual evolution of these lines of discourse during the 1990s. Their provisional merging in the framework of the strategy of 'new programming' adopted in connection with the reform of the Structural Funds and with the new community support framework (CSF) for the period 2000-2006 is interpreted in light of the 'Europeanization' of Italian public policy and of the influence of its progressive embedding into transnational policy discourses.     

Struggling with ‘this gender relations thing’ in the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership Program

Gender equality and women's empowerment has become a cornerstone for successful development. Religious teachings and practices, like ‘traditional culture’, are often viewed as contributing to gender inequality and oppression. The increased engagement by donor agencies with religious organisations prompts questions about how religion, gender and development intersect in particular places, and the implications this intersection has for the transnational ‘gender agenda’ of development agencies. This article focuses on the dialogue about gender in the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership Program. Analysing the struggles taking place, it argues that the processes that shaped local Christianities are also at work in the churches' translations of the ‘gender agenda’. These churches are gradually emerging as agents for gender justice as they develop their own approaches to gender work that support the churches' mission to ‘live the Gospel’ in their practice of holistic integral human development. However, to progress further, in recognising the necessity for men to lead the struggle for gender justice, the dialogue must focus on the personal transformation of men in relation to their understanding of masculinities and gendered power dynamics. From this foundation, structural and political change can be advanced.     

From Feminising to Engendering Development

Feminists have been crucial in challenging the gender-blindness of development discourse and practice. In the process, they have shaped the move from the feminisation to the engendering of development over the last three decades. This article explores this broad shift, focusing on the recent transformations within gender and development discourse and feminist approaches to development relating to diversity and representation, human rights, and the incorporation of men and masculinities within the development agenda, all set within the context of a globalising era. It highlights how women from the South have been critical in reshaping contemporary feminisms to celebrate difference and plurality and challenge Western hegemony. At the same time, feminists have also emphasised the commonalities among women in the name of addressing gender inequalities, evidenced in a recent upsurge in forging transnational alliances facilitated by the contradictory processes of globalisation.     

(Mal)Development in Central America: Globalization and Social Change

This article develops a globalization framework and a model of transnational processes for analysing social change and development, and then applies the model to Central America. The analysis emphasizes determinacy, in the last instance, of social forces in historic developmental outcomes, and documents how social forces in struggles in an emergent transnational environment have shaped Central America's changing profile within the global economy and society. Revolutionary movements, a new class structure, US geo-political considerations, and the internationalization of East Asian economies, have all contributed to a new model of development; from the 1960s into the 1990s the national model of development is being replaced by a transnational model. Maquiladora garment production, tourism, non-traditional agricultural exports, and remittances from emigrant workers are coming to eclipse traditional agro-exports as the most dynamic economic sectors linking the region to globalized circuits of production and distribution. The article also examines Central American migration to the US and gender dimensions of the new transnational model of development.