Africa and the United States

Peter J. Schraeder. United States Foreign Policy toward Africa: Incrementalism, Crisis, and Change . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.     

Creativity gaps and gender gaps: women,men and place in the United States

This article situates Florida's (2002) work on creative regions in the United States in the context of a critical discussion of place and gender and investigates the gender–class structure of his most and least creative regions. It analyzes the distribution of creative class, working class and service class occupations by gender within those 21 regions as well as earnings, household income, poverty and educational attainment using data from the US Census 2000. Women and men are compared within and across the two categories of most and least creative regions. The major finding is that the gender gap in earnings within categories of regions is larger than the creativity gap, i.e. the earnings gap within genders across regions. As new technology industries have been layered over old industries, altering spatial divisions of labor, gendered labor remains integrated in largely traditional ways.     

The imperative of struggle: feminist and gender geographies in the United States

Abstract

The groundbreaking work of feminist and gender geographies has substantially advanced the nature of inquiry in the United States. In centering gendered ways of knowing, geographers have reframed disciplinary analyses of landscape, place, and space by troubling the normativities associated with lives, politics, and location. Though undoubtedly thriving, the visibility and impact of feminist and gender geographies have been confronted by history and changing political contexts. This essay extracts challenges to conceptualizing and doing feminist and gender geographies in the United States. By linking national freedom struggles to the current political climate and by reviewing the landscape of U.S. higher education, the essay asserts that scholars engaged with feminist and gender geographies can find utility in reflection, and by doing so, can resist contemporary disciplinary challenges to theory and practice.     

Resisting mothers,making gender: teenage girls in the United States and the articulation of femininity

Much of the feminist literature on teenage girls in the west has tended to polarize around the issues of girls' gendered agency and victimization. In contrast, this article explores the ambiguous relationship between gender resistance and compliance. I argue that while girls clearly articulate their own agency, they do so through a reliance on gendered and heterosexual norms, identities, and categories. The article draws on examples from my research with girls in South Carolina, USA, in particular girls' narratives about their mothers. I suggest that girls situate their gendered practices and evaluate femininity in part via evaluations of their mothers' gender, sexual and nurturing practices. Mothers often stand in as representatives of normative and traditional femininity for the girls; yet girls do not realize that they reproduce, rather than resist, aspects of femininity, even as they criticize generational differences and their mothers' versions of feminine and gendered behaviors.     

Perpetuating neo-colonialism through population control: South Africa and the United States

Third world women in the global economy are valuable as a cheap source of labor and as producers of additional cheap labor sources (children). This discussion focuses on the interrelationships between race, class, and gender bias in international population programs and the unequal power relationship between colonizers and the colonized. For example, USAID directs over 33% of its family planning (FP) service delivery funding and 50% of policy funds to Africa, and African women and women of color in general are blamed for their own poverty and underdevelopment. Madi Gray is cited as suggesting that African FP is the cure for "illegitimacy, misery in the ghettos, and rising crime." The paternalistic and racist population policies of the US are traced to a 1905 speech of President Theodore Roosevelt, who expressed concern about the Yankee stock being overwhelmed by immigrants, non-Whites, and the poor. In 1933, the US Birth Control Federation targeted Black women. Birth control and eugenic practices were integrated before the Second World War and shared the goal of reducing the immigrant and Black populations. The current South African equivalent to this situation is the White power rhetoric of "Black peril" which is said to threaten White power, safety, and profits. Structural changes in both the US and South Africa are creating large surplus labor pools comprised largely of Black Africans. When labor reserves are too large, poverty and underemployment are identified as the result of overpopulation. Unhealthy and unproved birth control technologies have been distributed to Africans while health care, economic resources, and social security have been neglected. Population control is used for selective population reduction.     

Structural boundaries that effect the representation of gender and disability in works of fiction from the United States and United Kingdom

Abstract

Discussions of intellectual disability are found in medical journals, published biographies, and disability research. However, outside the realm of medicine or personal reminiscence intellectual disability struggles for spaces of social, historical, cultural and imaginative representation. This article addresses these struggles for space and specifically focuses on the imagined space of narrative fiction. Being imagined spaces they should easily be able to accommodate people with disability, and yet, very few characters with intellectual disability are represented or more importantly have agency in narrative fiction. Drawing on work from feminist geographies and literary geographies this article addresses the limiting narrative structures that have been used against fictional characters who have a disability and ways authors may move beyond these limitations. Reconciling feminist geographies and literary geographies allows new critical spatial knowledge around disability to emerge. It is not enough to write characters with disabilities into narrative fiction if the structures surrounding them remain limiting and prejudiced. This article discusses the three main limiting structures in narrative fiction: character representation, narrative voice and genre. Looking at narrative fiction through feminist and literary geographies reveals how these limiting structures function as power hierarchies, and importantly, shows how these imposed structures can be subverted and changed.     

Malthusianism,socialism and feminism in the United States

This article examines and compares Adam Ferguson's and Guillaume-Thomas Raynal's analyses of modern commercial states by reconstructing their accounts of the history and politics of the Dutch Republic. For both writers, the Dutch case stood as a clear instance of the political dangers implicit in a particular type of commercial polity, and both sought to apply its lessons to an understanding of the future of their own states. Although Ferguson's and Raynal's arguments about the decline of the Dutch trading state overlapped, their analyses reflected different evaluations of the relationship between modern states and modern economic institutions (trading companies and public debts). The broader purpose of the article is to shed light on the distinctive theories of commerce and models of European development that informed the major works of Enlightenment historiography and political thought produced by Ferguson and Raynal in the 1760s and 1770s.