(Re)Producing and challenging gender in and through urban space: women bicyclists’ experiences in Chicago

This research, which uses an intersectional feminist methodological approach, explores the relationships and intersections among women, public urban space, and bicycling, and the gendered processes through which the use of space is claimed, negotiated, and constrained. It builds on the existing scholarship on the gendered nature of public space, and uniquely uses bicycling as the site of inquiry. Drawing primarily from interviews with women cyclists in Chicago, this article explores how gender and other social identities are constructed, challenged, and constituted through an interaction with public space, urban processes and structures, and societal expectations and attitudes. It brings to the forefront and centers these narratives and empirically contextualizes them by linking the scholarship on the gendered (and raced, classed, and sexualized) nature of public space with the scholarship on women’s participation rates and barriers to bicycling. This research examines, through the everyday lived experiences of bicyclists and their multiple subject positions and privileges, how the gendered nature of public space affects the participation and experiences of women cyclists; how public space is negotiated and constrained; and how gender can be both (re)produced and challenged in and through urban space via women bicyclists’ actions. In particular, the research findings explore how women bicyclists must demand and negotiate public space; how their movement and activities are constrained in public space; how gender roles and social reproduction issues intersect with bicycling; and how social, quasi-advocacy group bicycle rides are used as a strategy, with mixed results, to address barriers to women bicyclists’ mobility.     

Negotiating "Streets for All" in Urban Transport Planning: The Case for Pedestrians, Cyclists and Street Vendors in Nairobi, Kenya

Abstract:  This paper uses the concept of "streets for all" as the analytical basis to critique the neglect of pedestrians, cyclists and street vendors in transport policy and practice in the city of Nairobi. The paper shows that transport planning in Nairobi has not adequately taken care of informal economy and non-motorized transport such as walking and cycling. This has resulted in competing use of pavements and roads, exposing pedestrians, cyclists and street vendors to insecurity and harassment. The paper calls for inclusive transport planning for multiple street activities, which requires implementing a "streets for all" policy. Such a policy needs to be critically pursued at the level of dealing with the institutional and structural bias in urban transport planning towards motorized traffic and the overall urban development that does not adequately consider the spatio-temporal activity pattern and the life of pedestrians, cyclists and vendors on the streets.     

Elemental mobilities: atmospheres,matter and cycling amid the weather-world

Abstract

Everyday experiences of movement have become a central concern for social and cultural geography in recent years. Work here has begun to unpack the specific meanings, imaginaries and experiences that come to be bound up with mobile bodies and their practices. However, it has been suggested that more could be done to examine the material, elementary, molecular and physical aspects of movement which are significant to the experience of being on the move. Therefore, this paper explores the experience of cycling amid such turbulent ‘elemental’ materialities. Such ‘matters’ matter to cycling in the way that they (re)make both mobile environments and mobile subjectivities. Cyclists come to have quite immediate and intimate relationships with the material and ‘elementary’ aspects of the environments they move through given their relatively unmediated encounters with them. This paper draws on video-interview based research with 24 commuter cyclists in Plymouth, UK to consider cyclists’ experience of atmospheric conditions in terms of air’s force and air quality. From this, the paper reflects on how the experience of such ‘elemental’ matters might be significant to future research on and planning for cycling.     

Cycle camping in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland

ABSTRACT

One of the most important aspects of cycling’s impact on Ireland in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods is that it made recreational trips to the countryside easier for the urban middle class and better-off workers who could afford to buy bicycles. As this article shows, many Irish and other cyclists in this period combined their love of cycling and the countryside with camping trips. Cycle camping appealed to enthusiasts for a number of reasons, including its relative cheapness, the welcome temporary release that it brought from conventional urban modes of living, and the perceived mental and physical health benefits that it brought. A close examination of the activities and mindset of cycle campers in Ireland reveals that they had much in common with their contemporaries, the “muscular Christian” enthusiasts for sports.     

Sharing public space across difference: attunement and the contested burdens of choreographing encounter

This paper concerns how claims to public space are negotiated between differently embodied subjects, and how forms of bodily articulation shape capacities for sharing space. Drawing on a study of outdoor access practices, entailing mobile video ethnographies with walkers and cyclists, it explores the corporeal mechanisms through which the entitlements of differently mobile subjects are asserted, resisted, circumscribed or accepted in the time-spaces of bodily encounter. How the signalling of ‘responsible’ and ‘irresponsible’ conduct influences how bodies are allowed to move in relation to other bodies is the focus. Mobilisations of speed, affective and sensory attunement, and techniques of bodily articulation, were found to be a key in the disciplining of cycling and walking bodies. This paper highlights the central role of attunement to, and concession of, hybrid subjectivity in the choreography of encounters, and, moreover, how related burdens of orchestrating coexistence are shared and struggled over amongst different publics. It demonstrates that whilst greater attunement can enable differently mobile subjects to develop a reciprocal choreography, expectations of such attunement can also undermine the ability to share space if not met. This paper thus raises the dilemma of when to accept or extend the limits of attunement in facilitating coexistence in public space.     

Spaces of Governance: Gender and public sector restructuring in Canada

While the literature on economic restructuring tends to understand neoliberalism as a uniform governance ideology or economic-political reality, we suggest that it is more useful to understand neoliberalism as a loosely knit assemblage of programmatic efforts that consist of various political rationalities and practices of rule that aim to manage social conduct. The paper focuses on the various ways that these efforts are connected to complex state rescaling processes in Canada. Specifically, the first part of the paper examines the restructuring of nation-state responsibilities in social service and security provisions. It illustrates the shift toward a new citizenship regime that renders women as active agents who are responsible for solving problems in an individualized manner. The second part of the paper exemplifies how neoliberal programmatic efforts create new spaces of governance, particularly those of flexibility through non-standard work. The massive rescaling of the public sector, the decreasing demand for women's ‘traditional’ occupations, and the increasing prevalence of women in non-standard work arrangements constitute women as political-economic subjects in new ways. We analyze these processes using data drawn from in-depth interviews with personnel in the Canadian Federal Public Service. We outline some of the implications these initiatives have had on public service programmes and various public sector groups. Additionally, we provide a selection of individual accounts of public sector restructuring and gendered work by professionals and contract workers employed in the public service, and offer empirical illustrations of the contentions surrounding neoliberal restructuring initiatives.     

Constructing Masculinity and Women's Fear in Public Space in Irvine,California

Fear in public spaces negatively impacts women's lives. Even when danger is low, the idea of women as endangered in public space endures—due, in part, to its centrality in the construction of gender identity for men and women. In this article, the author examines the construction of contemporary, masculine gender identities and men's perceptions of women as fearful and endangered in public space. Through interviews with 82 male students in Irvine, California, USA, the author examines how men's construction of masculine identities builds upon perceptions of women as fearful and endangered in Irvine public spaces. Though they regard Irvine as safe, men see women as vulnerable there. The author investigates this apparent inconsistency in light of men's performances of two masculine identities—the youthful 'badass' and the chivalrous man—which depend for their construction on opposition with women as fearful. Recommendations include suggestions for continued research on the spatial construction of masculine identities.     

Private practices in public spaces: research into spatial cues supporting breastfeeding in the Nijmegen-Arnhem region of the Netherlands

What features of the physical environment may support women to breastfeed in the public space? Based on in-depth interviews with eight women who were breastfeeding during the research period, this article explores this question. Three factors were examined as contributing to the comfort of nursing women in public space: peer support, a sense of protection, and cultural signifiers. Using five scales of physical attributes, tested through a visual research tool, a range of public spaces were examined to give insight into the features that contribute to women’s ability and willingness to nurse in them. The results show that a sense of place attachment does not affect women’s willingness to breastfeed; that physical comfort is desired, but can be waived aside; that physical shelter is important; that peers (in the form of other parents) or their expected presence, form a strong source of support; and that perceived formality, or work-related context, is the strongest deterrent reported to breastfeeding. I conclude that using private sphere attributes in public spaces could make them more accessible to the practice of breastfeeding.     

Engaging territorio cuerpo-tierra through body and community mapping: a methodology for making communities safer

We propose a new way of collectively creating data about gender violence through active participation and mapping women’s bodies and communities. We see this process of data creation, self-awareness and action as inherently linked to the native concept territorio cuerpo-tierra, the landscape of bodies-lands. The concept erases Western notions separating bodies and land and helps to decenter the public–private divide, which is an important obstacle to eliminating violence against women. Drawing on data from our work with Mexican women in the, U.S. and Mexico, we illuminate the continuity of women’s individual bodily experience of violence and collective spatial knowledge of community safety. We conclude that the process and outcomes of body and community mapping linking bodies and land, afford planners the prospect of engaging as partners and co-actants with community members in the goal of making places safe for women.     

Gender Segregation,Effacement, and Suppression: Trends in the Status of Women in Israel

The aim of this article is to analyze the phenomenon of the exclusion of women from the public sphere in Israel. The article describes some of the causes of this phenomenon, its impact on Israeli society, and the difficulty in confronting it. Israeli women have made impressive gains on many fronts, but the exclusion of women from the public sphere as a result of the influence of the growing Ultra‐Orthodox minority, which imposes its norms on the general public, raises serious concerns. The exclusion of women manifests itself in several forms: gender segregation in public spaces, the effacement of women's images from the public sphere, and the suppression of women's voice. The infiltration of Orthodox Jewish fundamentalism into Israeli society may cause the regression of advancements previously made in women's rights in Israel. The article points to the limitations of the treatment of this phenomenon within a theory of multiculturalism, and suggests an alternative framework of discourse, which relies on concepts that are drawn from the literature on environmental ethics, public rights, and public ownership of space and resources.     

The gender dimension of business elites: Italian women directors since 1934

Abstract

Gender is an important, albeit understudied, dimension in the analysis of business elites. In this paper we analyze the importance of women in the board of directors of listed Italian companies since 1934. We show that women are less represented in boards in Italy than in other comparable OECD countries, but also that listed companies are less open to women than other centres of powers, such as the public administration and liberal professions. In addition, in a country where board interlocking is a key device to ensure separation between ownership and control, very few women hold multiple directorships. We then present the results of a prosopographical study on women directors in seven benchmark years: 1962, 1970, 1978, 1986, 1994, 2002, and 2007. We conclude with a discussion of various policy options to enhance gender diversification on the boards of Italian listed companies.     

Rooms of Their Own: Public toilets and gendered citizens in a New Zealand city, 1860‐1940

Differences in the provision of public toilets for men and women point to the gendering of citizens. In the later nineteenth century, provision of public toilets in the city of Dunedin centered on the management of male bodies as the meaning of 'public decency' was transformed, while women were catered for as consumers. By the beginning of the twentieth century, when provision for women became a public issue, it was debated in terms of women's special character as citizens. The bodily and spatial characteristics of public and private were renegotiated around this issue: as women became more public, toilets became more private. This article draws on debates about the sexed and gendered body in public space, maternal citizenship, the civilising and modernising of landscapes and bodies, and shifting conceptions of privacy and public.     

Establishing Ground: Representing gender and race in a mixed housing development

In this paper we explore the sociospatial transformation of the Columbia Point public housing project in Dorchester, Boston to Harbor Point, a mixed-income, multiethnic community. We examine gender, race, class and cultural representations of public housing generally, and of Columbia Point specifically, in order to understand the origin and significance of these representations for the physical and social designs of the new community. African-American women residents were and continue to be largely responsible for the transformation of the public housing project. We suggest how the combined representations of African-American women, the welfare system, single motherhood and public housing underlie media misperceptions of what the new Harbor Point is .     

Post-secular geographies and the problem of pluralism: Religion and everyday life in Istanbul,Turkey

The concept of post-secularism has come to signify a renewed attention to the role of religion within secular, democratic public spheres. Central to the project of post-secularism is the integration of religious ways of being within a public arena shared by others who may practice different faiths, practice the same faith differently, or be non-religious in outlook. As a secular state within which Sunni Islam has played an increasingly public role, Turkey is a prime site for studying new configurations of religion, politics, and public life. Our 2013 research with devout Sunni Muslim women in Istanbul demonstrates how the big questions of post-secularism and the problem of pluralism are posed and navigated within the quotidian geographies of homes, neighborhoods, and city spaces. Women grapple with the demands of a pluralistic public sphere on their own terms and in ways that traverse and call into question the distinction between public and private spaces. While mutual respect mediates relations with diverse others, women often find themselves up against the limits of respect, both in their intimate relations with Alevi friends and neighbors, and in the anonymous spaces of the city where they sometimes find themselves subject to secular hostility. The gendered moral order of public space that positions devout headscarf-wearing women in a particular way within diverse city spaces where others may be consuming alcohol or wearing revealing clothing further complicates the problem of pluralism in the city. We conclude that one does not perhaps arrive at post-secularism so much as struggle with its demands.     

Feeling at home in public: diasporic Moroccan women negotiating leisure in Morocco and the Netherlands

Muslim women are often cited as subject to restriction in their mobility through public space, especially in European contexts, in comparison with non-Muslim community members. Yet any woman might face restriction in her access to leisure outside the home through geographies of risk and fear, as well as geographies of care and responsibility. In this article, we describe the ways in which Moroccan Muslim women resident in Europe negotiate access to leisure outside the home, in both Europe and Morocco, demonstrating that they practice mobilities framed by safety, risk and responsibility combined with individual volition to be participants in public spaces. Using examples from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, we discuss a notion of ‘viscosity’ as safe public space that acts as an extension of the home, where women feel comfortable enacting their daily lives and engaging in leisure practices. By comparing data from the Netherlands and Morocco, we highlight the role of Muslim-dominant and Christian-dominant public spheres in these negotiations of leisure. The ways women inhabit such spaces reflect individual concerns about personal safety, as well as maintaining respectful relations with family and being protected from unknown dangers, in ways that reflect not only religious beliefs but also geographies of risk related to other factors. Inhabiting such spaces implicates how they become part of the community at large, as visibly present participants, by negotiating many factors beyond religious beliefs as part of their access to public leisure spaces.     

Lesbian collaborative web mapping: disrupting heteronormativity in Portugal

Public spaces are constructed around hidden, subtle, non-verbalized and implicit codes of behaviour. These hidden and implicit codes of behaviour are pervasive heteronormative expressions that inscribe socio-spatial landscapes. As a consequence, same-sex public displays of affection are modified, or entirely absent. In the Portuguese sociocultural context public displays of heterosexual and familial affection are common, which prompted us to research how lesbians and bisexual women negotiate same-sex displays of affection in public spaces. The article begins by examining: the co-production of space, gender and sexualities; the pervasive invisibility of lesbian sexualities in public spaces; and the potentialities of participatory geospatial web that connects geographic location to photographs, text and other media shared online. The second half of the article presents the research project ‘Creating Landscapes’. It is argued that a collaboratively created web map by lesbians with positive public space experiences may promote agency and empowerment for lesbian and bisexual women. The article concludes by arguing that creating and sharing collaborative web maps of positive experiences of same-sex public displays of affection can disrupt heteronormativity and create public spaces that are empowering for lesbians and bisexual women.     

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.     

Women's Public Lives: Navigating the East India Company,Parliament and Courts in Early Modern England

This article traces the strategies that women deployed, and the resources upon which they drew, in order to challenge the East India Company (EIC) and ultimately lay claim to property that they believed was rightfully theirs. It focuses on three women, Elizabeth Dale, Rebecka Duteil and Mary Goodal, who navigated the EIC, parliament and the courts in seventeenth-century London to try to secure their inheritance from husbands and siblings. It offers a fresh perspective on early modern women's public lives by focusing on a wide array of agentic strategies that women employed in their encounters with various institutions. Using a range of sources, including company records, petitions, court depositions and wills, it argues that exploring women's interactions with the EIC, especially in their role as adversaries, enriches understandings of women's agency in early modern England. This article suggests that such a lens can further nuance how we understand the inherent tensions of early modern women's public lives: as inflected by global as well as local contexts and shaped by conflict as well as collaboration.     

Stepping into the Public World： Cases of Guixiu Philanthropic Activities in Late Qing China

This article explores the of certain elite women during late little-known public philanthropic activities Qing China. By examining contemporary newspapers, it traces the new development of women＇s philanthropic engagement and further analyzes two cases, one on disaster relief and the other on women＇s education, to illustrate the issues, controversies and achievements that went along with women＇s philanthropy. It demonstrates how philanthropy, a traditionally-sanctioned field for women＇s activism, legitimatized women to move out of domestic seclusion and reposition themselves in the public sphere in a crucial transitional era when for ＂good women＂ to appear in public was something hotly debated, and how through philanthropic opportunities some were able to engage with political affairs. The broad social impact of their initiatives suggests the continued importance of traditional elite women during China＇s transition to the modern era; it challenges some of our previous notions, which often unthinkingly accepted the verdict of ＂New Women＂ that those who did not embrace their path to modernity were parasitic, unproductive, and backward. By looking carefully at philanthropy, the article reveals fascinating issues and rich details of women＇s public activities that previous historical narratives have often overlooked. It helps to understand how reconfigured traditions became essential components of modernity in the development of modern Chinese gender roles. It also adds a gender perspective to the burgeoning historiography on Chinese philanthropy.     

Pākehā Women and Māori Protocol: The Politics of Criticising Other Cultures

Feminists have fiercely debated whether it is wrong for outsiders to criticise gendered customs and practices identified with cultural minorities. This article explores the ethics of criticising other cultures by analysing the reaction to public criticism of Māori ceremonial protocol by two Pākehā women. It argues that the response to outsiders' criticism does not depend in a simple and direct way on whether insiders have resisted the criticised practice. There is a history of Māori women formulating critiques of the gender roles in Māori ceremonies, but the public response from Māori women to the Pākehā women's criticism was overwhelmingly negative. The outsiders' criticism was understood as an attack on the incorporation of Māori cultural expression into the public sector, rather than as a gesture of support or solidarity.