(Post)Colonial [1] Encounters: gendered racialisations in Australian courtrooms [2]

This article identifies how the Australian legal system has generated knowledge about ‘traditional’ gender relations in Aboriginal Australia. Using a sample of artefact cases from the Australian judicial system, constructions of Aboriginal gender relations are mapped. By tracing knowledge production in these cases, it demonstrates how the non-Aboriginal Australian legal system has fabricated its own versions of ‘Aboriginal Customary Laws’, or Aboriginal ‘traditions’ about violence committed by Aboriginal men, against Aboriginal women. (Post)colonial understandings about the Aboriginal ‘other’ have occupied spaces in legal understandings and then been enforced in law. The Australian judicial system itself is therefore guilty of perpetuating and privileging the ‘colonial’ in these encounters.     

Struggling with ‘this gender relations thing’ in the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership Program

Gender equality and women's empowerment has become a cornerstone for successful development. Religious teachings and practices, like ‘traditional culture’, are often viewed as contributing to gender inequality and oppression. The increased engagement by donor agencies with religious organisations prompts questions about how religion, gender and development intersect in particular places, and the implications this intersection has for the transnational ‘gender agenda’ of development agencies. This article focuses on the dialogue about gender in the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership Program. Analysing the struggles taking place, it argues that the processes that shaped local Christianities are also at work in the churches' translations of the ‘gender agenda’. These churches are gradually emerging as agents for gender justice as they develop their own approaches to gender work that support the churches' mission to ‘live the Gospel’ in their practice of holistic integral human development. However, to progress further, in recognising the necessity for men to lead the struggle for gender justice, the dialogue must focus on the personal transformation of men in relation to their understanding of masculinities and gendered power dynamics. From this foundation, structural and political change can be advanced.     

Myths To Live By? Female Solidarity and Female Autonomy Reconsidered

Female autonomy and female solidarity occupy a special place in gender and development thinking. For some feminists, myself included, they represent closely held ideals; as such, they are very difficult to bring into question. This contribution reflects on these ideals in order to raise critical questions about the attachments that gender and development practitioners may have to particular ways of reading ‘gender relations’. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Nigeria to explore the lack of fit between received ‘Western’ ideas about gender and the complexity, contingency and multiplicity of relations and identifications among women in this cultural context. It argues that superimposing received notions of gendered power relations on those whom development intervention seeks to assist — in the form of gender myths that have a hold on hearts as well as minds — may offer these women neither succour, nor the means for them to empower themselves.     

Gender and Life Course in the Narratives of Melbourne's High‐rise Housing Developers

Socially constructed ideas about the life course, sometimes encompassing gender relations, have long informed the views of those within the housing development industry about who should be housed where in the city, living what sorts of lives. Drawing on the findings of a recent study of developers’ narratives about the construction of expensive, high‐rise housing in central Melbourne, a relatively new form of dwelling even in this part of the metropolitan area, several themes are found to characterise the taken‐for‐granted ways in which these city‐builders view the gendered life courses of housing consumers. Developers’ narratives oppose the suburban ‘home’ to the high‐rise ‘lifestyle’, consider central city high‐rise residences as appropriate only for people without families, and see women, separately from the couples they make up with men, only as potential victims requiring the security that high‐rise apartment living is said to provide. These narratives reiterate the characteristics of an essentialised ‘empty nester’, or ‘young professional’ housing consumer, who is envisaged to occupy the new housing and is defined according to life course stage and gender. The developers’ partial and narrow accounts of the likely consumers of this high‐rise housing is one factor amongst many that explains the building of precincts of high‐rise housing that have limited facilities for children and for pursuits other than consumption of the individual ‘lifestyle’.     

‘I am not a feminist but…’: women’s activism in post-1991 Albania

Abstract

This article examines the shape organized women’s activism took in Albania after the fall of the communist regime. It also analyses how gender and feminist studies have positioned themselves within the higher education system, the relationship between media and feminism and the new alternative spaces of women’s activism and feminist resistance to gendered power relations. The analysis follows the longue durée of the fraught relationship of debates around feminism during and after the fall of Communism starting with the communist top-down ‘women’s emancipation model’ as well as the lack of bottom-up women’s activism, the post-1991 neo-liberal frame and the generalized post-1991 stigma about ‘emancipation’, ‘equality’ or ‘feminism’, along with the need to resist post-1991 hierarchical gender regimes.     

Do Women Need the Renaissance?

Joan Kelly's path‐breaking article, ‘Did Women have a Renaissance?’, first published in 1977, led historians of women in many fields to question the applicability of chronological categories derived from male experience. Thirty years later, the questioning continues, augmented by doubts about whether all systems of periodisation over‐simplify the diversity of gender. This paper examines what might be lost if feminist historians, in their sensitivity to difference, refuse to apply structures of periodisation. It looks at challenges to both ‘Renaissance’ and ‘early modern’ as conceptual categories and suggests ways in which gender is and must remain central to understandings of these eras.     

Speech,Gender and Power: Beyond Testimony

This article aims to unsettle some taken‐for‐granted ideas about speech and power, to argue against taking testimony ‘at face value’ without reflecting also on silence, on the forms and techniques of talk, on embodied communication, and on the complex ways in which interests are expressed and animated. It argues that treating direct testimony in public political institutions as a metric of gender inequality may be another example of the distortions that follow from an uncritical adoption of an unmarked male template of speech as universal standard. The article aims thereby to improve the way development researchers ‘hear’, and how practitioners think about ‘participation’.     

Beyond ‘Crisis’ in Understanding Gender Transformation

Since the late 1980s, historians have described certain eras as marked by ‘crisis’ in the production of gender norms. At the outset, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ proved useful for understanding changes in normative cultural systems. The rhetorical trope of crisis distinguished key turning points in the construction of gender and helped to shape a coherent narrative centred on moments of breakdown and reconstruction. Unfortunately, however, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ has now outlived its usefulness; it has lost its analytic purchase. This article reviews the notion in modern, American and European historiography, then critiques its usefulness as an analytic concept. ‘Gender crisis’ has been overworked to the point of semantic collapse. It has been so reified as to foreshorten analysis, and it conceptualises masculinity as a fixed set of essentialised norms. Finally, ‘gender crisis’ describes subjectivity and its relation to normative systems in overly binary and mechanistic terms. Using the case study of postwar French masculinity, the author proposes the alternative concept of ‘gender damage’ as a way to understand periods of transformation in gender. The term ‘gender damage’ moves beyond a mechanistic notion of interaction with normative systems in order to incorporate such emotions as frustration, humiliation and confusion in our thinking of human subjectivity. In addition, the term forces us to specify exactly which gender norms are being reconfigured in some way. ‘Damage’ is by nature specific and local because it does not totalise catastrophe in the same way as does ‘crisis’.     

Imperial modernity,national identity and capital punishment in the Samarcand Arson Case, 1931

ABSTRACT. This article draws upon the fascinating and little known 1931 Samarcand Arson Case involving the possible execution of adolescent white female inmates at a juvenile reformatory in North Carolina. Marked by nationalist discourses, the spectacle generated by this case indicates much about how white New South advocates construed national life and sought to construct a white ‘civilised’ collective identity, defending their region from Northern charges of Southern barbarism and asserting their place within the imperial politics of American nation building. The decision not to execute any of the sixteen defendants was informed by a series of interconnected ideas about sexuality, national danger, ‘civilisation’ and ‘race,’ suggesting that the presumed ‘legal chivalry’ extended to the young defendants was not a simple matter of gender bias, but involved a nuanced set of reasons related to negotiations of national belonging through racialised alliances.     

III 'Gender' is not enough: the need for a feminist consciousness

In the final commentary, Cynthia Enloe thinks again about Gillian Youngs' question: why do many IR academics find it so difficult to take feminist analysis seriously? She argues there are two fears: the first, for men, concerns how their own relationships with masculinity are affecting what they see as a ‘serious’ topic of investigation; the second is the fear of appearing feminized by colleagues making a judgement on the topic's seriousness. Cynthia Enloe argues that ‘gender’ alone is insufficient for transforming IR into a more reliable and useful discipline. What is needed is a feminist consciousness informing work on gender.     

Frank Cass THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Much environment and development discourse assumes that women are the ‘natural’ constituency for conservation interventions. This article attempts to illuminate this assumption with the lens of a gendered critique of environmentalisms (technocentric, ecocentric and non-western). How do the intellectual roots of Western environmentalisms influence the positions, or non-positions, of contemporary environmentalism with regard to gender? What does research on environmental perceptions in non-Western societies imply about gender differentiation in environmental relations? The article concludes that there are no grounds for assuming an affinity between women's gender interests and those of environments and that such a view is symptomatic of the gender blind, ethnocentric and populist character of western environmentalisms. By contrast the application of gender analysis to environmental relations involves seeing women in relation to men, the disaggregation of the category of ‘women’, and an understanding of gender roles as socially and historically constructed, materially grounded and continually reformulated. The issue of how far women's gender interests and environmental interests go hand in hand leads us to pose a broader question of the degree to which environmental conservation is premissed upon social inequality.     

Tackling gender inequalities in music: a comparative study of policy responses in the UK and Sweden

Cross-disciplinary research has highlighted the persistence of gender inequalities across music scenes. However, the way in which cultural policy shapes responses to gender inequalities in music has been relatively underexplored. This article draws on research from Swedish and UK contexts, supporting analysis with reference to 9 key-stakeholder interviews from both. Comparing perspectives from ‘more’ and ‘less’ gender-equal contexts, with sufficiently different cultural policy traditions, the article explores how responses to gender inequalities in music are influenced by ‘cultural democratic’ and ‘arm’s length’ approaches. It demonstrates that, as a result of these traditions, there is a comparatively more interventionist approach in Sweden at a national level, whereas the lack of central government response in the UK has encouraged more market-oriented solutions. It suggests that this ‘arm’s length’ approach necessitates different grassroots organisational strategies in order to affect change but notes that these, alongside austerity agendas, are insufficient in the long term.     

Doing gender,doing safety? Young adults’ production of safety on a night out

This article explores the ways in which young adults produce a sense of safety in pubs and clubs. Despite considerable anxiety around issues pertaining to safety and violence in the night-time economy, there is little consideration of how young adults themselves feel about their safety on a night out, or how they achieve a sense of safety in a seemingly ‘risky’ social space. Drawing on mixed-methods research conducted in Melbourne, Australia, in this article I consider the strategies that young adults used to feel safe on a night out. I argue that feeling ‘safe’ is something that is actively produced through the use of these strategies, as well as providing an avenue for ‘doing’ gender.     

Being a man in the horse capital: Mexican farmworkers’ masculinities in Kentucky

Recent immigration to the U.S. south has been of much interest to scholars with economic, social, and regional interests. This article contributes to these interests by analyzing the ways that Mexican men who migrated to Kentucky think about, represent, and perform their masculinities on two foaling farms in the area surrounding Lexington. These perspectives point to how migration impacts the participants’ ideas about gender relations. By considering their masculinities as they intersect with other aspects of their identities, this analysis questions widespread notions of the Mexican ‘macho’ or ‘machista’, demonstrates how masculinities are created in tandem with other aspects of identity such as class, and discusses the complexity of interactions with hegemonic masculinities (e.g. a ‘machista’ identity). The research was performed through participant observation and semi-structured interviews on two horse farms with 15 farmworkers.     

Queerly situated? Exploring negotiations of trans queer subjectivities at work and within community spaces in the UK

While traditional perspectives on transgender from some strands of feminism and within medical/psychoanalytical discourse have argued that transgender people conform to and reproduce gender stereotypes, queer theory has celebrated transgender as a site that highlights the social and cultural construction of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and, moreover, as a symbol of transgressive gender possibility. Both of these readings ignore the complexities of lived trans experiences and identifications. By evaluating a queer reading of trans through recent empirical research into transgender identities, I suggest that while trans identifications certainly queer binary models of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, such transgressions are materially, culturally, socially and spatially contingent. The article draws on empirical research to explore the ways in which access to queer subjectivities is constrained by, and negotiated alongside, the locales of the workplace and community spaces.     

Somatic Styles of the Early Middle Ages

‘Somatic Styles’ examines how classical modes of gender played significant roles in carving out competitive arenas between clerical and lay elites, c.600–900 CE. The paper explores the hermeneutical obstacles standing between the contemporary theorist of gender and the complex nature of the early medieval texts under scrutiny. The analysis reconstructs classicising techniques of gender deployed by early medieval churchmen, and it does so in a way that both challenges the stranglehold of the ‘one‐sex’ model on pre‐modern understandings of gender and heals the ‘rupture’ between the ‘Ancient’ and the ‘Dark Age’. Finally, the essay maps early medieval somatic and gendered styles onto an architectural space where lay and consecrated bodies met – a ninth‐century monastic basilica.     

Miners,Masculinity and the ‘Bataille du Charbon’ in France 1944–1948

In 1944, the French provisional government, backed by the Parti communiste français and the Confédération générale du travail, undertook an aggressive propaganda campaign to persuade miners to embark upon a ‘battle for coal’ which raised their efforts in extracting coal to that of a national endeavour. At the same time, miners had great hopes that nationalisation of the coal industry, under discussion at this time, would bring significant improvement to their working lives. In identifying the ways in which publicists posited miners as an ideal of working-class manhood, this article will argue that ‘la bataille du charbon’ marks a crucial moment in the celebration of working-class masculinity and that the ‘statut des mineurs’ which was passed in 1946 as a part of nationalisation enshrined many of the existing gender assumptions about mining life. What does an incorporation of gender to an analysis of the treatment of miners in the years 1944–1948 add to our understandings of the various economic, political and social dynamics around ‘la bataille du charbon’? How do these insights inform our perceptions of French coalfield societies in the mid-twentieth century?     

Managing the gendered dynamics of parenting during the UK New Labour government years

This article considers what a ‘structure of feeling’ approach can reveal about the gendered dynamics of parenting during the ‘New Labour’ years of the UK government. It explores some of the ways in which contestations about gender roles were evident in policy and in popular cultural discourses and demonstrates how these discourses both contained their own internal tensions and contradicted each other. It then reflects on the strategies that parents engaged in need to make sense of and manage these contestations and makes clear some of the pressures that had come to bear through policy and popular culture on parents' personal lives.     

Gender,work and technology in the information workplace: from typewriters to ATMs

We consider the relations between gender and technology in the workplace, focusing on clerical work in the information workplace, especially the finance and insurance sector. Our goal is to excavate a ‘hidden history’ of how clerical work and the artifacts which sustain it have been understood and deployed under different cultural and economic circumstances. We employ an analysis of technosocial relations developed in Science and Technology Studies in which meanings about ‘technology’ and ‘society’ are mutually constitutive, changeable, and in need of maintenance in order to sustain their conceptual coherence. By drawing on examples from the USA and Canada, we argue that at various points over the twentieth century particular office technologies became ‘feminized’, or associated with characteristics coded as feminine, as a means of shaping spatial practice and social relations in the workplace.