Christianity,Tradition, and Everyday Modernity: Towards an Anatomy of Women's Groupings in Melanesia

This paper approaches its central theme of women's groupings in Melanesia via critique of several longstanding shibboleths, including examples of their strategic appropriation by indigenous people. These stereotypes include the romantic image of rural dwellers as pre‐modern traditionalists on whom Christianity is an imposed foreign veneer; the hoary rhetorical opposition of ‘West’ and ‘non‐West’/modernity and tradition/individual and community; and the pervasive essentialization of Melanesian women as ‘naturally’ family‐oriented, communitarian, and less individualistic and competitive than men. Seeking patterns in regional diversity and fragmentation, the paper examines cultural, historical, and structural correlates of a wide range of women's groupings, including National Councils of Women, church women's organizations, and the largely self‐financed local church fellowship groups which are growing steadily in number and significance in the virtual absence of effective state institutions. Increasingly, women's groupings are complementing their traditional Christian spiritual, domestic, and welfare concerns with attention to global feminist, human rights, and ecological issues which are often reworked locally into scarcely recognizable shapes. Eschewing romanticization, the paper considers the potential and the problems of women's groupings in male‐dominated Melanesia, including women's own divisions and their typical aversion to assuming public responsibilities.     

‘Womanly Qualities’ and Contested Methodology: Gender and the Discipline of Economics in Late Imperial Germany

This article analyses the affinities between two debates of the 1890s in Germany: one over women's intellectual abilities and one over the production of knowledge in economics. Economists and advocates for women's higher education found common cause and language because of the rhetorical centrality of the working woman, family and motherhood to a social reform discourse that connected the university, the women's movement and the state. The historical economists conceptualised their ‘science’ in a way that allowed ‘womanly qualities’ to be identified as appropriate to its optimal practice. A limited comparison with the United States highlights the historical specificity of this construction of social‐scientific knowledge.     

Shadows of Song: Exploring Research and Performance Strategies in Yolngu Women's Crying‐songs

This paper provides an argument that research on women's crying‐songs in north east Arnhem Land can be effectively analysed as a series of shadow‐dances between the researcher, the singer and the performance context. Within this framework, it explores the processes of transmission and reception of a selection of crying‐song texts from one of the most highly regarded female performers in the region. As singing is a powerful force in the making of Yolngu social, spiritual and political life, music making is shown to play a crucial role in authorizing, describing, teaching and controlling social and ancestral knowledge between men and women and by extension the place of the researcher within the community. Through the regulation of knowledge the making and remaking of the singer and researcher is danced out in a web of mutuality, reciprocity and obligation in which processes of ‘strategic formation’ and ‘strategic location’ emerge. Thus, one woman's melodies of mourning are shown to be a musical gift exchange of various shadow‐dances between learning, receiving, performing and mutually engaging in Yolngu ways of knowing and coming‐to‐know.     

‘The Gospel of Health’: American Missionaries and the Transformation of Ottoman/Turkish Women's Bodies, 1890–1932

This article explores an overlooked aspect of American missionary modernisation efforts in the late Ottoman Empire: the attempted transformation of women's bodies. By the late nineteenth century, American missionary women and Ottoman government officials both viewed Ottoman women's bodies as a visible reflection of the empire's weaknesses, yet also as central to its survival and revival. The transformation of women's bodies from ‘uncontrolled’ to ‘robust’, they believed, was a prerequisite for a modern society. Through a close reading of missionary reports, correspondences and student memoirs, this study traces the development of physical education, hygiene and recreational sports at the missionary‐run American College for Girls (ACG) in Istanbul. Over time, the female teachers at the ACG partnered and collaborated with male Ottoman/Turkish government officials to implement these courses at girls’ schools across the region. While the government endorsed physical education as key to national progress and regeneration, the ACG educators framed it as a mode of international, feminist self‐empowerment. In reality, the missionaries continued to assert their own Western superiority and advance Orientalist notions through the education courses. By highlighting the shifts in women's body ideals, curricular development and nationalist rhetoric, I argue that women's bodies must be studied as a crucial site of missionary and republican reform.     

Gendering the History of Women's Healthcare

This essay examines the genesis and continuing influence of certain core narratives in the history of western women's healthcare. Some derive from first‐wave feminism's search for models of female medical practice, an agenda that paid little attention to historical context. Second‐wave feminism, identifying a rift between pre‐modern and modern times in terms of women's medical practices, saw the pre‐modern European female healer as an exceptionally knowledgeable empiricist, uniquely responsible for women's healthcare and (particularly because of her knowledge of mechanisms to limit fertility) a victim of male persecution. Aspects of this second narrative continue subtly to effect scholarly discourse and research agendas on the history of healthcare both by and for women. This essay argues that, by seeing medical knowledge as a cultural product – something that is not static but continually re‐created and sometimes contested – we can create an epistemology of how such knowledge is gendered in its genesis, dissemination and implementation. Non‐western narratives drawn from history and medical anthropology are employed to show both the larger impact of the western feminist narratives and ways to reframe them.     

The Anti‐Essentialist Choice: Nationalism and Feminism in the Interaction between Two Women's Projects

Abstract. Two cross‐national women's organisations, one in Northern Ireland the other in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, are observed here in interaction with each other. The article explores the connection between their ability to sustain such cross‐community alliances and their choice to be women's projects. In so doing, it addresses the question ‘are feminism and nationalism compatible?’ Not all the women are ‘anti‐nationalist’ in philosophy, but they draw distinctions between variants of nationalism, and may be described as ‘anti‐essentialist’. The article distinguishes between variants of ‘feminism’, recognising it, too, as a plurality of movements. An anti‐essentialist understanding of ethnicity and nation is partnered in both the Network and Medica by an anti‐essentialist feminism, in which a woman's family role is minimised and value placed instead on her autonomy and agency. Certain forms of feminism and nationalism are thus compatible – but the configuration may be progressive or retrograde.     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

Feminist geography,the ‘everyday’, and local–global relations: hidden spaces of place‐making*

An interest in the taken‐for‐granted, mundane routine activities of women's lives has long been central to the production of knowledge in feminist geography. Here, I revisit the ‘everyday’ in relation to changing lines of inquiry as geographers work to capture the complexity of local–global relations in conceptualising an accelerated pace of the stretching of social relations over space. Through a primary focus on feminist work on care in the home, I explore the various ways in which the meanings and organisation of caregiving activity are intricately connected with the intertwining of globalisation, neoliberalism, social conservatism and a ‘greying’ population in the West. Foregrounding gender in my discussion, I review literature and draw on research examples to illustrate ways in which various types of ‘hidden’ caregiving contribute to contemporary place‐making, and open up our understanding of the ‘local’.     

Gender,Vulnerability, and the Experts: Responding to the Maldives Tsunami

This article examines the initial response by national and international agencies to gender issues during the aftermath of the Maldives tsunami, arguing that it was, in general, inadequate. Some agencies took a gender blind approach, ignoring different impacts on men and women, as well as the effects of complex gender relations on relief and recovery efforts. Other agencies paid greater attention to gender relations in their response but tended to focus exclusively on the universal category of the ‘vulnerable woman’ requiring special assistance, whilst at the same time ignoring men's vulnerabilities. This article argues that such language entrenched women as victims, excluding them from leadership and decision‐making roles and as such served to reinforce and re‐inscribe women's trauma. It is suggested that it is partly because of the nature of international bureaucracies and the fact that this disaster drew foreign ‘experts’ from around the world that the response neglected or over‐simplified gender issues.     

Nunneries,Communities and the Revaluation of Domesticity

This is a review of three books: a collection of essays edited by Diane Watt on medieval women in their communities, and two monographs, by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Marilyn Oliva, on nunneries in late medieval Germany and England. All three suggest in different ways that women's activities are regularly undervalued by the assumption that women try to do the same things as men, and fail. Hamburger argues that the artistic production of late fifteenth‐century nuns has been dismissed because it does not satisfy the criteria of (male) ‘high’ art. He shows that ‘nuns' work’ is in fact the product of a complex symbolic visual and textual culture. Oliva argues that the study of nunneries has been neglected because it is assumed that, since they were not rich and powerful like the monasteries, there is no evidence about them. She shows that it is possible to undertake a detailed prosopographical study of a group of nunneries from a single diocese. I argue that when in this context we talk about ‘women’, we are often in fact talking about the domestic sphere, with which women were so strongly associated. A revaluation of women's activities entails a revaluation of domesticity and the home.     

The salon as clinic: problematising,treating, and caring for skin

In this paper I draw upon Foucault's concept of the clinic, as well as his later work on the ‘care of the self’, in a consideration of the problems that are diagnosed, and the treatments that take place, within the beauty salon. As biotechnology descends to the sub-molecular level, so those spaces that are linked to the laboratory through the diffusion of knowledges, practices and material products—such as the salon—are also reworked. Traditionally the locus for an array of experts in both body and mind who instruct (mostly) women on how to care for the self, salons use a series of ‘cutting edge’ treatments to pamper and groom the body, correcting as it does so various problem areas such as the skin. I argue, using interview material from salon managers and employees, for the beauty salon as a key site wherein health and medical knowledge is disseminated, and the clinical gaze is brought to bear.     

‘Looking alright,feeling alright’: emotions,sizing and the geographies of women's experiences of clothing consumption

Recent work within geographies of consumption has focused on the practices of consumption as a means to find out ‘what people do when they go shopping’. This paper argues that few of these accounts of consumption have considered the significance of emotions in understanding the intricacies of consumer experience. Drawing on material from research about women's experiences of clothes shopping this paper, therefore, utilizes recent work in the social sciences which understands emotions not as inherent or as induced by practices or commodities and instead emphasizes the intersubjective nature of emotions whereby emotions ‘are self‐reflective, involving active perception, identification and management on the part of individuals’ (Lupton : 16). In short, this view posits that the consumer has the capacity to ‘manage’ or to experience and re‐experience emotions in particular consumption moments. Such an understanding offers a conceptualization which does not conceive of women's engagements with consumer culture within a victim/resistance dichotomy, instead uncovering geographies of consumption in which women may feel uncomfortable or depressed in a particular moment but then engage in practices through which they experience that moment differently. These emotional experiences are explored through considering the significance of the spatialities of the changing room, shop floor and the corporeal space of the ‘sized’ body, and the consumption practices of cheating, coping and connecting.     

Agency,Periodisation and Change in the Gender and Women's History of Colonial India

The paper begins with a critique of the ‘imperialism‐nationalism’ paradigm and its concomitant privileging of the period 1885–1947, which has dominated the writing of modern Indian history. It is argued here that the fixation with the ‘birth‐of‐the‐nation’ theme has led to the neglect of women's agency; that it has resulted in many inconsistencies, dilemmas and unresolved issues regarding a range of topics within Indian gender‐relations; and that this periodisation inhibits the reclamation of terms such as ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’. The second half of the essay proposes that women's agency can be recovered via a new chronology and a new template for understanding agency within which scholars will be enabled to retrieve the conscious voices of Indian women and record change in gender relations.     

‘Shades of grey’: spaces in and beyond trafficking for Thai Women involved in commercial sexual labour in Sydney and Singapore

In this article I explore the migration trajectories of some Thai women trafficked internationally for commercial sexual exploitation, suggesting that many figuratively ‘cross the border’ between coerced and consensual existence in volatile migrant sex industries during the course of their migration experiences, thus complicating debates around the notion of choice in ‘sex’ trafficking. In exploring these women's transitions I seek to understand why women who had either never previously been sex workers or who were sex workers operating without duress, but who were then trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation remain in, or re-enter volatile forms of migrant sex work at a later point under voluntary arrangements. In answering this question I focus on the temporal and spatial aspects of individual women's experiences in migrant sex industries drawing in detail on the narratives of two Thai women trafficked to Sydney, Australia and Singapore. I make some suggestions about methodologies used in trafficking research that can assist in bringing to light some of these complex time–space dimensions of women's experiences through their shifting positions in commercial sexual labour. The article also reflects on the implications of these women's trajectories for the ‘prostitution debate’ as it relates to trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation by suggesting that many trafficked women occupy ambiguous or in-between positions in migrant sex industries, neither easily distinguishable by the label of victim of trafficking or migrant sex worker.     

Simultaneous love: an argument on love,modernity and the feminist subject at the beginning of the twentieth century

This article explores an argument on love as it was articulated within the framework of the ‘New Ethics’ sexual reform in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. While many commentaries on the alienating impact of modernity projected authenticity onto the ‘non‐modern’ woman and her love, the feminist authors at issue in this article promote ‘modern love’ as a medium of women's participation in modernity. Furthermore, they address the problem of love's temporality and non‐exclusivity. Yet, the engagement with these topics is a tricky one because non‐exclusivity and impermanence are at the same time dismissed as ‘decadent’ ways of loving and attributed to ‘archaic’ Europe and non‐European cultures.     

Telling it Like it is? Constructing accounts of settlement with immigrant and refugee women in Canada

This article reflects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee women's settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It specifically takes up the ways in which the women's accounts were co‐constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in‐depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mother's accounts showing how their story‐telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the women's talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of ‘womanhood’ in Canada, routes to a desired ‘integration’ and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as ‘desirable’ immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological reflection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken‐for‐granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of ‘the other’. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the specific space of the interview, were intricately involved in ‘telling it like it is’ for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.     

‘The women's lobby’: Networks,coalition building and the women of middle Australia

The ‘women's lobby’ or the ‘powerful feminist lobby’ has been held responsible for a range of evils including the undermining of the traditional family, public expenditure on community services, social engineering and the imposition of ‘political correctness’. To what extent is there a ‘women's lobby’ working from inside or outside government to influence public decision‐mating? In this paper we explore this question, using data from a social network analysis of the Australian women's movement conducted in 1992–3.

Our findings are that there is a large, very loosely connected network of organisations engaging in advocacy on behalf of women. Density of ties is less than is found in a comparable study of the Canadian women's movement but there are more ties between non‐government groups and government agencies. Issues of organisational philosophy have inhibited the development of a ‘peak body’ for the non‐government women's movement and led to reliance on issue‐specific coalitions. Latterly, awareness of increasing fragmentation has led to a series of attempts to create more effective national networking.     

Beyond ‘State Ibuism’: Empowerment Effects in State‐led Development in Indonesia

This article examines the ways women's processes of self‐formation are indicative (or not) of new possibilities for women's gendered selves in the post‐Reformasi period in Indonesia. It focuses on the development arena to reveal how shifts in state rhetoric, from top‐down guidance based on a patriarchal familial model to bottom‐up, inclusive development based on empowerment, have transformed what is referred to as the ‘topography for self’. The article draws upon theories of personhood a) to show how gendered selves emerge and are contested within particular historical conditions; and b) to develop an alternative framework of ‘empowerment’ that focuses not on capabilities and choice, but on an expansion in the possibilities for self. It argues that models of community‐driven development have provided new opportunities for women to hold and enact socially recognizable subject positions. This constitutes a form of empowerment for individual women but does not necessarily reflect challenges to patriarchy in Indonesia.     

Taking Care into Account: Leveraging India's MGNREGA for Women's Empowerment

The potential of India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) for women's empowerment is immense. Studies examining gender‐related issues in MGNREGA have attested to the high levels of participation of women on worksites, and their positive experiences of working in MGNREGA. This article argues, however, that an exclusive focus on increased participation of women does not serve an agenda of promoting ‘women's empowerment’. By ignoring the dynamics and processes of unpaid care work, both the making and the implementation of the Act fall short of the goal of women's empowerment. The author argues that this invisibilizing of care arises from the gendered nature of the interactions of formal and informal institutions that have shaped MGNREGA. The article examines the gendered debates during the formulation of the Act and analyses the gendered nature of its implementation. It concludes that a true focus on women's empowerment requires that women's lived experiences are taken into account, especially those relating to their unpaid care responsibilities. MGNREGA's potential for women's empowerment can only be achieved through adequate implementation and monitoring of its gender provisions, which in turn depend on changing the formal and informal institutions that underpin policy processes.