Spaces of Labor Activism, Mexican‐American Women and the Farm Worker Movement in South Texas Since 1966

This paper studies the farm worker unionization experience and the historical development of Mexican‐American women's activism in South Texas to elaborate more precisely the relationship among socio‐spatial practices, political activism and labor's geography. Drawing upon archival documents and interviews, the paper describes how Mexican‐American farm workers used public space for political activity; however, radical unionization efforts also domesticized other spaces for women's activities. The paper chronicles how Mexican‐American women in South Texas transformed the farm worker center from a "domesticated space" into one of empowerment. In short, women in the union made the farm worker center into a space that challenged both the class‐based structure of larger South Texas society and masculinist practices within the larger farm worker movement. The analysis advances the imperative to better understand how workers "make space" to ensure their own survival. The paper advances the study of labor geography by arguing that working class mobilization reconstitutes dynamic social geographies within laboring communities themselves. In arguing this point, the paper illustrates the limitations of activism based solely on the use of public space and argues for more attention to the significance of other socio‐political spaces for labor mobilization.     

Narrating intersections of gender and dwarfism in everyday spaces

Dwarfs, midgets, even freaks, are among the terms that have been used to label little people. Feminist theorists have argued that discursive identities of women prevent any meaningful essentialised analysis of their experiences. Similarly, disability researchers have argued against generalising the experiences of disabled individuals. This paper explores the intersection of gender and dwarfism through the narratives of four women who are little people. Findings suggest that the ways women, who are little people, negotiate public spaces are affected by discourses of gender, disability and common conceptions of what is physically normal. Furthermore, these discourses have material implications in the everyday lives of these women. A brief historical overview of dwarfism is followed by narratives that describe experiences in public spaces, perceptions of height related to age and capability, gendered spaces and sexual stereotypes, uncomfortable spaces, violations of personal space and transportation. This paper provides a partial perspective on how discourses of dwarfism are manifest in social spaces and the built environment. Despite these significant commonalities that little people shared with other disabled people, there are socio‐spatial experiences that appear to be unique to people with dwarfism .     

Empowered spaces? Management articulations of gendered spaces in apparel factories in Karachi,Pakistan

Feminist scholarship has often focused on gendered workspaces within the apparel sector, where it is taken for granted that it is work conventionally attracting neophyte women. Within it, the task of managers is to discipline these young women to become docile and malleable workers. While this may have held to be the case temporally and regionally, South Asia’s experience has exhibited country-specific facets. This article focuses on these gendered workspaces in three factories in Karachi, Pakistan, in which we undertook research. In this context, there was a deliberate change in place facilitated by a United Nations Development Program’s Gender Promotion (GENPROM) initiative – to recruit and retain women workers, even though they acknowledged skilled workers were men. The factory managers we interviewed and spoke with used discursive tropes of gender equality and culturally appropriate women’s-only spaces as ways of justifying their labor recruitment strategy. However, digging deeper through interviews with managers at various levels suggested that their recruitment tactic had similar undertones to that revealed by early feminist research – although articulated via different mechanisms. We argue that this creation of empowerment spaces in particular Pakistani apparel sector factories requires careful tracing because it suggests how management interpellations reconfigure worker subjectivities. We also want to suggest that attentiveness to these practices is important because they may have specific bearings on temporal and spatial realities faced by Pakistan.     

Empowering women: an essential objective

The draft action plan of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) calls for enhancing women's participation in all levels of the political process and public life, promoting women's education and employment with attention to alleviation of poverty and illiteracy, halting discriminatory practices against women, establishing women's rights, and improving women's ability to earn income and achieve economic self-reliance. The document specifically refers to the importance of girls beyond their traditional roles as potential childbearers and caretakers. The action plan requests actions to enforce minimum marriage age laws and to assure women's choice in spouse selection. Female genital mutilation is prohibited. Preventive efforts are to be directed to infanticide, prenatal sex selection, trafficking in girls, female prostitution, and pornography. The men who are in positions of power have a particular responsibility to bring about gender equality and to focus on men's responsibility in parenthood and child support. Fertility is related to women's paid employment and higher educational levels. The longterm success of population programs is dependent on women's ability to make informed decisions at all levels and in all spheres of life.     

‘In This Profession We Eat Dust’: Informal and Formal Solidarity among Women Urban Transportation Workers in Nepal

This article considers the working lives of women who drive electric rickshaws, known as tempos, in Kathmandu, Nepal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the author examines drivers’ precarious working conditions and the strategies they use in an effort to secure better conditions and job security. This case study illuminates the particulars of women tempo drivers’ day-to-day experiences and also speaks to larger debates in feminist political economy surrounding women's entrance into the paid labour force, especially in South Asia. Women drivers provide a compelling example of how socio-economically disadvantaged women in industrializing and urbanizing cities of the global South find ways to create and protect spaces of dignified work and worker solidarity despite myriad challenges. Evidence from the research suggests that both informal and more formalized coping and resistance strategies are important mechanisms through which women seek to change the terms of their labour.     

GENDER DIVISIONS IN URBAN SPACE: BEYOND THE RIGIDITY OF DUALIST CLASSIFICATIONS

The paper discusses the absence of gender from the analysis and understanding of urban development as a result of dichotomies, implicit or explicit, in much of urban research: private space vs public space, home life vs politics, domestic labor vs paid employment, reproduction vs production. It is argued that urban analysis and theorizing have focused almost exclusively on the latter part of such dichotomies, the one associated with men and masculinity. This is an emphasis on and valuation of the adult male's activities and experiences of urban development and a corresponding devaluation of the activities and experiences of women — thereby reproducing gender hierarchies and ways of thinking about them. To consider these questions, a historically and geographically specific context of urban development is presented: the municipality of Helioupolis in the Greater Athens area (Greece). This study helps explain how the boundaries of divisions and dichotomies are transcended in women's everyday lives; how women (and men) are not exclusively identified with either part of dichotomies; but also how dichotomies are often intensified — sometimes by perceptions and practices of women themselves.     

From work to welfare: the response of the Peruvian state to the feminization of emergency work

This paper explores the ways in which the convergence of economic crises and gendered processes of globalization have created a new role for states and new scenarios for women's paid work. It focuses specifically on one of these scenarios—the emergence of state-backed employment programmes in the 1980s and early 1990s and examines the feminization of such programmes in Latin America. Through a detailed case study of emergency work in Peru the paper analyses the relationship between feminization and the state. Specifically, the paper interrogates the contradictory conceptualizations of work embodied in such state-backed initiatives. The example of the APRA government of Peru and its nation-wide employment programme (PAIT: Programme of Support and Temporary Income 1985–1990) is used to illustrate the ways in which states have responded to processes of feminization. The paper highlights the relationship between feminization and a shift in state rhetoric. Through empirical archive and interview based research¹ it examines the implications of APRA's move from a rhetoric of providing work for men to one that emphasized welfare aid for women.     

Postgraduate Essay Prize Winner for 2005 * A New Look at the Affluent Worker: The Good Working Mother in Post-War Britain

The number of married women working outside their homes afterthe Second World War rose rapidly despite widespread criticismof working wives and mothers. This article discusses three maintrends associated with this change. First, many women reactedto the discourse criticizing working mothers by trying to changethe view of ideal motherhood as exclusively domestically bound.They defended their actions by arguing that a good mother wasnot solely one who stayed at the beck and call of her family,but one who nurtured their self-reliance and independence bynot being constantly available and provided goods and pleasuresotherwise out of reach of the family. Second, the criticismof working mothers combined with the dual burden that most womenfaced in choosing employment to create an unprecedented demandfor part-time jobs. The change in women's work force participationsince World War II is almost entirely attributable to the risein part-time workers. Third, because observers and the womenthemselves so often described wives’ work as providingextras for the family, the value of women's work was debased.This obscured women's role in creating the affluent societyand allowed the male breadwinner ideal to continue unaffecteddespite major social change, as the public still generally viewedmen as having primary responsibility for family support.     

'Gendered Exclusions': women's fear of violence and changing relations to space

This paper examines how women's fear of violence is realised as spatial exclusions. Quantitative surveys on fear are used to show the number of women who are afraid, and the nature of the most frightening places. However, it is argued that quantitative surveys are of limited value in approaching the mental and social processes behind fear and in understanding the fear-related production of space. Qualitative research methods are used to explain the matter in more depth. It may be argued that fear is a consequence of women's unequal status, but it also contributes to perpetuating gendered inequalities. The paper reveals multiple experiences that change women's relations to space. Experiences and attempts at violence, and incidents of sexual harassment produce a space from which women are excluded on account of their gender. Social and emotional aspects, such as increased feelings of vulnerability, lack of social support, and a feeling of not having control over what is happening to oneself, have spatial consequences. These feelings often increase along with ageing, injuring, bereavement or moving to another place, as well as pregnancy and motherhood. I argue that the spatial exclusions in women's lives are a reflection of gendered power relations. Women's subjective feelings contribute to the intersubjective power-related process of producing space. Urban space is produced by gender relations, and reproduced in those everyday practices where women do not-or dare not-have a choice over their own spatial behaviour.     

"I Didn't Do Anything Important": A Pragmatist Analysis of the Oral History Interview

In the course of gathering oral histories from women who servedin the Navy and Coast Guard during World War II, an unusualconversational pattern has emerged. The women almost invariablydiminish the importance of their wartime contributions; a commonrefrain is "I didn’t do anything important." Their individualexperiences, as revealed during the interviews, belie that assertion.In this paper, I will use the women's words to parse what ismeant by this rhetorical move. Do the women really believe theydid not do anything important? If so, why do they find it necessaryto participate in the very public process of oral history, placingtheir names and life stories within the historical record? Consideringboth the content and the context of the women's words from afeminist pragmatist philosophical base will help explain thisseemingly incongruent act. This article demonstrates that thewomen do not really mean to belittle their life experiences(and military service), but instead are using the phrase asa way to acknowledge society's expectations. The oral historyinterview, meanwhile, is used by the women to not only placetheir experience into the historical record but also to affirmthe importance of their wartime work.     

Creating social spaces for transnational feminist advocacy: the Canadian International Development Agency, the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women and Philippine women's NGOs

The postauthoritarian democratisation process in the Philippines saw the rise of 'state feminism', which emphasised gender mainstreaming in government development planning. Various international development agencies, particularly the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), played an important role in harnessing the social capital of women's movements and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) for gender and development (GAD) programs in the post‐Marcos era (1986–2002). This period was marked by a decline in the CIDA's direct assistance to women's NGOs in the Philippines and its shift to institutional capability‐building of government agencies, particularly the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW). The article examines how local women's organisations have interpreted, engaged and negotiated transnational discursive practices on 'development', 'social capital', 'capacity‐building' and 'gender mainstreaming.' The CIDA‐funded Women NGOs Umbrella Project and Canadian aid to the Negros Occidental province are used as case studies to illustrate issues and problems in transnational linkages between Philippine women NGOs, national and local governments and Canadian development agencies. Such transnational linkages, embodied in the interesting mix of 'gender mainstreaming' and 'critical engagement' between states, donor agencies and women NGOs, show the interpenetration of the 'global' and the 'local' and the blurring of boundaries between 'state' and 'civil' societies in the course of gender advocacy. At the same time, transnational processes and demands may concurrently create better understanding, as well as conflicts and tensions between state machinery, NGOs and social movements, thus defeating the original intentions of development projects sponsored by international donor agencies.     

Healthy vocations: field nursing and the religious overtones of public health

This article argues that the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) field nursing program of the 1930s, which continued much of the same assimilation-style health care practices begun generations earlier by missionaries and field matrons, perpetuated the nineteenth-century link between religion and health care. Following in the footsteps of their female predecessors, field nurses targeted native women for health education, emphasizing personal hygiene and individual responsibility at the expense of socioeconomic causes of illness. Native women nonetheless appear to have maintained agency and power in negotiating health and health care. Peaking during the era of OIA Commissioner John Collier's Indian New Deal, the history of field nursing problematizes this period, particularly with regard to women's experiences. The article is significant for its exploration of field nursing as a contested site of cultural negotiation, revealing issues of power and difference in the lives of American women.     

Engaging in the disablement process over space and time: narratives of persons with multiple sclerosis in Ottawa, Canada

This article presents an interpretive analysis of the narratives of 15 men and women who have been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) living in the city of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Relatively little is known about how people who are affected by MS cope with the challenges posed by social and physical barriers in their environment. Our research investigates two objectives: (1) to explore how those who have developed MS cope with their disease and resulting impairments, both in terms of the bodily experiences of becoming a chronically ill person and in terms of how they cope with changing relationships, changing identities and challenges in their physical environment; and (2) how they engage in the process of disablement over time and space as a result of these changing social and spatial relationships. We argue that the physical body and its social placings in public and private spaces are intertwined and both affect experiences of health, ability, impairment, disability and chronic illness. We further argue that these relationships are experienced across time and space, and in place, as people who have developed a chronic illness, such as MS, engage in, with and through the process of disablement. This article demonstrates the need for researchers to pay more attention to the role and significance of the simultaneity of space, place and time in shaping the experiences of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, as it has been shown that these variables played a significant role in regulating the everyday experiences of this study's respondents.     

'Safe space' as counter‐space: women, environmental illness and 'corporeal chaos'

Women constitute a disproportionate 80 percent of people diagnosed with environmental illness (EI), a contentious condition in which patients react adversely to everyday chemicals in the environment at levels politically conceived to be 'safe'. Whilst the diverse range of somatic symptoms constitutes a biomedical anomaly, in this paper I present an alternative means of conceiving environmentally ill bodies. Women (and environmental health practitioners at the Environmental Health Centre, Nova Scotia) have begun to view their bodies as complex systems that have been nudged into a state of 'corporeal chaos', in which minute quantities of chemicals trigger disproportionate somatic symptoms. This chaos extends into 'corporeal space'[ Moss and Dyck (1999a) ] as the diagnosis of environmental illness is experienced simultaneously through both material and discursive bodies. This diagnosis also carries with it a means to mitigate corporeal chaos through a series of body‐ and environment‐based modifications that replace risky bodies with 'safe space'. As a discursive construct, safe space is associated with an absence of chemicals, and in order to mitigate chaos, should ideally be stable, predictable, controllable and communicative. I finalise this paper with some examples of body modifications and illustrate how safe space materialises in the home environment .     

The “Corona Warriors”? Community health workers in the governance of India's COVID-19 response

India's nearly 1-million strong band of quasi-volunteer accredited social health activists (ASHAs) have been key actors in government efforts to control COVID-19. Utilizing a nationalist rhetoric of war, ASHAs were swiftly mobilized by the government in March 2020 as ‘COVID warriors’ engaged in tracking illness, disseminating information, and caring for quarantined individuals. The speed at which ASHAs were mobilized into mentally and physically grueling labor was all the more stunning given these minimally paid community health workers have long been seen to have low morale given their precarious, informalized work arrangements. Building on work examining the spatialities of global health governance alongside literature on geographic contingency, this paper explores the ways that nationalist COVID-19 war rhetoric promulgated from Delhi worked as a technology of health governance to propel ASHAs into certain forms of action, yet also opened up spaces of potentiality for them to reimagine their relationship to both the state and the communities they serve. In particular, in our analysis of in-depth telephone interviews with ASHA workers in the state of Himachal Pradesh, we find that their hailing as COVID warriors inspired patriotic calls to duty and legitimized their (long over-looked) roles as critical governance actors, yet also was subject to resistance and reworking due to a combination of institutional histories, local politics, as well as happenstantial everyday encounters of ASHA work. The precarious employment of ASHAs – in terms of basic remuneration as well as the great on-the-job risks that they have faced – underscores both the fragile nature of India's health governance system as well as possible political movements for its renewal. We conclude by calling for geographers to give greater attention to community health care workers as a key window into understanding the uneven ways in which health systems are made manifest on the ground, and their ability to respond to citizens' healthcare needs – both in the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.     

Conceptualisation of home among Russian-speaking women engaged in commercial sex in Finland

This article explores how Russian-speaking women engaged in commercial sex in Finland understand home in relation to their experience of mobility and engagement in commercial sex. As it examines the mobility of those engaged in commercial sex, it moves away from trafficking or forced migration, and focuses on everyday experiences of home, ownership and self-care. The research is based on semi-structured interviews and ethnographic field work conducted in NGOs and commercial sex venues in Finland. It shows how by investing in private property, the women use their earnings from commercial sex to create their own spaces of comfort and personal pleasure, within the context of mobility, and how the inability to secure a material dwelling makes their sense of home more transient and unstable.     

Change within the change: pregnancy,liminality and adventure tourism in Mexico

Abstract

Despite the growing number of pregnant women engaging in outdoor adventure activities, very few studies have explored pregnancy or the specific needs and challenges of pregnant women in tourism research. To fill this gap in the literature, we examine the participation of pregnant women in adventure tourism through the theoretical lens of liminality. Conceptualising pregnancy as a liminal stage in which women are ‘suspended’ between two statuses, opens diverse possibilities to delve into women’s experiences of embodiment, bodily image and control. In this sense, pregnancy is understood as an ‘internal change’, which adds specific challenges to women’s practice of adventure tourism, including bodily changes and different perceptions of risk-taking. Similarly, the context of adventure tourism provides an ideal space to reflect on liminal transitions and the ‘outside changes’ that pregnant women go through in the predominantly masculinised spaces that characterise this tourism segment. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 35 Mexican women who actively pursue adventure tourism and who had engaged in these activities during at least one pregnancy. The analysis indicates the importance of norms and social expectations experienced by pregnant women when doing adventure tourism. The concept of the ‘rhizomatic body’ proved to be a valuable tool when looking at the social taboos, prohibitions and rules that apply to pregnant women in specific sociocultural contexts (in this case, Mexico). By reframing and reconceptualising pregnant women and their practice of adventure activities, the social construction of pregnancy is elucidated. Finally, the study contributes to the understanding of alternative models and experiences of being a woman in gendered spaces, while shedding light on relevant behavioural patterns among pregnant tourists and the sociocultural impacts of these patterns.     

Gendering boundary work: exploring excluded spaces in supermarket job rotation

The article explores the establishment of gendering divides in organisations by bridging Hernes' (2004) typologies of physical, social and mental boundary work with notions on the practice of gender as negotiated in everyday organisational activities. In the investigated Swedish supermarket, the pre-store, a narrow, front-stage space in which only women worked, was excluded from the job rotation that otherwise dominated the organisation of work in the store. This study examines: (1) how and on what grounds the divides of the pre-store were established in the supermarket and (2) how spatial divides were incorporated into the practice of gender and work in the supermarket. The findings suggest that the divides that are visible through the exclusion of the pre-store from the job rotation involved not only the allocation of work and space but also multiple and complex physical, social and mental spatial negotiations undertaken by both employees and managers. Together, these factors neutralised the divides as an aspect of the activities. First, the notion that gender was irrelevant for organisational decisions makes gender a non-issue for the organisation of the pre-store activities. Second, the notion that women and men are essentially different provided a ground for explaining why, despite being an organisational non-issue, work and workers were in fact organised along gendered lines in the supermarket. The study contributes with qualitative insights regarding the micro-political practices that make gender into a neutralised non-issue in organisations and, in particular, the intertwinement of spatial practices and negotiations.