‘Mɔn’ (to marry/to cook): negotiating becoming a wife and woman in the kitchens of a northern Ghanaian Konkomba community

In this article, I consider the kitchen as domestic space that is at once gendered and gendering in its construction and use by women as they negotiate their social position across the life course. Deeply rooted patriarchal values structure Konkomba society in northern Ghana, and a woman's role is to be a wife, to prepare food in support of her husband's family and community. Although the normative definition of woman's role in society stems from a clear-cut division of labor between women and men, a woman must negotiate her social position and ability to fulfill these labor obligations; she becomes a woman and wife by working to gain access to and control over resources and labor. I explore the shifting dynamics of women's work and social position across the life course, emphasizing the transition from young woman to woman-as-wife-as-cook in her husband's community. These negotiations take place in the kitchen – a fiercely feminine space in which a woman becomes a wife when she earns the right to place hearth stones and prepare a ceremonial ‘first meal’ for her husband and his community.     

Public vices,private remedies in nineteenth-century Italy: Giulia Falletti di Barolo Colbert and Le Forzate

In nineteenth-century Italy notions of femininity and, no less, masculinity influenced the ways in which crime was viewed. The result was that criminality was perceived, judged and explained differently according to the sex of the offender. At every stage in the penal process, cultural understandings of what women were like, and how they ought to behave, operated to define the appropriate response to their misconduct and to structure their punishment. These 'gendered' aspects of criminal justice have influenced the practices of prosecution and sentencing, and, most clearly of all, the special regimes and attitudes adopted in women's prisons: throughout the century male prison regimes emphasized discipline and deterrence, while female prisons developed individualized programmes of 'moral regeneration'. This article deals with the history of the first prison destined exclusively for women - which was opened in Turin in 1821 - with the circumstances which brought about its creation as well as with its organizational structure and its aims. Its promoter - both in money and in spirit - was a woman, named Giulia Falletti di Barolo Colbert. Giving special consideration to the ideals of its foundress, this article examines how nineteenth-century perceptions of the female criminal differentiated the nature and purpose of penal servitude for women.     

Bridewealth a Pardon: New Relationships and Restoration of Good Daughters

Bridewealth is recognized as vital in the reproduction and reconfiguration of Pacific environments and women play an integral role in this process. In contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG), bridewealth is reconfigured by kin to acknowledge the considered actions of women as they enter into relationships with men. This paper will explore how women's choices impact and influence their experience of these exchanges and determine the role of women and their kin as they undertake these practices. Here I aim to understand how the social relatedness that frames bridewealth exchanges enables the practices of bridewealth to be used as a tool for recognition of women's choices, autonomy and personhood. Although women enter into relationships without initial kin approval, bridewealth practices converge ultimately with a women's autonomous choice of husband. Wardlow suggests (2006:86) 'bridewealth confers value and dignity on female gender', and going beyond her observation, I show that bridewealth has been useful in achieving this in regard to managing and supporting social, kin and affinal relationships. This article will explore two cases, to identify what each tells us about women's ability to act in ways that are beneficial to them and important to kin. I show how moral evaluations frame (pasin) and recognize (luksave) kin and social relationships that ultimately constitute their personhood.     

Regendering space and reconstructing identity: Bedouin women's translocal mobility into Israeli-Jewish institutions of higher education

This article offers a geographic perspective on the mutually constitutive relations between institutions of higher education and Bedouin women's gendered spaces, identities and roles. Situated beyond Bedouin women's permitted space and embedded in Israeli-Jewish space, institutions of higher education are sites of displacement that present Bedouin women students with new normative structures, social interactions and opportunities for academic learning. As such, they become a discursive arena for the articulation and reconstruction of their previously held conceptions and identities. Often the journey to institutions of higher education signifies for Bedouin women the first opportunity to venture out of their community. Traveling to the university as students, returning home as educated women and embarking on professional careers outside tribal neighborhoods and villages involves moving across and beyond different locales. Such translocal mobility necessitates constant negotiation between seemingly contradictory cultural constructs and the development of varied spatial bridging strategies. The article seeks to contribute to Bedouin gender studies by going beyond the functional role of higher education institutions as well as the gendered hierarchies of women's mobility, placing emphasis, instead, on the effects of socio-spatial contextuality that shapes Bedouin women's experiences.     

Protagonists and politics in the Italian women's movement: a reflection on the work of Annarita Buttafuoco

This article retraces Annarita Buttafuoco's work as a historian of the women's political movement in Italy through a brief survey of her essays and books. These covered more than two centuries of history, ranging from the echoes of the French Revolution in Italy and the constitution of the Jacobin Republics to the struggles for female suffrage and emancipation in the liberal era down to the period after the Second World War and the founding of the Italian Republic. Emphasizing the originality of both the sources and the methodological approaches she used, the article offers a critical appreciation of Annarita Buttafuoco's research and her role in organizing and shaping collective research projects. It is focused on three specific issues: the history of women as conscious historical subjects, the history of women's political movements not only in their social and political contexts but also in relation to institutional networks and the practices of citizenship.     

Gender Equality in National Politics: The Views of Australian Male Politicians

Studies of gender and politics have typically been studies of women and politics. In contrast, this paper places men at the centre of its inquiry by drawing on interviews with 15 current federal male politicians. Of concern is exploring the ways in which men conceptualise the question of gender equity in the Australian parliament. Three frameworks are identified in the men's narratives. These are that the parliament is a masculinised space but that this is unavoidable; that the parliament is now feminised and women are advantaged; and that the parliament is gender neutral and gender is irrelevant. It is argued that collectively these framing devices operate to mask the many constraints which exist to marginalise women from political participation and undermine attempts to address women's political disadvantage as political participants. The paper concludes by highlighting the significance of the paper beyond the Australian context and calling for further research which names and critiques political men and their discourses on gender and parliamentary practices and processes.     

Taking Stands: A feminist perspective on 'other' women's activism in forestry communities of northern Vancouver Island

The author examines alternative and possibly contradictory positions associated with 'other' women's political activism in forestry and land use debates. The article traces research on women's activism, noting that the main focus has been placed on community management and social mothering as sources of motivation, political perspective and activity. The author suggests that these explanations have been imbued with a predetermination of appropriate action (progressiveness) that effectively renders as radical the activism by some women while ignoring the activism by others. This separation and privileging has arisen, in part, because of a theoretical preoccupation by feminist researchers with illustrating women's marginality and an empirical focus on public actions. When feminist perspectives have been applied to women's participation in environmental debates, there has been a narrowing of visibility of women's motivations, perspectives, and actions. It is argued that feminist conceptions need to go beyond maternal/community explanations and advocate that activism be considered in terms of its embeddedness in local social and spatial contexts. The author suggests that embeddedness overcomes the implicit reverse hierarchy of marginalisation discourses and includes both private and public spaces and actions in conceptions of women's activism. Turning to northern Vancouver Island, the author illustrates how embeddedness helps to render visible and intelligible, the multiplicity, consistencies and contradictions in women's positions and activities in support of conventional forestry. For these reasons, the author believes that embeddedness is useful as a means to generate dialogue across current divisions among women, forms of activism, and notions of appropriate relations with non-human nature.     

(Ad)dressing belonging in a contested space: Embodied spatial practices of Palestinian and Israeli women in Jerusalem

The article explores women's clothing choices from a feminist geopolitical lens to comprehend mobility practices and power-relations across the contested city of Jerusalem. Building on 80 interviews with Palestinian and Israeli women, we explore the different ways in which women's clothing choices can be interpreted as a spatial practice that affects urban im/mobilities. First, we demonstrate the different ways through which cultural and religious norms and representations of the body are perceived as both excluding and restricting women from using certain areas in the city. Second, we suggest that clothing practices may enable movement and mobility that potentially undermine social-cultural norms. Thus, women's bodies and clothing can be a political site of difference and resistance that somewhat underscores the insurmountability of boundaries in the contested spaces of Jerusalem.     

The care of women's health and beauty: an experience shared by medieval Jewish and Christian women

In this article I intend to elucidate the extent to which medieval western Jewish and Christian women shared customs, knowledge and practices regarding health care, a sphere which has been historically considered as part of women's daily domestic tasks. My study aims to identify female agency in medical care, as well as women's interaction across religious lines, by analysing elusive sources, such as medical literature on women's health care, and by collating the information they provide with data obtained from other textual and visual records. By searching specific evidence of the dialogues that must have occurred between Christian and Jewish women in transmitting their knowledge and experiences, I put forward the idea (developed from earlier work by Montserrat Cabré i Pairet) that medical texts with no clear attribution can be used as sources to reconstruct women's authoritative knowledge.     

The care of women's health and beauty: an experience shared by medieval Jewish and Christian women

In this article I intend to elucidate the extent to which medieval western Jewish and Christian women shared customs, knowledge and practices regarding health care, a sphere which has been historically considered as part of women's daily domestic tasks. My study aims to identify female agency in medical care, as well as women's interaction across religious lines, by analysing elusive sources, such as medical literature on women's health care, and by collating the information they provide with data obtained from other textual and visual records. By searching specific evidence of the dialogues that must have occurred between Christian and Jewish women in transmitting their knowledge and experiences, I put forward the idea (developed from earlier work by Montserrat Cabré i Pairet) that medical texts with no clear attribution can be used as sources to reconstruct women's authoritative knowledge.     

‘Samudayik Shakti’: Working-class feminism and social organisation in Subhash Camp,New Delhi

This article illustrates the intersections between architecture and agency in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi, by ‘situating activism in place’. It highlights the significance of place in social action by examining the architecture of everyday places—the house, the street and the square—as the sites of both individual transformations and collective consciousness. Through observations of the activities of and interviews with members of Samudayik Shakti, a women's organisation and a men's panchayat, this article highlights a number of related processes in Subhash Camp: how different women experienced different places through everyday spatial practices; how the spatial practices in these places were shaped by different social structures at different scales, from the family to the state; how the architecture of these places was significant both as sites of control and of emancipation of women's bodies; and how this dynamic contributed to the making of social action in Subhash Camp.     

Ethnographic Understandings of Gender and Economic Transition in Siberia: Implications for Planners and Policy Makers

Economic transition has been defined by neo-liberal restructuring policies and understandings. Using ethnographic data from Omsk, Russia, I examine structural adjustment policy implementation in the context of socially constructed gender norms. These policies have complicated implications for women and men's economic survival. The ethnographic understandings gained from interviews with women provide vital information that would improve planning processes in Omsk. For example, using an economic gardening approach to support women's small business development and workforce development targeting survivors of violence would advance women's economic self-sufficiency. I suggest that if planners use ethnographic understandings they will be able to more effectively respond to planning challenges such as poverty, education and health care issues.     

The Hudson River School of Incarceration: Sing Sing Prison in Antebellum New York

New York's Sing Sing Prison's first two decades coincided with the emergence of the Hudson River School of Painting. The differences between the two were dramatic: the Hudson River School emphasized an idealized “natural magnificence” whereas the prison extracted silent, profitable labor through routine beatings. Tourists and other visitors to the prison struggled to reconcile their expectations of the Hudson River with what they witnessed in the prison on its banks. Prison practices and the Hudson River School unexpectedly converged between 1844 and 1848, when phrenology simultaneously influenced the Hudson River School and prison reformers. Although its influence on the administration of the prison was short lived, the Hudson River School of Incarceration would have a lasting impact in the shift from religion to science in the administration of prisons.     

Women and Peace Building: Local Perspectives on Opportunities and Barriers

The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 has made strong provisions to include women in peace‐building interventions and actions. This is, however, rarely observed in practice beyond local‐level activities. This article discusses new qualitative evidence on the opportunities and barriers to women's participation in peace‐building processes, based on a comparative analysis of case studies conducted in Afghanistan, Liberia, Nepal and Sierra Leone. The findings show that women's engagement in peace‐building activities, beyond their immediate social relations, is restricted by institutional, economic, cultural and social obstacles. These barriers prevent the realization of gender equality objectives in peace‐building initiatives. Moreover, local understandings of peace typically place family relations at the centre of how women engage with peace‐building processes, and how other community members perceive women's roles in peace building.     

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.     

Mapping women in Tehran's public spaces: a geo-visualization perspective

Functioning public spaces, as ‘public’ political, social, and cultural arenas of citizen discourse, affect not only the citizen's quality of life, but are also indispensable infrastructure in democratic societies. This article offers a nuanced understanding of Iranian women's usage, feelings, and preferences in public spaces in present-day Tehran by not simply importing Western theories that sustain distinctions between traditional and modern women, but instead by hearing women's stories. This article raises concerns related to the gender identities, the politics of space, and design of these places. Meidan-e-Tajrish, Sabz-e-Meidan, and Marvi Meidancheh in Tehran accommodate an ethnographic visualization of gendering space. The process by which Iranian women attach symbolic meanings to those public spaces offers insight into the mutual construction of gender identities and space politics. The contrasting urban locations, different design styles, and distinct social activities provide an excellent comparison between the selected public spaces. Findings suggest caution in using gender as an essential category in feminist geography research to better represent the diversity of experiences in public spaces. Binary categorization of modern versus traditional, secular versus religious, public versus private, and male versus female in urban studies should be carefully validated as Iranian women's lived experiences challenge the homogenizing Western theories, particularly the predominant critics of modern public spaces in North America. The research process also highlights the benefits of geo-visualization in understanding the complex interaction between gender identities and the built environment.     

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.     

Working the Yucatán in the neoliberal landscape: household management,consumption and the lives of intellectual elite women

This article examines the lives of academic women in Mérida, the state capital of the Yucatán in southern Mexico. In particular, I consider the relationship between work – including household management – and consumer practices in light of Mérida's changing socioeconomic climate. I address how women's lives have been impacted by the neoliberal restructuring of Mexico's political economy and what these changes mean to their experience of university life, household management styles and consumption practices. I point out how labor and consumption are deeply interrelated cultural practices, which have acquired new meanings in the neoliberal landscape. Accordingly, consumption practices must be understood in connection with women's social and professional identities.     

Dominion of the Spirit over the Flesh: Religion,Gender and Sexual Morality in the German Women's Movement before World War I

This article examines the place of religious values in the thinking of leading figures in the mainstream German women's movement in the period before World War I. Focusing on the debate of sexual morality and abortion within the German League of Women's Associations, it argues that the position taken by these women is best understood as a product of their religious commitments, rather than their political ideas. The article seeks to place these women in the historical context of a particular liberal, Protestant, social and intellectual milieu that flourished in the period before 1914.