Wearable cameras,in-visible breasts: intimate spatialities of feminist research with wearable camcorders in Istanbul

Abstract

Video-based wearable technology such as actioncams and optical head mount devices lead to various kinds of visualities and interrelations between camera vision, bodily visibility, immersive viewing and public visibility of the body-wearing-the-camera. These interrelations are not neutral and in order to claim wearable visual technology's potential for critical, feminist research, it is essential to problematise the contexts and frictions that precede and/or surface during and after the bodily experience of shooting with a wearable device in a research context. In this article, I problematise the common approaches to video-based wearable research technology by engaging participants' particular ethical, emotional, political positions and embodiment of camera's prosthetic vision during mobile visual research in Istanbul. This work was realised as part of the ongoing study on memories of violence and wellbeing in Istanbul and the specific questions that guide my discussion are: what wearable camcorders as mobile research tool do to bodies; how they co-constitute the norms of visibility, movement and gender of particular bodies and what practices and emotional responses emerge from these intersections. A major aim, therefore, is to situate the camera experience as in physical and social relations of moving, seeing and be seen as gendered bodies in specific (research) settings. Drawing on ‘the embodied nature of all vision’, the article provides a close-up, chest-specific analysis of the implications of doing wearable visual research and presents breast-space as an emergent research site in my Istanbul study.     

Engendering New Labour's Workfarist Regime: Exploring the intersection of welfare state restructuring and labour market policies in the UK

This article deconstructs New Labour's emerging workfarist regime to reveal the complex and contradictory gender relations embodied in and through its work–welfare policy. Starting from the decline of manufacturing employment within the UK, it traces the deregulation of the labour market and the range of structural and social changes initiated by this process. Noting, in particular, how the ‘feminisation of the economy’ is connected to the changing characteristics of employment and women's socio-economic positions, the article identifies the manner in which the growing labour market participation of women is serving to (further) entrench gender inequality. Against this background, it proceeds to raise issues regarding the increased expectation to enter the labour market observed within programmes such as the New Deal for the Unemployed, which stipulates that the receipt of state benefits ought now to require a labour input. The crux of analysis is on the policy and political discourses that award priority to paid work in the formal labour market, whilst simultaneously neglecting the gendered divisions of labour around unwaged care work and domestic tasks. In suggesting that gender remains a key form of political-economic organisation in the contemporary period of after-Fordism, this article argues that (further) attention must be given to the ways in which its socially constructed properties are manifest within work–welfare policy and the ramifications of this embedding for social and economic equality.     

Work,Gender & History in the 1990s and Beyond

By the end of the 1980s, having amply demonstrated that the study of class could no longer be separated from the study of gender, feminist historians were advocating a new gendered history of work. At the beginning of the 1990s, American historian Ava Baron identified four problems that women's labour history had left unresolved: the need to move women's labour history out of its ghetto; an explanation for the mechanisms of sexual difference in labour relations; the theorisation of women's and men's ‘consent’ to oppression; and an understanding of the differences among women. The quest for a gendered labour history required new conceptual tools and new theoretical approaches. This paper tests this agenda against research on work and gender in the last decade of Gender & History. The moves toward the interrelation of public and private, work and family, as well as toward the construction of identities calls into question whether work remains a distinctive historical field.     

Gender and poverty: what we know,don’t know,and need to know for Agenda 2030

Drawing on historical debates on gender, poverty, and the ‘feminisation of poverty’, this paper reflects on current evidence, methods and analysis of gendered poverty. It focuses on initiatives by UN Women, including the Progress of the World’s Women 2015–16. Our analysis of the data compiled by UN Women raises questions about what might account for the over-representation of women among the poor in official accounts of poverty, and how this is plausibly changing (or not) over time. The paper highlights that analysis of what is measured and how needs to be understood in relation to who is the focus of measurement. The lack of available data which is fit for purpose questions the extent to which gender poverty differences are ‘real’ or statistical. There is a continued reliance on comparing female with male headed households, and we argue the move by UN Women to adopt the notion of Female Only Households reflects available data driving conceptual understandings of women’s poverty, rather than conceptual advances driving the search for better data. Wider UN processes highlight that while sensitivity to differences among women and their subjectivities are paramount in understanding the multiple processes accounting for gender bias in poverty burdens, they are still accorded little priority. To monitor advances in Agenda 2030 will require more and better statistics. Our review suggests that we are still far from having a set of tools able to adequately measure and monitor gendered poverty.     

Drought policy in Australia: gender mainstreaming or gender blindness?

Australia is experiencing a major drought, one that has devastated the landscape and people for up to ten years. This major disaster has accelerated ongoing rural restructuring and created changes in the way farm family members order and live their lives. Yet despite evidence that drought is a gendered experience, that is, that generally women and men experience and respond to drought differently, and despite a rhetorical move to gender mainstreaming in Australian policy circles, drought policy remains significantly gender blind. In this article I use the example of emergency support to poverty stricken farm families to show how agricultural departments that attend to a notional norm of family farming as a unitary male pursuit can actively discriminate against women in their efforts to preserve the farm and support their families. The article exposes gender mainstreaming as an ‘empty signifier’ that is contextually grounded and that its success is highly dependent on making these issues transparent. For gender equity efforts to reach women at local levels, I argue that gender mainstreaming requires international collaboration by gender specialists to facilitate greater attention to gender assessments by national bodies. It also requires national coalitions of gender expert units, women's organisations and academics to work together to expose culturally specific gendered issues and discriminatory outcomes.     

Beyond ‘Culture’ as an explanation for intimate violence: the politics and possibilities of plural resistance

This article interrogates simplified culturalist explanations of gendered violence, which evoke timeless ‘tradition’ and religiosity to locate violence in racialized places and upon ‘othered’ bodies. I examine structural processes that shape women’s experiences of and vulnerability to intimate violence. My analysis complicates culturalist narratives, but engages critically with culture as one context within which violence is embedded. Drawing on field research within Muslim communities in Hyderabad, India, I discuss the complexities of interwoven experiences of structural, state, and intimate gender violence. I draw attention to how anti-violence organizations working in marginalized communities theorize these complexities, and practices of what I am calling ‘plural resistance,’ which these organizations enact through equally complex responses to such violences. Plural resistance describes community-based strategies that simultaneously reject both gender violence and other forms of systemic violence, such as poverty born of uneven development. Embodied resistance to gender violence provides a critical lens for understanding articulations between regional patriarchies, exclusionary state practices, uneven development, and Islamophobia.     

Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition: The Case of Kenyan Horticulture

This article examines the social effects of contract farming of export horticulture among smallholders in Meru District, Kenya. During the 1980s and 1990s, contracting was popularized by donors and governments alike as a way to reduce poverty and increase opportunities for self–employment in rural areas. Considerable research has documented the tensions in social relations that emerge in such cases, giving rise to gendered struggles over land, labour, and income in the face of new commodity systems. This article highlights similar tendencies. It suggests that men’s failure to compensate their wives for horticulture production has given rise to a string of witchcraft allegations and acts, as the wealth engendered by horticultural commodities comes up against cultural norms of marital obligation. While witchcraft accusations can expose women to risks of social alienation and financial deprivation, witchcraft nevertheless remains a powerful weapon through which women can level intra–household disparities and, more broadly, challenge the legitimacy of social practice. In Meru, witchcraft discourses are a vehicle through which gendered struggles over contract income are articulated and contested, and through which the social costs of agrarian transition become apparent.     

Spatialising performance: masculinities and femininities in a ‘fragmented’ field

While there are many self-reflexive accounts of ‘field’ experience, few researchers have explicitly examined how different places within the field shape gender performances and subsequently the research process. This paper spatialises the notion of ‘performance’ by examining how male and female bodies in particular places of the field are perceived both by researchers and participants as markers of gender identity. The analysis is based on fieldwork in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi where the author and her research assistant conducted semi-structured interviews with the residents. The fieldwork highlighted how the embedded power structures in different places of the field created encounters between different gendered bodies and, in turn, how different relationships between researchers and participants shaped the field ‘experience’. I suggest that the ‘field’ should not be understood as a homogeneous terrain, but as a fragmented collection of places, each constructing multiple gender identities in research, and each telling its own research story.     

Harsh choices: Chinese women's paid work and unpaid care responsibilities under economic reform

China's economic reforms over the past three decades have dramatically changed the mechanisms for allocating goods and labour in both market and non-market spheres. This article examines the social and economic trends that intensify the pressure on the care economy, and on women in particular in playing their dual roles as care givers and income earners in post-reform China. The analysis sheds light on three critical but neglected issues. How does the reform process reshape the institutional arrangements of care for children and elders? How does the changing care economy affect women's choices between paid work and unpaid care responsibilities? And what are the implications of women's work–family conflicts for the well-being of women and their families? The authors call for a gendered approach to both social and labour market policies, with investments in support of social reproduction services so as to ease the pressures on women.     

Women,Communities, Neighbourhoods: Approaching Gender and Feminism within UK Urban Policy

In recent years some commentators have looked at successive waves of UK urban policy from the perspective of gender, although these commentaries have been somewhat marginal within wider discussions of urban policy and politics. This article seeks to make the case for a renewed emphasis on gender, which moves beyond tracing the role of men and women in relation to urban policy programmes, in two particular ways. First it is argued that a more sophisticated analysis of the gendered nature of urban governance is needed, in other words how forms of gendered labour, subjectivity and power work through and within policy projects; and second that there should be a wider consideration of what feminist visions of cities and politics, both past and present, might contribute to the project of a critical, and hopeful, analysis of urban policy and politics. The paper seeks to make a practical as well as theoretical intervention in relation to gender and feminist perspectives on UK urban policy. It is argued that there has been a silence around such issues in recent years, both in analysis and in policy discourses, and that this silence has masked how gendered labour and power has often been woven into urban governance. For example, forms of women‐centred organising have been relied on in a range of government projects seeking to build community and participation within poor neighbourhoods. Such reliance may be increasing in a context of austerity. As well as this critical analysis of current policy, the paper argues for the reinvigoration of feminist visions of cities that suggest different framings of aspects of urban life. For example, rethinking the lines between public and private spheres might result in different forms of housing or sites of civic participation. Through engaging anew with such perspectives cities might become more just, caring, and equal for all.     

Who does the work in sustainable households? A time and gender analysis in New South Wales,Australia

Households in the affluent West have become an important target of government and NGO campaigns to encourage more environmentally sustainable behaviours, but there has been little research into the gender implications of such policies. This article investigates the role of gender and time in the sustainability practices of six heterosexual households with young children, committed participants in the Sustainable Illawarra Super Challenge programme in 2009. Women spent more total time on sustainable practices, and did so more often. Men's contributions related mostly to gardening and transport, in longer blocks of time. In these households, sustainability became a highly gendered practice because of the different roles in homemaking. Women resisted constructions of themselves as being closer to nature, and shouldered expectations of sustainability as part of their roles as mothers and household managers. They experienced time as overlapping and fragmented, with no distinction between work and leisure. Men contributed to sustainable practices mainly through activities understood as leisure, in longer blocks of time. Our temporality lens also illustrates the gendered ways that old practices become deroutinised and new practices reroutinised. While men were often responsible for the labour and upfront time required to start or research a project, the responsibility of everyday implementation and habit-changing commonly fell to women. These findings illustrate how gendered analyses help identify both opportunities for, and constraints against, change towards sustainability. Opportunities include the strong connections between both mothers' and fathers' understanding of good parenting and the importance they attach to household sustainability. Constraints include the temporal challenges faced by households, and how these interact with wider structural and labour roles.     

Wandering intellectuals: establishing a research agenda on gender,walking, and thinking

Building on a study of three women who practice walking-for-thinking as a part of their intellectual work, the analysis identifies potential themes for a future research agenda on gender, walking, and thinking. A particular focus is the subtle, daily, management of gendered expectations and ways in which walking, for these women, is a contribution to such management. We name this ‘walking away from expectations’ and identify three themes: walking away from others’ gaze, walking away from restlessness and domestic responsibility, and walking away as belonging. Walking emerges as a skilful way of creating the conditions to do one’s intellectual work and manage gendered expectations. Further, the meanings of silences about gender in the context of intellectual work and walking is discussed and questions for future research agenda are suggested.     

What motivates millennials? How intersectionality shapes the working lives of female entrepreneurs in Canada’s fashion industry

The contemporary fashion industry is based on a set of ‘gendered skills and attributes.’ Women numerically dominate fashion schools and the labour force of fashion firms, and also start and run the majority of independent fashion brands. Angela McRobbie and others have highlighted the importance of considering the gendered dynamics of fashion-related work. Yet, as the industry continues to evolve in the wake of global integration, the digital transition and intensifying competition, there is an ongoing need for research. Using an intersectional approach, this paper provides a novel case study of young ‘Millennial’ female independent fashion designers who operate within the emerging and under-explored Canadian fashion industry. Drawing on 87 interviews and participant observation, the paper demonstrates how entrepreneurial motivations, pathways, practices and experiences are shaped by individual characteristics, such as gender, age, lifecycle and class. Particular attention is paid to the challenges and tensions associated with the D.I.Y. (do it yourself) model and how forms of work, including aesthetic labour, are performed and experienced in virtual spaces such as social media platforms. In so doing, the paper contributes to nascent research on Millennials and nuances our understanding of the gendered nature of creative labour. Crucially, the paper also moves beyond typical masculinist conceptualisations of entrepreneurship, which focus on high-growth and high-technology businesses, to highlight the legitimacy, prevalence and importance of alternative motivations, networks, identities and business practices within contemporary markets and creative industries.     

Rural children’s role in buffering household poverty through ganyu (piecework) in Zambia

In Zambia, the ways in which social change intersects with rural livelihoods to increase children’s workload and commodify their labour are poorly understood. In this article, changing patterns of rural children’s work are seen as necessitated by their evolving household roles and contributions in an increasingly rural cash-based economy. Drawing on child-focused qualitative research in rural Lundazi district in Zambia, it is explored how children use a traditional labour practice called ‘ganyu’ (piecework) to ameliorate poverty. The infiltration of the cash-based economy, amplified by the Economic Structural Adjustment Programmes, a predominantly adult-centred traditional informal socio-economic levelling mechanism of ganyu, and its evolution into more cash-oriented transactions increasingly involving children are discussed. Although ganyu has largely been seen as characterized by exploitative labour relations, the empirical findings from this research indicate the complex ways in which the practice is empowering children and their families. The resources accrued through ganyu are vital for both personal and household well-being. The findings of this study have important implications to rethink not only contentious issues of child labour but also dominant narratives of childhood that fail to take into account children’s lived experiences as situated in local, social, economic, and cultural contexts.     

Unnatural discourse. ‘Race’ and gender in geography

Geographers’ long‐term involvement in the construction ‘race’ and gender has occurred through literally and metaphorically mapping out the world in ways that highlight, perpetuate and naturalize difference. This paper provides a critical analysis of the naturalization of these categories by revealing parallels in their social construction and in the ways in which they have been independently conceptualized. The focus is on the extent to which ‘race’ and gender as social constructs have been, and are, predicated upon biological categories. We argue for a conceptualization which, while eschewing notions of essentialism and determinism, integrates the biological and social, recognizing that distinctions between the biological and cultural are invariably socially constructed. We also highlight the extent to which social constructions are political constructions, sexism and racism being modes of thought which construct the body for ideological ends. We begin to chart the political strategies whereby dominant notions of the biological and cultural can be unnaturalized, thus challenging the ways in which ‘race’ and gender are used to create social identities and to maintain relations of domination. In an attempt to develop an alternative to strategic essentialism, we focus on the practice of unnatural discourse, of imposing disorder on dominant discourses through, for example, practices associated with the unnatural, the unnaturalization of everyday language, the unnaturalization of landscapes upon which gendered and racialized relations are played out, the questioning of our disciplinary codes and the unnaturalization of vision by developing new ways of seeing the racialized and gendered embodiment of subjects.     

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.     

Trance and visibility at dawn: racial dynamics in Goa’s rave scene

The geography of music has recently turned to questions of embodiment and materiality to account for the sensuous specificity of music. Extending this work, this article emphasizes the constitutive work that embodied experience of music and space does for social differences such as race and gender. It criticizes what is perceived as a limited conception of embodiment in non-representational theory. Using ethnographic evidence from the rave tourism scene in Goa, India, it is argued that precisely during the scene's most mystical and hedonistic moments (what will be called the ‘morning phase’), racial dynamics are at their starkest. It is crucial to understand that racial difference is emergent and not automatic. The article then suggests a Deleuzian musicology which conceives music not as form, language or ideology, but as force. Accounting for the richness of musical materiality involves examining the networks of power and inequality through which it necessarily operates.     

Trans youth,science and art: creating (trans) gendered space

This article is based on empirical research which was undertaken as part of the Sci:dentity project funded by the Wellcome Trust. Sci:dentity was a year-long participatory arts project which ran between March 2006 and March 2007. The project offered 18 young transgendered and transsexual people, aged between 14 and 22, an opportunity to come together to explore the science of sex and gender through art. This article focuses on four creative workshops which ran over two months, being the ‘creative engagement’ phase of the project. It offers an analysis of the transgendered space created which was constituted through the logics of recognition, creativity and pedagogy. Following this, the article explores the ways in which these transgendered and transsexual young people navigate gendered practices, and the gendered spaces these practices constitute, in their everyday lives shaped by gendered and sexual normativities. It goes on to consider the significance of trans virtual and physical cultural spaces for the development of trans young peoples' ontological security and their navigations and negotiations of a gendered social world.     

Translations of Gender Equality among Rural Arsi Oromo in Ethiopia

How are global policies on women's rights and gender equality translated into local contexts and who are the translators in this process? This article describes and analyses contradictory and competing translations of gender equality in two districts in Ethiopia. Two main strands of translations are identified: ‘gender experts’ in the government's gender machinery emphasize the importance of changing the gendered division of labour while the ‘grassroots’ underscore the importance of collaborative work and mutual agreement through conjugal dialogue. Although these translations are similar in terms of their focus on labour, they represent fundamentally different visions of gender equality, the first reflecting a vision of equality as sameness, the latter ideals of gender complementarity. Rather than presenting one or both translations as examples of resistance against or misinterpretation of gender equality, I argue that contemporary theories of translation and discursively informed theories on global norm diffusion offer perspectives that allow us to recognize the potential of contestations in meaning creation. This opens up the translational space as the ‘grassroots’ are recognized as translators.