‘I've had it with them!’ Younger migrant women's spatial practices of conformity and resistance

This article examines how younger migrant women from Turkey maneuver the public and private spaces of their everyday lives in a neighborhood in Germany, and how they challenge and affirm the patriarchal practices and gender norms that husbands, fathers, and older migrant women seek to impose within and outside private homes. Younger migrant women selectively comply with gendered and generational norms of veiling and dress, while at the same time also reworking gender roles, and avoiding and transgressing masculinist spaces. Younger migrant women's practices and spatial representations in mental maps reveal the complex entanglements of compliances and resistance, and dispel simple assumptions of being overwhelmingly victimized by their potentially violent men that are so prominent in contemporary Western societies.     

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.     

The evacuation camp as paradoxical space for women

In recent years, so-called natural disasters have devastated areas around the world. Survivors must leave their homes and reside temporarily in evacuation camps run by state, religious and humanitarian actors. These official post-disaster spaces are intended to provide safety to survivors while they repair damaged homes, rebuild livelihoods, or await new lodging. Not all people, however, experience or perceive these spaces as safe. Through the interventions of institutional actors and the actions of evacuees, these spaces can become sites of repression, violence and family separation. This study of women survivors' experiences in evacuation camps reveals that gendered social relations and norms, often invisible or incomprehensible to the organizations running the camps, shape these sites into paradoxical spaces. The paper draws from interviews and participatory videos made by urban poor survivors of Typhoon Sendong in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines. Gillian Rose's concept of paradoxical space is used to study women's access to, use of and experiences within official post-disaster spaces. Distinct outcomes for survivors based on gender, ethnic and class differences highlight the failure of official post-disaster spaces to protect survivors from harm and the need for women survivors to adopt conflictual strategies that simultaneously exposed them to harms and resisted ideal survivor subject norms.     

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.     

Taking Care into Account: Leveraging India's MGNREGA for Women's Empowerment

The potential of India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) for women's empowerment is immense. Studies examining gender‐related issues in MGNREGA have attested to the high levels of participation of women on worksites, and their positive experiences of working in MGNREGA. This article argues, however, that an exclusive focus on increased participation of women does not serve an agenda of promoting ‘women's empowerment’. By ignoring the dynamics and processes of unpaid care work, both the making and the implementation of the Act fall short of the goal of women's empowerment. The author argues that this invisibilizing of care arises from the gendered nature of the interactions of formal and informal institutions that have shaped MGNREGA. The article examines the gendered debates during the formulation of the Act and analyses the gendered nature of its implementation. It concludes that a true focus on women's empowerment requires that women's lived experiences are taken into account, especially those relating to their unpaid care responsibilities. MGNREGA's potential for women's empowerment can only be achieved through adequate implementation and monitoring of its gender provisions, which in turn depend on changing the formal and informal institutions that underpin policy processes.     

Women's and Children's Quarters in Golden Gate Park,San Francisco

This paper explores the mythic domesticity encoded in the Children's Quarter in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. The play area, opened in 1888, represented a new genre of gender-specific public space developed in urban parks in the late nineteenth century. In welcoming women to the public domain of the urban park, gendered spaces such as the Children's Quarter signified a complex response to changing class and gender identities in the nineteenth-century city. Imposing a domestic structure on women's public presence, the Children's Quarter modeled a middle-class domestic ideal, affirming women's essential association with the private sphere even as it welcomed them to the public sphere of the urban park.     

Living with patriarchy and poverty: women's agency and the spatialities of gender relations in Afghanistan

This article examines the spatialities of gender relations and women's oppression in urban Afghanistan under conditions of poverty and strict patriarchy. Using empirical data from biographical interviews with Afghan women from urban households in Kabul, Herat, and Jalalabad, the article questions how gender as social relation and gender as difference is lived and experienced among the urban poor in Afghanistan. Looking at urban livelihoods through the lens of feminist geography helps to better understand the gendered spaces of home and the outside world, of households as sites of security and violence, and of urban contexts and ethnic affiliations. The approach allows for reflection on women's subjectivities and their own understandings of gender inequality and injustice. Examining the gendered geographies in urban Afghanistan shows how social difference is lived under conditions of patriarchy and poverty and how women's agency contributes to the livelihoods of their households.     

Resistance and the politics of negotiation: women,place and space among the Kayapó in Amazonia,Brazil

In this article, I suggest that a critical analysis of Kayapó participation in resistance strategies should be inclusive of negotiated politics, everyday resistance and micro-scale strategies of contestation along with the public and highly dramatic. In particular, I interweave theories of gender, resistance and space to analyse women's strategies of resistance and spaces of negotiation in a Kayapó village. I not only emphasize the performative politics of activism, but also highlight the gendered facets of performance and resistance. I suggest that a critical analysis of women's participation in resistance strategies should be inclusive of but not overshadowed by the highly visible, spectacular forms of social movements. Drawing upon more than 12 months of ethnographic research in a Kayapó village, I note the importance of examining everyday experiences of discord and resistance in Kayapó villages. This micro-scale perspective is especially salient if we consider that women might be unevenly included or not have routine access to leadership roles and protests. Finally, I draw attention to the power-laden spatial politics of contestation in order to trace the way in which women are using distinct facets of village landscapes for performative practices and politics.     

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.     

Gendered mobilities and immobilities: Women’s and men’s capacities for agricultural innovation in Kenya and Nigeria

Abstract

Social norms surrounding women’s and men’s mobility in public spaces often differ. Here we discuss how gendered mobilities and immobilities influence women’s and men’s capacities to innovate in agriculture. We analyze four case studies from Western Kenya and Southwestern Nigeria that draw on 28 focus group discussions and 32 individual interviews with a total of 225 rural and peri-urban women, men and youth. Findings show that women in both sites are less mobile than men due to norms that delimit the spaces where they can go, the purpose, length of time and time of day of their travels. Overall, Kenyan women and Nigerian men have better access to agricultural services and farmer groups than their gendered counterparts. In Southwestern Nigeria this is linked to masculine roles of heading and providing for the household and in Western Kenya to the construction of women as the ‘developers’ of their households. Access and group participation may reflect norms and expectations to fulfill gender roles rather than an individual’s agency. This may (re)produce mobility pressures on time constrained gendered subjects. Frameworks to analyze factors that support women’s and men’s agency should be used to understand how gendered mobilities and immobilities are embedded in community contexts and affect engagement in agricultural innovation. This can inform the design of interventions to consider the ways in which norms and agency intersect and influence women’s and men’s mobilities, hence capacity to innovate in agriculture, thus supporting more gender transformative approaches.     

Women's Cotton and the Spaces of Gender Politics in Northern Cote d'Ivoire

This article seeks to contribute to the gender and 'development' literature by showing how gender struggles over women's economic autonomy from cotton growing are played out at multiple geographical scales. The main argument is that 'men' and 'women' do not simply negotiate over cash cropping within the household. Women in particular find it necessary to 'jump' the scale of the household in order to secure productive resources for cash cropping. Drawing upon the notion of 'scalar politics,' this article illuminates the multiple processes and scaled spaces in which women's economic autonomy expands and contracts around the cultivation of cotton. It is inspired by feminist political ecological approaches to examine how the micro-politics of gender interact with meso- and macro-level agroecological and political economic processes affecting women's poverty and empowerment. Based on longitudinal research in northern Côte d'Ivoire, it shows how women of different sociocultural and economic standing negotiate access to productive resources at multiple scales, and how some men seek to restrict these initiatives. As women search for solutions to contradictions in gendered social relations of production, at different geographical scales, they have simultaneously dispersed the site of gender struggles to other locations (the marketplace and women's personal fields). Male household heads now find it necessary to contest women's cotton growing in these gendered spaces in their attempt to control their wives' labor.     

‘Whose name's on the awning?’ Gender,entrepreneurship and the American diner

While, in recent years, women-owned businesses have become increasingly common, entrepreneurship itself remains a deeply gendered institution, and one that is constructed through everyday practice rooted in space and place. The purpose of the present study is to explore the woman-owned diner as a distinct environment in and through which configurations of gender and entrepreneurship are mutually constituted, socially enacted, and spatially defined. Drawing upon a case study of a present-day diner in Worcester, Massachusetts, I trace the life narratives of two working-class women through their emergence as entrepreneurs in the diner industry. I reflect upon the distinctive space of the woman-owned diner as it is produced through the interaction between the gendered body-subjects of women owners, the social meaning of ‘feeding work’, and the spatial character of the diner institution. Through the gendered social practice of diner ownership, these two women have overcome substantial social, economic and geographic obstacles to their independence and worked to bridge the divide between the value of public and private work. Building on existing scholarship in the field, this study demonstrates the potential for women's agency through everyday practice as business owners, to create new spaces and alternative means of practicing both gender and entrepreneurship.     

Spaces of protest: gendered migration,social networks,and labor activism in West Java,Indonesia

This article examines the gender geography of labor activism through a comparative investigation of two communities in West Java, Indonesia. Based on in-depth interviews and a survey of workers carried out in 1995, 1998, and 2000 in the two sites, it explores the place-specific meanings attached to migrants’ social networks and gender relations, and their roles in mediating the gendered patterns of labor protest in the two villages. Previous analyses of labor protest in Indonesia have occluded scales and processes that are critical to understanding how gender dynamics are linked to the geography of protest. By contrast, attention to the gender- and place-based contexts of women’s activism illustrates the complex interactions between migrants’ local interpretations of gender norms, social network relations, household roles, state gender ideology, and global neo-liberal restructuring. Through examining these interactions, gender is conceptualized as ontologically inseparable from the production of specific activist spaces, rethinking the uni-directional spatial logic and deterministic views of gender and place put forth in theories of the New International Division of Labor.     

Kitchenspace: Gendered territory in central Mexico

Drawing on extensive ethnographic field research with multiple women and kitchens in two central Mexico communities, this article argues for kitchenspace—indoor and outdoor spaces where food preparation takes place—as gendered territory. Using a feminist political ecology approach, it explores private and semi-public space in the everyday, household kitchen and the fiesta or ‘smoke’ kitchen at the center of community celebrations. Marked as gendered territory by distinct social boundaries and gendered, discursive strategies, kitchenspace is vital to the maintenance of traditional forms of organization and generational transmission of cultural and embodied knowledge. This article questions assumptions about ‘the kitchen’ as a site of social isolation and women's oppression that often characterize feminist approaches. It considers embeddedness in local social and spatial contexts and the importance of everyday life in private and public spaces.     

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.     

‘Writing’ Black Womanhood in the Early Cuban Republic, 1904–16

This article explores the intersection of race, class and womanhood during the early years of the Cuban Republic. It focuses on the writings of elite women who published in the black press between 1904 and 1916. While legal reforms and the expansion of the educational system facilitated new gender expectations, racial ideologies positioned upper‐class white women as the standard of ideal womanhood. I argue that elite women of African descent employed modernising gender norms in order to counter anti‐black racism and to affirm their identification with upper‐class whites. In particular, they published articles that promoted the dominant values regarding marriage, education and public comportment. They disparaged unmarried unions and the practice of African cultural traditions among the labouring poor. Elite black women's writings drew from the model of the enlightened caretaker also to engage broader debates regarding feminism and black civic unity. Yet their emphasis on ideals that promoted white superiority helped reinforce the anti‐black tenets of Cuban citizenship they hoped to undermine. By analysing elite black women's articles, poetry and letters, the article demonstrates the importance of understanding how women of African descent forged an intellectual trajectory, and thus contributes to the historiography of gendered racial ideologies in Latin America and the Caribbean.     

Care-givers,leisure and meanings of home: a case study of low income women in Dublin

This article seeks to contribute to the literature on the meanings of domestic spaces by furthering understandings of the sorts of roles that space plays in shaping women's leisure experiences. The study researched a group of 15 women who live in disadvantaged areas of Dublin city and care for dependent children. Focus groups and structured conversations revealed the poverty of the spatial capital available to these women, depicting local environments as difficult and stressful, and to be endured rather than enjoyed. They further revealed the extent to which the women's lives were shaped by their obligations as care-givers. Within the home itself, private domestic spaces were found to be deeply embedded with powerful ideologies of motherhood that did not necessarily evaporate in the simple absence of obligations imposed by children. Instead, they tended to serve as constant reminders of how things ‘should be’, consequently constraining some women's abilities to divest themselves of care-giving duties and engage in self-focused recreation. Some of the women studied were able to move beyond obligation, and for them leisure represented modest yet significant opportunities to self-determinedly relax, reclaim and even luxuriate in certain spaces within their homes. Similarly, once relieved of child-caring responsibilities, leisure encounters within the local environment afforded some women new insights into familiar spaces.     

The writing is on the wall: the text(ure) of women's toilets in Australia

This article is about public toilets for women. Drawing on data provided by the textual material posted in women's toilets in Victoria, Australia, it is argued that in western nations, toilets represent more than instrumental facilities for the disposal of waste products. Because they also serve as repositories of social anxieties about bodies, gender, cultural and religious differences and health/death, public toilets are sites used to order the disorder of women's bodies and activities. Cultural intolerances have problematised differences in ablution practices and ‘correct’ toilet behaviours are frequently prescribed. As unique examples in the west of cultural and gendered practice, women's toilets offer rich material on the discipline and meaning of gendered space in a range of different environmental settings.     

The ‘New Woman’ and the Politics of Love,Marriage and Divorce in Colonial Korea

This study seeks to explore the changing discursive forces that competed to define Korean women's identity and roles within the context of the new spaces created by colonialism and modernity. It argues that a small coterie of literate women seized the initiative to enhance their education, define the politics of physical aesthetics and con‐tribute to the debate about the changing gender roles and expectations in Korean society all under the guise of 'Westernisation' and progress. The emergence of these 'new women' challenged traditional notions of Korean womanhood and brought the 'woman question' to the forefront of public discourse.