Logging,Women and Submarines: Some Changes in Kamula Men's Access to Transformative Power

In this paper I describe how, for the Kamula, the productive elicitation of both familiar and modern things often requires access to the transformative capacities of ‘bush spirits’. The Kamula narratives I deal with outline how elements of modernity (such as money, logging, guns) are relocated into the domain of these spirits. By the mediation of these spirits, sometimes disturbing, even dangerous, aspects of modernity are transformed and then productively transferred to Kamula men such that they can apparently more effectively negotiate the new forces that now structure their lives. Through these narrative and magical definitions of agency, Kamula men become complicit in a modernity that is increasingly both the source and negation of their power.     

‘White Skins‘, ‘Real People’ and ‘Chinese’ in Some Spatial Transformations of the Western Province,PNG1

To understand more fully contemporary forms of colonialism in PNG I argue we need to move our analysis beyond local narratives of encounters with Europeans to include narratives about non-Europeans. Through a consideration of Kamula accounts of Europeans, especially missionaries, and Chinese I show how the Kamula model two quite different experiences of colonialism. In one, local people are able to transform Europeans into analogues of themselves and in the other, currently more associated with the Chinese, the emphasis is on difference, rather than on commonalities. These interrelated representations of two distinct kinds of colonialists are, in part, complex signifiers of national, and especially local, concerns about ‘development’ based on logging. I outline how these accounts of Europeans and Chinese express the different forms of power which are currently deployed to transform space in the Western Province. I conclude by speculating that to understand these powers adequately we may need to follow Latour and Callon and extend our analysis of colonialism to include non-human agents.     

Rethinking Whiteness and Masculinity in Geography: Drinking Alcohol in the Field in Vietnam

This paper evaluates the spatial politics of fieldwork in Vietnam in order to think through the connections between whiteness, masculinity, and geography. In drawing attention to how the consumption of alcohol underwrites daily activities in Vietnam, as well as fieldwork activities, I show that research ethics are underpinned by unique spatial contexts that do not conform to conventional accounts of masculinity and whiteness in the global North. I make three interrelated arguments. First, I argue that debates in geography about whiteness and masculinity must be understood alongside fieldwork experiences in the global South. Second, I invite geographers to think through how research ethics are shaped by spatially contingent productions of whiteness and masculinity. Lastly, I challenge geographers to keep pace with how disruptive categories like whiteness and masculinity are produced outside of the global North.     

White Settler Society as Monster: Rural Southeast Kansas,Ancestral Osage (Wah‐Zha‐Zhi) Territories,and the Violence of Forgetting

This article provides a critical analysis of the practices and discourses of white settler “men” in Southeast Kansas (Ancestral Osage Territories) by examining the inextricable links rural masculinity has with settler colonialism. I begin by underscoring how efforts in erasing Indigenous histories have been sanctioned through processes of dispossession, bordering, and nation‐state building. I then explore how hetero‐patriarchal rural hierarchies are assembled via capitalistic desires for private property; conservative Christianity's rhetoric of altruism and good intentions; white supremacist conceptions of race; and masculinist perspectives regarding work and gender. Next, I highlight how the spatial assertion of white settler masculinity reproduces colonial oppressions based upon interlocking subject positions and notions of difference. I continue by suggesting denial and disaffiliation are banal exercises of disavowal employed by white settler societies as attempts to forget colonial violence. I then finish by illustrating how a masculinist status quo might be disrupted, resisted, and transformed.     

'Walking the walk and talking the talk': Bodies,conversation, gender and power in higher education in England

Combinations of speaking, listening and bodily behaviour have been neglected in accounts of the operation of power. Although often described as fluid and interactionally produced, power has been the subject of few empirically based analyses at micro-interactional scales. Drawing on interviews with undergraduates and extracts from teaching interactions at higher education institutions in England, this article focuses on talk as a situated practice. It describes how verbal and bodily behaviours together are fundamentally involved in the enactment of instructor and student roles and power relations, and the collective interactional (re)production of teaching spaces. It discusses two broad types of teaching interaction in terms of gendered differences in the structure of talk, drawing attention to how these are shaped by differences in how instructors enact power. I suggest that men may routinely engage in conversations with 'feminine' structures in teaching spaces without this compromising heterosexual masculinity, and present reasons why it may be more likely that women be problematized for using 'masculine' verbal styles. I also argue that rather than simply being inscribed on to instructors' bodies in ways that accord with the hegemonic discourses of gender, authority and respect have to continually be earned from students, and verbal behaviour is deeply involved in this process. It is not enough to 'walk the walk', instructors must also 'talk the talk', in ways that students deem legitimate.     

The Politics of Incorporation: Masculinity,Spatiality and Modernity among the Ngaing of Papua New Guinea

In this paper I argue that the way in which masculinity and spatiality are reconstituted among the Ngaing men of Madang Province (Papua New Guinea) is pivotally implicated in how they articulate their ongoing claim to incorporation in modernity. The manner in which they strive for progress is indicative of identifications coupling Christianity and whiteness with the hope of redemption from a condition of blackness, inferiority and marginality. With the help of recent discourses and secret ritual practices, in which Christian components combine with local cultural patterns, the men make clear that indigenous participation in modernity is prefigured on the inside of external manifestations of body and space. This discursive and ritual empowerment of the men rests on a culturally specific construction of the inside and the outside in which the knowledge, power and mobility possessed by whites are construed as an integral part of the local world.     

Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth‐Century Britain

Eighteenth‐century England is, for many scholars, the time and place where modern domesticity was invented; the point at which ‘home’ became a key concept sustained by new literary imaginings and new social practices. But as gendered individuals, and certainly compared to women, men are notable for their absence in accounts of the eighteenth‐century domestic interior. In this essay, I examine the relationship between constructs of masculinity and meanings of home. During the eighteenth century, ‘home’ came to mean more than one's dwelling; it became a multi‐faceted state of being, encompassing the emotional, physical, moral and spatial. Masculinity intersected with domesticity at all levels and stages in its development. The nature of men's engagements with home were understood through a model of ‘oeconomy’, which brought together the home and the world, primarily through men's activities. Indeed, this essay proposes that attention to how this multi‐faceted eighteenth‐century ‘home’ was made in relation to masculinity shifts our understanding of home as a private and feminine space opposed to an ‘outside’ and public world.     

Is Androcentric Archaeology Really About Men?

The article starts with a discussion of the relation between feminist archaeology and gender archaeology followed by a short account of how androcentrism may influence on archaeological research. By exploring two representative examples I will argue that androcentric archaeology mainly reproduces stereotype images of men and do not provide much new or real knowledge about prehistoric men or understandings of masculinity. Consequently, there is a need to study prehistoric men as gendered and I will argue that to include studies in men and masculinity into a gender archaeology based on feminist theory might challenge androcentric archaeological studies just as much as to study women in prehistory.     

Resisting popular feminisms: gender,sexuality and the lure of the modern

Abstract

This article tracks discursive and political use of gender and sexual equality in nationalist and popular accounts of feminism, focusing on the ways in which such discourses produce a particular linking of time and space in the articulation of ‘the Modern’ in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. It further explores the increasing popularity of feminism in some media and celebrity contexts that have historically been so hostile to it, asking for care in tracking how and under what conditions feminism is cited as ‘universally desirable’ in light of this history. I suggest that feminism is partly reframed in this way insofar as it is newly sutured to femininity rather than masculinity, but also to singular rather than multiple or intersectional understandings of women’s oppression. A related claim of this article is that this shift of affective association with feminism is only possible when that singular cause of gender oppression is firmly understood as sexual oppression. I will be suggesting that if feminism is understood primarily or even only a fight against sexual oppression by men then the oppositional gendered roles that allow for its tethering to nationalism remain intact yet simultaneously obscured. In conclusion the article calls for an appreciation of feminism as a minority pursuit attentive to multiple power relations and histories.     

Gendering pastoral power: masculinity,affective labour and competitive bonds of solidarity among Filipino migrant men in Saudi Arabia

This article draws on Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to understand Filipino men’s care work and the making of migrant masculinities in Saudi Arabia. Feminist scholars have indicated the gendered nature of pastoral power and emphasized what Young refers to as the ‘logic of masculinist protection’ that characterizes the contemporary security state. However, the notion of pastoral power invites further consideration of the taken for granted cultural assumptions about the way that hegemonic masculinity and forms of homosociality are characterized mainly by aggression, competition and dominance. Men’s talk about and practical involvement in assisting fellow migrants in diasporic settings foregrounds the way that an ethics of care runs up against and is entangled with the competitive bonds of masculine solidarities. While markers of material success are privileged in measuring migrant men’s accomplishments in country of origin, practices of care become central to men’s achievement of symbolic power and social legitimacy especially among their peers in the diaspora. That spatialization is also linked to temporally shifting models of masculinity and normative expectations about men over the life course.     

‘The rainha is the boss!’: On Masculinities,Time and Precolonial Women of Authority in Northern Mozambique

This article focuses on the oral historical narratives about precolonial women of authority (or rainhas in Portuguese) to explore the deeper history of gendered power in northern Mozambique. History-telling is a gendered practice, and nowadays male elders are usually the ones most knowledgeable in these narratives. Moreover, telling these tales - which in interview situations involves personal interpretations and comments - the men also story gendered temporal worlds. This article looks more closely at two seemingly clashing (and incompatible) storylines that emerge in the oral history material. One tells of women's spiritual-political power in the Yaawo chieftaincies in precolonial times, while the other tells a narrative of masculinised power and woman's subordinate position in relation to male leaders. The article focus's especially on how the male narrators talk about masculinity and how different models of masculinity in turn shape the historical narratives they tell. As the author's analysis demonstrates, these models have different temporal origins; yet they intertwine in present time-space, interacting also with newer notions (e.g. the ‘new man’ of the socialist period). The article thus shows how various models of masculinity linked to different temporalities and different imaginings of the relationality between femininity and masculinity coexist and shape male gendered identities as well as the histories men tell about the past and gendered power.     

Masculinity and domesticity in 1930s South Wales: did unemployment change the domestic division of labour?

This article examines masculinity in an area suffering from sustained high unemployment and unremitting hardship during the 1930s: the South Wales coalfield had some of the highest rates of male unemployment and the lowest participation rates of married women in paid employment in Britain. Particular attention is drawn to power relations between husband and wife by looking at the domestic division of labour and whether male unemployment affected the split in domestic responsibilities. Personal testimonies are used to assess how men filled their time whilst unemployed and the meanings they attached to their activities and relationships. It will be shown that some unemployed men engaged more in the home and that many men were able to maintain existing power relations with their wives by finding or creating alternative manual work and maintaining an elastic relationship with the home by continuing to spend the majority of their time in the company of other men.     

Hyper or hypo-masculine? Re-conceptualizing ‘hyper-masculinity’ through Seattle’s gay,leather community

This article offers a critique of the concept of hyper-masculinity and a more nuanced, place contingent, critical way to think about masculinity. I use the concept of hyper-masculinity to highlight a conceptual problem between essentialist and de-essentialized notions of gender. Constructionist notions of masculinity (and gender) do not escape the essentialist problem; however, by critiquing and offering a placed conceptualization of hyper-masculinity based on Seattle’s gay leather community, I push the boundaries of masculinity and gender to arrive at a more nuanced, embodied, place-based and contingent understanding of hyper-masculinity thereby side-stepping debates that essentialist/constructionist. Through participant-observations and ethnographic interviews with men who practice hyper-masculinity within the gay leather community in Seattle, USA, I interrogate hyper-masculinity within the community to demonstrate how it reinforces and subverts heterosexual gender roles and homonormativity.     

Devout Muslim masculinities: the moral geographies and everyday practices of being men in Turkey

While the academic focus on Muslim women’s dress and comportment has enriched our understanding of the multifaceted formation of pious femininities, there has been much less consideration of the embodied practices of Muslim men. What work does exist on Middle Eastern men’s piety, sexuality, and everyday conduct too often falls back on established categories, such as traditional, Western, or Islamic identities. Yet it is crucial not only to critically examine how we conceptualize masculinity in the Middle East, but also to recognize the political and cultural importance of how masculinities are enacted through everyday practices. In this article, we argue that questions of dress and bodily practice are relevant to an understanding of how young devout Muslim men navigate the complex spatiality of piety, morality, and masculinity in contemporary urban Turkey. Drawing on fieldwork with young devout men in Konya and Istanbul, we illustrate how multiple, competing devout Muslim masculinities participate in the production of uneven moral geographies in these two very different Turkish cities. Further, we find that the possibility of different ways to enact devout masculinity opens questions about the universality of Islamic knowledge and practice. We suggest that the embodied construction and regulation of the looking-desiring nexus tethers male sexual desire to the public performance of Islamic morality. Our intervention is thus to demonstrate how different versions of masculinity and Islamic piety striate the moral geographies of these two Turkish cities, and thereby to further recognition of the contingency and plurality of both masculinity and Islam.     

Shame and Care: Masculinities in the Goroka Marketplace

For those women living in villages within accessible range of Goroka town, it is the norm to sell fresh produce in the Goroka market. Fresh produce trading, or maket in Tok Pisin, is common for women throughout the country. To see men selling food in the Goroka market is significantly less common, and those who do, usually sell foods brought from outside of Goroka. The gender divisions that exist in and around the marketplace today in Goroka are maintained through discourses of emotions and practice, specifically the notion of sem (Tok Pisin: shame, embarrassment). As part of a 12‐month ethnographic research project on gender relations in and around the Goroka market, I spoke with market vendors, amongst others living in and around Goroka, about why men do not market. I also interviewed some of the few men who do sell fresh produce in the market. Based on these men's explanations and those of others with whom I spoke, I suggest that these sellers exhibit aspects of masculinity that are caring for their families, putting shame second, and justifying this by their aspirations to transform their and their loved ones’ lives through education and business. These men demonstrate an emergent form of masculinity that both includes and contests aspects of hegemonic masculinity in the Highlands. Whilst selling fresh produce in the marketplace is deemed embarrassing and shameful for the majority of men, those who sell regardless justify doing so by pointing to the importance of providing for their families and loved ones.     

What to do with the “Tubby Hubby”?“Obesity,” the Crisis of Masculinity,and the Nuclear Family in Early Cold War Canada

Abstract:  Despite current insistence that obesity is a new problem, obesity and fat were discussed frequently in the medical and popular presses and by state officials during the early Cold War in Canada. Using Kristeva's (1982,  Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection ) concept of abjection, I argue that Cold War anxieties about fat, and specifically the obesity of white, middle-class men, had less to do with the growing girth of bodies than it did with a post-war crisis in masculinity related to the collapse of the public and private spheres. Through an analysis of fitness regimes and female-administered diets for men, I argue that anti-obesity rhetoric served to assuage dominant worries about degenerating masculinity by reasserting both the gendered division of labour and the white, middle-class, nuclear family as Canadian norms.     

Masculinity and the mic: confronting the uneven geography of hip-hop

This article explores the uneven gendered geographies of rap music. It argues that Black men's blocked access to culturally dominant masculinity, vis-à-vis access to public space – and the resulting containment of Black men within Black communities – has produced an overly compensatory form of masculinity, for which access to and control of the public domain within Black communities is essential for access to hegemonic masculinity. Rapidly declining economic opportunity has meant that young Black men thrown out of work put their talents, time, and energy into an emerging youth culture brewing in parks, on street corners, train stations, and viaducts in places such as the South Bronx. The early innovators of the hip-hop movement used this new art form to remake the public space of the abandoned, segregated, and spatially disempowered Black neighborhoods they lived in. It was in this context that the link between masculinity and rap music was established. I conclude by providing an example of how Black women have found ways to break the link between masculinity and the mic by creating spaces where they can confront and remake the uneven geography of hip-hop, restoring hip-hop's radical spatial potential.     

Looters,collectors and a passion for antiquities at the margins of Italian society

Unearthing old objects was for centuries a widespread activity in Italy. Artefacts were removed from the soil and re-incorporated into the social realm as votives, chits and treasure. Women and men knowledgeable about old things and old places were respected repositories of history. The twentieth century brought significant changes to this sphere of cultural activity: archaeology became a professionalized discipline, regulated by the state, and artefacts became scientific objects belonging to the Italian nation. Today, unauthorized excavators risk prosecution, fines and imprisonment. In this paper I ask: What is the effect of state power on the use and circulation of antiquities by unauthorized excavators and collectors? How do the men and women who inhabit the cultural margins distinguish themselves from each other? My analysis draws on ethnographic data and textual analysis of newspaper articles concerning tombaroli or ‘tomb robbers’. I focus on marginalized cultural production, a key dimension that is missing from most accounts of looters.     

‘It was entirely his fault’: constructing white masculinities and the Haga Man assaults in Umeå, Sweden 1998–2006

Several cases of single repeat offenders in urban space have raised public concern in Sweden during recent decades. Few studies have been conducted on the consequences of the ‘hostage situations’ that emerge when one individual offender causes fear and affects a large group of people in a specific place. The concern of this article is to examine consequences of the Haga Man phenomenon: the case of a serial rapist operating between 1998 and 2006 in Umeå, a medium-sized Swedish city. The article focuses on the construction of white masculinities among male respondents in Umeå during the time of the attacks. I examine how men positioned themselves in relation to the public image of the offender as a ‘normal Swede’ and how they related to women's increasing fear of violence in urban space. Three prominent constructions of masculinity emerged from the research data: the dangerous stranger, the suspect and the protector. These three constructions of masculinity were not clear-cut and did not ‘belong’ to specific men – several of the interviewees articulated various forms of masculinities but stressed them in different ways depending on, for instance, age and/or ethnicity/race. I conclude that men largely positioned themselves as protectors as a strategy to distance themselves from the perpetrator (the image of the ‘normal Swedish man’ performing the rapes) and to ensure that they would not be perceived as suspects. However, men largely perceived that women's increased fear of crime was ‘one man's fault’ and broader issues about gendered power relations in space were not raised.     

Politics squeezed through a police state: Policing and vinculación in post-1968 Mexico City

Contemporary political geographers accommodate everyday practice in accounts of state power but arguably tend to retain a bias towards sites easily identified with the state. This bias complements a frequent conflation of policing and the state in recent scholarship on the post-political. This article challenges these assumptions by showing how rituals of anti-stateness may themselves paradoxically give to the senses a partitioned world of state domination and non-state resistance that delimits political possibility. I specifically examine activist participation in such policing through analysis of student-left commemorations of 1968 in Mexico City. My analysis of such activism also reveals tension in processes that consolidate a partitioned state/non-state world. I show that, through vinculación, some activists establish unaccounted-for solidarities that exceed the categories through which state power has in the past been exercised, reconfiguring relations between people whose place vis-à-vis the state would otherwise be predictable. I therefore reveal ongoing interplay between processes of politics and policing, not a “post-political condition” that would demand, as politics, the negation of any social-spatial order.