Postfeminist possibilities: unpacking the paradoxical performances of heterosexualized femininity in club spaces

One of the ways in which the heterosexualization of women's bodies is made apparent is through the blatant promotion of Ladies' Night at night clubs. These are typically weekly events, of which women are granted complimentary entry by club operators. Ladies' Night is thus popularly construed as a time and space in which men can gain access to many ‘heterosexy’ female bodies. The deliberate deployment of specific kinds of (post)feminine bodies and subjectivities—slim, savvy, and sassy—in club promotional material is often couched in discourses that highlight female expression, consumption, and autonomy. Such a celebratory rhetoric of women as empowered actors seems to suggest that traditional gendered expectations of women as self-reserved, timid and vulnerable to sexual aggression are archaic and are no longer valid. In light of this, I investigate how women negotiate a postfeminist terrain within the context of Singapore's night clubbing scene. By employing qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, ethnographic work, and discourse analysis, I argue that clubs are paradoxical spaces for performing gendered and (hetero)sexualized selves that vacillate between affirming and subverting heteropatriarchal regimes. In so doing, this paper hopes to contribute to the scholarship on feminist geography by bringing recent debates on postfeminism into a productive conversation with the literature on (hetero)sexuality and space.     

Bodies,building and bricks: Women architects and builders in eight eco-communities in Argentina,Britain, Spain,Thailand and USA

Eco-building is a male domain where men are presumed to be better builders and designers, more men than women build and women find their design ideas and contributions to eco-building are belittled. This article suggests that a focus on bodies, embodiment and the ‘doing’ of building is a potentially productive way to move beyond current gender discrimination. This article makes three key interventions using empirical material from eight case studies of eco-communities in Britain, Thailand, Spain, the USA and Argentina. First, it uses a focus on eco-communities to illustrate the enduring persistence of gender divisions in architecture and building. Second, by using multi-site examples of eco-communities from diverse countries this article finds more commonalities than differences in gender discrimination across cultures and nationalities. Third, it outlines three spaces of opportunity through which more gender-neutral approaches are being developed in eco-building: (1) in challenging the need for ‘strong’ bodies, (2) by practising more embodied ways of building and (3) by making visible women's bodies in building. The ‘doing’ and manual aspect of eco-building is unfamiliar for many (not just women) and interviewees commented on the need to (re)learn how to be practical and to understand the physical possibilities (and limitations) of their bodies.     

Narratives and Bodies: Culture beyond the Cultural Turn

This article offers a fresh assessment of the current condition of ‘culturalist’ international history, exploring its achievements and limitations, taxonomising its key threads and charting an agenda for the future. It argues that at its heart lie two core concerns, one with narratives and the other with bodies. Thinking in this way allows us both to tie together work which initially appears disparate – endowing a bewilderingly diverse mass of scholarship with coherence and shape – and to better grasp the project's current trajectory. It analyses how these two issues rose to prominence, discussing not only the merits and failings of previous ‘culturalist’ work but also linkages with shifting debates in historical theory in the aftermath of the ‘postmodern’ turn. It explores the contours of the important work currently being conducted under these rubrics, drawing attention where appropriate to cognate scholarship in the discipline of International Relations with which international historians might profitably engage. Understanding the significance of these two core concepts provides vital orientation in contemporary intellectual debates within international history and enables us to push them on further.     

‘It's called Girl Scouts,not, like,Woman Scouts’: emotional labour and girls' bodies

A key part of the American Girl Scouts organization is their iconic annual cookie sale, which is promoted as providing girls with invaluable business and leadership skills. We argue that it also trains girls in the gendered practice of emotional labour. By learning how to suppress or express certain feelings in public spaces in order to net more profit, girls are socialized to not only regulate their emotions, but also their bodies. This becomes complicated as girls become teens, as they receive mixed messages regarding their bodies. No longer considered to be ‘cute girls’, teens' bodies occupy a space between adolescence and adulthood, which often creates tension in public space. We explore this tension and teens' responses.     

‘The meat market’: production and regulation of masculinities on the Grindr grid in Newcastle-upon-Tyne,UK

This article explores the regulatory practices that shape the production of embodied masculinities in profile pictures in the online dating app, Grindr. Mobile dating applications are becoming increasingly enmeshed in everyday socio-sexual lives, providing ‘new’ spaces for construction, embodiment and performance of gender and sexuality. I draw on 31 semi-structured interviews and four participant research diaries with men who use Grindr in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a post-industrial city in North East England. Exploring the ways men display, expose and place their bodies in online profile pictures, revealed the production of two forms of masculinity – hypersexualised masculinity and lifestyle masculinity. I argue that the regulatory practices that shape men’s bodies in everyday spaces work to produce these masculinities. I take a visual approach that pays attention to the spatial practices that produce pictures, but that also pays attention to other senses, particularly touch. Paying attention to the visuality of the Grindr grid enables an understanding of the instability of online/offline dichotomies, as it is the interactions of online and offline spaces that enable the production of digital masculinities.     

The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children's Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal

This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the ‘body as method’ of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children – the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi‐stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines (Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students’ ‘seditious’ political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re‐masculinising the youth. These nation‐building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways.     

Losing it in Hawai‘i: Weight Watchers and the paradoxical nature of weight gain and loss

In Hawai‘i, bodies may be big, successful, widely accepted, and revered by their public, yet some subjects may simultaneously be seeking a thinner body even with what appears to be ‘fat acceptance’ by many state residents. This article analyses weight and weight loss narratives of two prominent public and nonwhite men, Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole and Sam Choy. We connect these narratives to Weight Watchers International discourses of slimming as these apply to ‘nonwhite’ subjects in Hawai‘i. We suggest that Weight Watchers normalizes thinness through discourses of whiteness inherent in particular foods. Hawai‘i's regional cuisine known as ‘Local Food’ is framed as ‘exotic,’ which is distinct from what the organization proposes is ‘good’ food that produces ‘healthy’ bodies. Weight Watchers narrates slim bodies and health while normalizing ‘white’ cuisine and the bodies who consume it thereby excluding Local brown bodies in Hawai‘i.     

Dirty dancing: the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv

This paper examines the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv, Israel. The nightclub is considered to be a space of sexual liberation and hosted the Friendly Freedom Friday party. Yet, the space of the nightclub is also divided by gender and sexuality. We draw on individual in-depth interviews and participant observations to examine the tensions that arise from, and between, gay men, transwomen and club spaces. A number of paradoxes are present in the club. We argue that the fluidity of subjectivity—espoused by queer theorists—evaporates when confronted with the materiality of actual sweating bodies. We are interested in the visceral geographies of how and where sweat, and other body fluids, becomes matter out of place or ‘dirty.’ Three points structure our discussion. First, we outline the theoretical debates about body fluids and fluid subjectivities. Second, we examine gay men's and transwomen's bodily preparations that occur prior to attending the nightclub. The spatial, gendered and sexed dimensions of participants’ subjectivities are embedded in desires to attend the club. Finally, we argue that the spaces gay, partially clothed and sweating male bodies occupy are distinct from, and in opposition to, transwomen's clothed and non-sweating bodies.     

Beyond ‘State Ibuism’: Empowerment Effects in State‐led Development in Indonesia

This article examines the ways women's processes of self‐formation are indicative (or not) of new possibilities for women's gendered selves in the post‐Reformasi period in Indonesia. It focuses on the development arena to reveal how shifts in state rhetoric, from top‐down guidance based on a patriarchal familial model to bottom‐up, inclusive development based on empowerment, have transformed what is referred to as the ‘topography for self’. The article draws upon theories of personhood a) to show how gendered selves emerge and are contested within particular historical conditions; and b) to develop an alternative framework of ‘empowerment’ that focuses not on capabilities and choice, but on an expansion in the possibilities for self. It argues that models of community‐driven development have provided new opportunities for women to hold and enact socially recognizable subject positions. This constitutes a form of empowerment for individual women but does not necessarily reflect challenges to patriarchy in Indonesia.     

„Simulanten des Irrsinns auf dem Vortragspult“: Dada,Krieg und Psychiatrie,eine ‚Aktive Traumadynamik‘

“Simulanten des Irrsinns auf dem Vortragspult”: Dada, War and Psychiatry – ‘Active Dynamics of Trauma’. This paper relates stage performances of dada artists to war neurosis and shell shock as sociocultural phenomena. The leitmotif of this investigation is the notion of simulation, as dada artists were referred to as malingerers (simulators) of madness by the press at the time. I hypothesize that the performers imitate/simulate with drums, shouting and ‘bruitist’ sound poems, the noises of war, staging themselves as war neurotics in a kind of shocking clinical demonstration. Both discourses intersect in the fact that many dadaists try to dodge the draft by simulating madness. The scandalizing anti-art of dada will be understood as contagious anti-pedagogy, trying to vaccinate against the madness of the era.     

The Big Buddha of Hong Kong: an accidental Buddhist theme park

ABSTRACT

The Tian Tan Buddha is the core of a tourism site on Lantau Island, Hong Kong, around which a cable car ride, the Po-Lin monastery and its museum, and the village of Ngong Ping have come to comprise an eclectic set of tourism nuclei that ‘accidentally’ became the ‘Buddhist theme park’ of Hong Kong due to the spatial juxtaposition in an isolated site of these disconnected and even dissonant components built at different times by different jurisdictions. The first objective of this article is to explore the developmental process of a religious site into a theme park of sort through a lengthy process filled with contestation and manipulations. The history-dependent and erratic nature of this process validates the notion of ‘accidental’ theme park used here. It is shown that over time, the Big Buddha went from being a Buddhism-themed leisure site to being generally perceived and promoted as essentially a theme park through a process of partial Disneyization. The second objective is to examine how the ‘theme park’ is perceived by its visitors, more precisely how they see it after their visit and what first-time visitors expect from it beforehand. The first enquiry, performed through the analysis of TripAdvisor reviews, indicates that ex-post, the visitors typically describe having experienced a visit to a theme park. The second enquiry, performed by interviewing first-time visitors about to access the site, suggests that while many first-time visitors expect to visit a theme park as well, others, mainly Western tourists, are expecting a more cultural experience. The findings of the two inquiries are compared to each other and to the image of the site promoted by the local tourism authorities. The subdued political message of the Big Buddha and the degree to which it is discerned by visitors are also discussed.     

Theming Asia: culture,nature and heritage in a transforming environment

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces a special issue on Theme Parks in Asia with reflections on how the various theoretical ideas on theming and theme parks that are found in the social science literature can help us to understand the proliferation of theming and theme parks in contemporary Asia. How does theming create a specific spatial and social form that has meaning in a transforming Asia? We trace here the rising importance of theming in places of consumption, education, entertainment and everyday life and argue that further attention is needed to understand the transformation of ideas of culture, nature and heritage within the context of theme park development in Asia. We look at arguments that suggest that theming is part of human cognitive processes, that it creates a frame that gives the content a particular order and meaning; we also consider theming within the context of theories of Disneyization and the ‘experience economy’ in leisure and tourism to explore how ‘new’ experience-based consumerism, and the designing of coherent ‘imagineered’ spaces, plays a role in ordering our social worlds. We also examine how debates over the authenticity or superficiality of theme parks, and more generally in cultural display and preservation, can take on new twists in Asia. We do this by drawing on a review of postmodernist perspectives on themed parks to show how theme parks in Asia can be better understood through nuanced inquiries into the ways cultural, natural and heritage images and icons are cited, referenced and projected, departing from a simple ‘copy’ versus ‘original’ dichotomy. Finally, we position and introduce the papers included in this special issue and suggest further possible research into such a fertile research field.     

Exploring subject positions and multiple temporalities through an Iranian migrant mother's family photograph albums

In this article, I draw on a research study of one Iranian migrant mother's generation of selves through her material configuration of her personal photograph albums and through our verbal reading of her photographs. The research engages in a visual-material feminist ethnographic approach, and is informed by the work of Gillian Rose and the understanding that family photographs are a means by which women negotiate subject positions. In this article, I discuss an unexpected finding of my research, the significance of multiple temporalities in a migrant mother's production of selves. The photo album practices of the participant mother of this study, ‘Parvin’, depart from the common social convention of mothers arranging their photograph albums to chart family growth following the model of milestones occurring over linear developmental time. Parvin does not limit herself to linear developmental time, but rather she mixes up photographs in her post-migration family albums to generate multiple temporalities woven together by an enveloping ‘mixed’ time. Drawing on both Julia Kristeva and Homi Bhaba's theories of temporality and the subject, I suggest that Parvin produces subject positions for self and family through a continual interweaving of a multitude of pasts into the present and through a subsuming of milestones within cyclical family time. Further, I suggest that through her generation of multiple temporalities, Parvin produces the subject position of ‘accommodating mother’. Finally, I highlight the potential afforded by considering the temporal and the spatial together in studies of migrant identity.     

From Coombs to Crean: popular music and cultural policy in Australia

The many bodies administering Australian arts activity were incorporated within the Australia Council, established in 1973 by the Whitlam Labor Government to oversee Commonwealth arts policy under the direction of H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs. This article takes the establishment of the Australia Council as a starting point in tracing changing attitudes towards the practices and funding of popular music in Australia and accompanying policy discourses. This includes consideration of how funding models reinforce understandings of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, the ‘cultural’/‘creative’ industries debates, and their effects upon local popular music policy. This article discusses the history of local music content debates as a central instrument of popular music policy and examines the implications for cultural nationalism in light of a recent series of media and cultural reports into industries and funding bodies. In documenting a broad shift from cultural to industrial policy narratives, the article examines a central question: What does the ‘national’ now mean in contemporary music and the rapid evolution of digital media technologies?     

Children practising politics through spatial narratives

The aim is to study children’s politics by exploring how children relate to and rework positions and identities offered to them and others in a residential narrative of ‘Swedes’ and ‘immigrants’. Children’s politics is defined as children practising politics when negotiating and challenging positions and defending identities. The results are based on a reanalysis of two studies. The results show that participating children use the narrative, and to it connected stories about neighbourhoods, to position themselves and to negotiate exclusion, inclusion, identity and belonging. In relation to this they deal with political issues connected to national and global discourses that blame the category of ‘immigrants’ for being the cause of local and national problems. They also reflect on the positions and identities offered in the narrative and use tactics to manage the positions and their consequences. From this point of view, the children practise politics in their everyday lives.     

Development and the environment: Perception and opinion in St Andrews,Scotland

In 2003, three proposals were being mediated through the planning system in the peri‐urban environment of St Andrews, Fife: a large housing development, a rail link, and a Green Belt. Using questionnaires and semi‐structured interviews with key stakeholders, we investigate the ways in which diverse conceptions of ‘the environment’ shaped public reactions to these proposals, and evaluate the fit between these and the respondents’ stated environmental perceptions. 98% of local residents surveyed describe themselves as ‘concerned about the environment’. However, large majorities conceive of the environment as a local rather than a global phenomenon, and regard it primarily in terms of personal benefits (such as landscape aesthetics or traffic considerations). By exploring the environmental perceptions in the light of the planning proposals, the study supports the contention that the ‘local environment’ is a socially constructed phenomenon which can be fashioned and re‐fashioned according to local perceptions of threats and opportunities.     

Experiencing Dracula's homeland

ABSTRACT

Transylvania has not only a geographical location as a province of Romania but also a mental meaning as Dracula's land. Dracula has become an important brand name for Romania, attracting many tourists in recent years – especially after the fall of communism. The main dimensions of Dracula's castle (i.e. Bran Castle) experiences shared online by tourists were identified to ascertain the primary reasons for satisfaction and dissatisfaction with visits and to test whether narratives and satisfaction vary according to the occasion (i.e. Halloween). Quantitative (i.e. computer-based) and qualitative (i.e. narrative) content analyses were conducted on the Web reviews written by visitors. The results reveal that the experiences are multidimensional, and they include the following themes: ‘castle’, ‘visit’, ‘Dracula’, ‘inside’, ‘tourist’, ‘outside’, ‘trip’, ‘souvenirs’, ‘stairs’ and ‘Dracula's castle’. The main reasons for dissatisfaction are overcrowding, which is connected with the outside theme, and the disappointment of tourists regarding the old furniture, which is associated with the inside theme. The results also reveal that visitors are the most satisfied with their experience around the time of Halloween. The narratives shared online emphasise tourists’ need to associate their imaginings with this region and castle, giving their experiences greater meaning through this destination's image as Transylvania.