Iron knees in wooden vessels—an attempt at a typology

Knees were brackets in the structure of a wooden ship. They were introduced in the second half of the 18th century and were in common use for naval and merchant ships in the 19th century. They were fashioned in various designs. A typology of these is proposed based on archaeological and documentary evidence. Iron knees could used to assist the dating of unidentified shipwrecks.     

关于中华帝国晚期心态史的探索

Some elements of Puritanism in Chinese tradition are obviously different from the well-known intellectual phenomenon in the West; in the Neo-Confucian ambit the key question concerns “order-disorder,” “harmony-disharmony” in society and inside one’s personality, rather than “sin” and “purity” in personal morality. Yet we also find that chastity is involved in the contrast between the two concepts of purity and pollution and the idea of “obscene” (meaning “inauspicious,” “ill-omened,” “profane”) allows us to uncover a darker side to sexual representation. Death seems another source of active or passive pollution: this effect occurs after contaminational contact with human or animal remains. Thus death is the source of “desecration,” or of “contamination,” especially when it is the consequence of violence. This means that in Chinese culture, a sense of impurity seems to be driven by the horror of death and the fear of being overwhelmed by the passion of love; respectively, thanatos and eros. Other topics may also be associated, such as mental insanity referring to what is different, abnormal, strange, and socially subversive. The clean-unclean distinction originally responded to a basic visceral feeling—horror and repulsion/disgust—that is typically associated with hygienic worries and matter that is perceived as repugnant and inedible. But these basic ideas seem to have been symbolically extended to cope with the subconscious and metaphysical spheres: the horror of death and the fear of being overwhelmed by passion, the mysteries which lie behind these emotions, and the attempt to sublimate such fears into an impulse to transcend the red dust of our limited existence.     

Toward a feminist paradigm in anthropology

Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. 416 pp. Bibliography. $15.00.     

Hungarian feminist geography in a curved space?

Abstract

The history of feminist geography in Hungary coincides with the 25?year-long history of Gender, Place and Culture. Authorities denied the existence of gender inequality in the era of state socialism, which was the primary obstacle to the spread of gender studies. The political changes that had occurred after 1989 had removed most obstacles, but feminist geography emerged with a delay relative to other disciplines. Its first two decades was characterised by struggles and compromises within and against the geographical discipline in order for it to win recognition. The 25?year-long history of feminist studies has, however, been completely broken by legislation proposed by the current government suggesting a ban on masters programs in gender studies. In this article, I trace the situation of feminist geography in Hungary by applying the concept ?curved space?. This concept adapted from modern physics claims that mass creates a gravitational field, i.e. it bends 4-dimensional ?spacetime?. My argument is that the situation of feminist geography in Hungary can be interpreted as an embodiment of ?curved space?. Using this analogy, I argue that the current Hungarian government has amassed such a huge amount of power that has enabled it to curve the space of feminist geographical knowledge production. It has established a quasi-dictatorship that resembles the one that impeded the evolution of gender/feminist geography in the state socialist era. Therefore, only broad-based solidarity can help create opposition to the current government’s attacks against gender studies.     

Work and wonder at the weekend: on emotions in feminist geographical praxis

This article explores intersections between academic work and emotional work at a feminist geography reading weekend held by the Women and Geography Study Group of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers in the UK in 2006. It points to the importance of the fleeting, often unreported, spaces of feminist geographical praxis and of inserting these in our disciplinary histories. Using a performative textual strategy it offers a poly-vocal reflection on the complex, challenging and productive experiences of this kind of academic workspace. In so doing it contributes to feminist engagements with the practices of neo-liberal academia, to debates about the emotional geographies of feminist geographical work, and to discussions of the value of activities outside the norms of academia in providing potentially supportive and creative spaces for geographical praxis.     

Storytelling and co-authorship in feminist alliance work: reflections from a journey

If all writing is fundamentally tied to the production of meanings and texts, then feminist research that blurs the borders of academia and activism is necessarily about the labor and politics of mobilizing experience for particular ends. Co-authoring stories is a chief tool by which feminists working in alliances across borders mobilize experience to write against relations of power that produce social violence, and to imagine and enact their own visions and ethics of social change. Such work demands a serious engagement with the complexities of identity, representation, and political imagination as well as a rethinking of the assumptions and possibilities associated with engagement and expertise. This article draws upon 16 years of partnership with activists in India and with academic co-authors in the USA to reflect on how storytelling across social, geographical, and institutional borders can enhance critical engagement with questions of violence and struggles for social change, while also troubling dominant discourses and methodologies inside and outside of the academy. In offering five ‘truths’ about co-authoring stories through alliance work, it reflects on the labor process, assumptions, possibilities, and risks associated with co-authorship as a tool for mobilizing intellectual spaces in which stories from multiple locations in an alliance can speak with one another and evolve into more nuanced critical interventions.     

Still a long way to go: gender and feminist geographies in France

Abstract

After recalling some specific elements of the French gender debate, such as French feminism, which threatens the war of the sexes and the fear of indifference, this article distinguishes three moments in the geography of gender in France. The first moment forgotten is the emergence of research on women’s work and urban mobility from a Marxist and feminist materialist perspective. The second, at odds with the first, is distinguished by an approach that is more cultural than social, an inspiration that borrows from the linguistic shift and postmodernism, and that may have its references among the English-speaking authors of radical geography and feminist geography. The last is a moment of consolidation and diversification of themes (masculinities, sexualities, the body) and approaches (queer geography, black feminism, intersectionality). The article then highlights two challenges. The first is to sustain gender by consolidating achievements, developing gender education and promoting gender mainstreaming in all aspects of research. The second is to create common ground and develop solidarity in a context of profound transformations in higher education and research.     

Gender and feminist studies in Albania – a brief state of the art

Abstract

The aim of this contribution is to identify how gender and feminist studies have positioned themselves within the higher education system in post-socialist Albania. In Albania, the post-socialist context was featured by a negative connotation of the left-wing perspective hindering the development of critical and feminist thinking in academia. There is a lack of feminist debate, and hostile prejudices against feminists stick well, particularly in the absence of a thorough debate about feminism. Gender and women’s studies are present mainly in the public university system in association with the Social Sciences Faculty. The only complete program on gender studies is situated within the Department of Social Work and Social Policy, as a Master program in Gender and Development. Gender or feminist studies are mostly taught as “optional” courses often just for the sake of having them present in the program. In this contribution, we aim at briefly presenting some of the main developments, gaps and challenges regarding gender and feminist studies in the Albanian higher education.     

A feminist geographer in a strange land: building bridges through informal mentoring in Switzerland

Abstract

This article is a narrative representation of a personal experience as an early career feminist woman in the French-speaking Swiss context. After highlighting the androcentric tradition in Swiss academia, and the still-prevalent glass ceiling for young female scholars, this article aims to explore the survival mechanisms women use among themselves when up against a pervasive old boys’ club. Using a reflexive approach, this article illustrates how informal mechanisms can support early career women academics. Despite the lack of either feminist or gender geography programs and departments in Western Switzerland, this article highlights the presence of feminist practices in the everyday life of academia. Numerous collaborative practices are encountered at different career levels, and in different sites. While the bias of such practice is acknowledged, relying on individuals more than on institutionalised practices, the article aims to understand the workings of female solidarity networks better. It calls for a recognition of their role in women’s career progression and for the implementation of a culture of informal mentoring within academia. Finally, by more fully recognising such practices, it calls for the use of mentoring as a feminist tool to create a more inclusive academia, promoting an ethic of care that aims to challenge the masculinism and elitism of the neoliberal university.     

A lone ranger: My journey towards becoming a feminist geographer in Nairobi,Kenya

Abstract

Very few Kenyan universities offer modules on Gender or Feminism in their courses. Women are largely under-represented and very few hold senior positions. Due to the few numbers of female faculty, mentorship for young female scholars is lacking. Feminist writing by Female Kenyan geographers in professional geography journals is limited. Collective action among female geography faculty is also largely absent. This is largely due to the lack of feminist advocacy and policies in the universities. My journey to becoming a feminist geographer has received little or no support from the university. I have taken personal initiatives to link up with local and transnational gender associations in order to get insights on current feminist scholarship issues. My lived feminist experience and observations of the struggles of ordinary women in everyday livelihood negotiation have been my main motivation for continuing to do feminist work. Thus, my feminist work has concentrated on women in marginal economic informality. This paper presents my journey as a feminist geographer. It begins with a discussion on the state of feminist geography in three universities in Kenya namely, University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University and Egerton University. This is followed by a presentation of my journey toward becoming a feminist geographer in the absence of a supportive infrastructure. My journey has been inspired by my lived experience. The paper concludes with a call for a concerted effort for feminist advocacy in Kenyan Geography departments.     

The production of emancipatory feminist spaces in a post-socialist context: organization of Ladyfest in Romania

Ladyfest – a Riot Grrrl feminist do-it-yourself festival – has been organized independently in cities around the world since the year 2000. The emancipatory spaces that activists at Ladyfest seek to cultivate through workshops, music, and art provide seeds of inspiration for transformative social change. The main strength of the festival is the capacity to strengthen networks. This article discusses how the idea for this festival arose in Olympia, Washington, expanded to other locations, and was later organized by young feminists in Romania. In 2005, young women in Timisoara organized the first such festival in their city with a community of women from both inside and outside of Romania, and held another festival in Bucharest in 2007. Retrospective interviews are used to unpack the meaning of such organizing in a post-socialist context with reflections on how feminism has changed in Romania over the past decade. Specifically, the analysis of this event offers insight on how the production of space can be used to catalyze interconnections between emancipatory feminist spaces, the mode of production, and flows of feminist knowledge and concepts.     

Emotional masking and spill-outs in the neoliberalized university: a feminist geographic perspective on mentorship

This paper addresses the emotional dimensions of academic mentorship from a student mentee perspective and contributes to an emerging literature on geographies of emotion in higher education. It presents a pedagogical practice of self-reflexive co-mentorship – self-peer-ceptive feminist mentoring – and deploys it methodologically to analyze three biographical narratives. From different student mentee vantage points, these narratives reveal how the scales of the body, the family, and the nation are interwoven within the geopolitical and manifest within mentoring relationships. We argue that self-peer-ceptive feminist mentorship allows people at different academic career stages to share personal experiences of navigating the academy as a means to challenge institutional systems of power. Our argument answers three questions: How and why do we express and manage our emotions in mentoring relationships? What spatial scales are invoked through our emotional experiences and with what implications? How are different power structures embedded in the requirements, practices, successes, and failures of emotional management? Our discussion highlights how emotional masking and spill-outs are tools to navigate the emotional terrain of the neoliberalized academy. We conclude that self-peer-ceptive feminist mentoring can unsettle the structural hierarchies that require a “masking” of feelings for the sake of professional distance.     

Building the City of Women: creating a site of feminist resistance in a northern Colombian conflict zone

Against all odds, in uncertain and violent times, Colombian women are mobilising for peace. They do so even when they face ongoing violence and personal threats from a variety of armed actors. Despite a well-established tradition of studying women’s social movements in times of conflict, there is a lacuna when it comes to analysing feminism as a mobilisation strategy. This article uses the case study of the League of Displaced Women, the Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas (LMD) to illustrate the utility of Zulver’s High Risk Feminism framework to explain how and why women chose to build the City of Women, despite the real and threatened danger that this implied. The article narrates the history of the LMD, from its foundations in a geography of marginality to its creation of a space of resistance for displaced women and their families. In all, this articles demonstrates how feminist resistance has not only become a way of life for the women of the LMD, but also a strategy for creating pockets of safe places in the midst of a conflict zone.     

Constructing and practicing feminist pedagogy in Taiwan using a field study of the Twenty-Five Ladies Tomb

Drawing on theories of space, gender, and participatory learning, central concepts in feminist pedagogy, the author designed a university-level general-education course that took the Twenty-Five Ladies Tomb in southern Taiwan as the focus of a field study and class discussion. This local gendered site, which commemorates a 1973 ferry accident that killed 25 unmarried young women working in Kaohsiung, raises issues about patriarchy in Taiwan, gender inequities in traditional Han customs, and women's labor. The course relied on guided class discussions and focus-group discussions, culminating in a visit to the site. Face to face with the researched, the author not only built an inclusive and supportive relationship with students in the classroom, but also put her researcher's reflexivity into teaching practice. Research results indicate that the freedom of the class discussion format succeeded in breaking down the logic of binary opposition that accompanies the traditional gender duality of male/female. Avoiding a top-down teaching style also minimized students' resistance to perspectives emphasizing gender equality.     

Medicalising menstruation: a feminist critique of the political economy of menstrual hygiene management in South Asia

Women's use of water differs from men in essentially one aspect: in cleansing the body of menstrual blood. The pledge of the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector to place ‘women at the centre’ of development has in recent years, therefore, come to focus on menstruation. International development agencies have begun to push the agenda of menstrual hygiene management (MHM), but their use of a medical approach requires critical rethinking. This article argues that through MHM lessons, menstruation is medicalised to construct new and repressive expectations of normality for the female body. A medical construction also poorly accommodates the natural biological process of menstruation within the gamut of existing sociocultural practices. Consequently, menstruation becomes associated with the perceived need for not only sanitisation of the female body of the rural poor, but also to turn it into a working body that is able to ceaselessly and ‘normally’ perform its productive and reproductive chores. I note that the success of medicalisation relies upon the separation of the body from its purported waste, the menstrual blood. Once menstruation is confined to a pathological condition, treatable only by public agents such as doctors and commercially produced goods such as sanitary napkins, a defining essence of womanhood is thereby dissociated from the female body.