Slavery in black and white: the racialisation of (male) slavery in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and/vs. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

This article revisits Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative as illustrative of the ‘birth’ of whiteness as ideology and, in particular, of the subordination of class to race interests in antebellum America. To do so, it compares Douglass’s text to Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), which traces the origins of the slave trade back to the seventeenth century, when American slavery was not fully ‘racialised’ yet. While Morrison focuses on the earliest stage of the increasing (class) animosity among different types of servants and slaves, black and white, Douglass’s nineteenth-century Narrative already reveals the explicitly racialised association of human bondage with non-whiteness. I argue that Morrison’s novel may thus be interpreted as a ‘prequel’ to Douglass, whose Narrative illustrates the increasing racialisation of slavery throughout the nineteenth century, but also elaborates on its class and gender biases. In this sense, the essay concludes that Douglass shows how the assertion by white workers, especially males, of their racial and gender supremacy over both black men and women entailed, paradoxically enough, their class subjugation, which, if not in form, ended up transforming them into virtual ‘slaves’.     

Single female tenants in South Delhi – gender,class and morality in a globalizing city

Based on ethnographic data gathered over 12 months of fieldwork with unmarried women living alone or in flat-shares in different middle class South Delhi localities, this article traces the way shifting gendered norms – often epitomized by growing numbers of single women households – are negotiated within class specific and highly localized contexts of the residential neighborhood. Despite growing economic opportunities for middle class and elite women, cultural anxieties surrounding the notion of ‘delayed’ marriage and women living outside of the familial or marital home persist and obstruct attempts at establishing independent households. Single women experience difficulties finding apartments to rent; have to contend with hostile intrusions from neighbors; or feel obliged to self-monitor their behavior within their neighborhoods. As South Delhi’s liberalised urban landscape has become home to an increasingly globalized, consumerist middle class, disciplinary measures such as curfews, regulations over houseguests and increased surveillance simultaneously indicate a middle class recalibrating its gendered social coordinates by proving its commitment to values of female propriety. While popular discourses draw juxtaposed imaginaries of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ in their depictions of increasing individualism and a loosening of ‘traditional’ role expectations, this article demonstrates the need to consider the different structural conditions and local inflections in which struggles over women’s agency take place. Looking beyond the supposedly universalizing forces of globalized consumer modernity, the residential neighborhood hereby provides a view into the lived experiences of – at times incongruous – mechanisms at play in societies undergoing social change.     

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.     

The failure of Asian American representation in All-American Girl and The Cho Show

This article examines Korean American comedian Margaret Cho's attempts to represent Asian American identity as the star of two television sitcoms, All-American Girl (1994) and The Cho Show (2008). It begins with All-American Girl, showing how its contradictions around race, ethnicity and gender demonstrate the ideological boundaries of the network sitcom genre. It then looks at how the post-network ‘celebreality’ sitcom, The Cho Show, reproduces the assimilationist identity politics promulgated in All-American Girl even as it purports to critique them. The commercial failure of these shows is traced ultimately to the broader institutionalised racism and sexism of the US entertainment industry, its perpetuation of the neoliberal ideology of the American Dream and the internationalisation of that ideology by social minorities.     

Unpacking the landscape of female sex tourism in Kenya: a film analysis of Paradise: Love

This article examines Paradise: Love (2012, Dir. Ulrich Seidl), a compelling filmic account of the problematics of race, ethnicity, gender, and nation that organize contemporary accounts of female sex tourism. The storyline and visual imagery of the film positions Kenya – and a Eurocentric, homogenized, and reductive (mis)understanding of parts of ‘Africa’ – as an imagined site of racial and sexual adventure for older white Western women seeking intimate relationships with a category of local black men, many of whom enter into these sexual relationships in order to supplement personal and family economic shortfalls. This economy of intimate exchange is positioned as a trade of these black Kenyan men’s desire for money, local status, and the potential to travel to the West, for white Western women’s desire for sexual fulfillment from young black men’s bodies and their assumed sexual prowess. Deconstructing the discourses of female sex tourism through Paradise: Love centres the visual and representational components of processes of racialization and sexualization, wherein beach boys and white Western women gaze upon and ‘Other’ each other through essentialist and fetishized understandings of racial and sexual difference. In focusing on the power dynamics of female sex tourism in particular, the film plays up the shock value of women sexually exploiting men, pushing viewers to question: who counts as a sex tourist? Ultimately, this article seeks to enrich and extend scholarship that troubles intersecting power structures that shape and inform transnational inter-racial intimacies within economies of eroticized exchange.     

Getting comfortable to feel at home: clothing practices of black muslim women in Britain

This article explores the role of comfort as an affective encounter across bodies, objects (namely clothing) and spaces. I focus on how bodies that are marked as strange and a source of society’s discomfort negotiate this positioning through the presentation of one’s body. What does it mean for these bodies to be comfortable or uncomfortable? This question is answered through work done with Black Muslim women in Britain. By exploring how comfort is felt in relation to racially marked bodies, this article develops work on emotional geographies. Comfort is understood as both an emotional product and process that changes as bodies move across different spaces. In noting this movement, I also explore how boundaries around the body (enacted through e.g. the multi-dimensional hijab) presents a particular form of territorialisation that facilitates comfort as we present our bodies across different spaces. These boundaries can be both a source of comfort and discomfort through their positioning as deviant from social norms. In understanding the different roles of boundaries, I explore the social processes that construct comfort (or discomfort) as we move through different spaces. This is intertwined with furthering work on Muslim geographies by challenging the overwhelming focus placed on ‘public’ facing garments like the headscarf and abaya. Such a focus limits an understanding of the fluidity of Black Muslim women’s identities, and how these changes in our clothing practices affect and are affected by the relationships built across spaces.     

The stranger that is welcomed: female foreign students from Asia,the English language industry,and the ambivalence of ‘Asia rising’ in British Columbia,Canada

In 2002, attacks on six Asian women and girls temporarily living in the Greater Vancouver Area, Canada to study the English language garnered significant attention. Beginning with the attempted murder of Korean national Ji-Won Park, and ending with the murder of Chinese national Wei Amanda Zhao, the attacks on Asian females sparked a national debate about the vulnerability of foreign language students of Asian origin, and Canada's responsibility to protect them. Drawing on mainstream media accounts, this article examines how the intersection of race, gender and class produced the event as a story of national interest and as one of the province of British Columbia's most significant events of 2002. Highlighting the shifting positioning of Asian difference in contemporary western space, this research contributes to recent theorizing on how Asianness in the west no longer primarily signifies backward, underdeveloped nations and peoples best kept in their place, in another space. I argue that western discourse on Asian difference is defined by ambivalence. While the economics of the English language industry and the geopolitics of ‘Asia rising’ led to a heightened interest in these acts of violence, gender and processes of feminization simultaneously reduced concern over what is arguably an anxiety producing event in the west: Asia's economic ascendancy and the west's positioning in the ‘Asia Pacific century’.     

‘Mountain women’: silent contributors to the global agenda for sustainable mountain development

In this article, we examine the transnational and international discourses and initiatives focused on and/or carried out by the so-called ‘mountain women.’ Tracking the growing reference to ‘mountain women’, we analyze the way in which the construction and the claim of a gendered identity has developed within the general debate on the international recognition of the global importance of mountain environments that emerged about 20 years ago. Drawing on documents, a survey and interviews, our main objective is exploring how such a reference could lead to the making of an imagined community of ‘mountain women’ offering opportunities for political action. This article concludes that, though women are identified in international discourses as essential contributors to sustainable mountain development, the social identity ‘mountain women’ has not yet evolved into a collective identity around which political solidarities and strategies coalesce to ultimately ground collective action. Indeed, women's organizations have other themes on their agendas and are active at other scales apart from the global one. Indeed, few are willing to identify themselves as ‘mountain women.’ For the time being, ‘mountain women’ remain silent partners in the global agenda for sustainable mountain development.     

‘Concrete bodies’: young Latina women transgressing the boundaries of race and class in white inner-city Stockholm

This article examines young Latina women's interactions in the urban landscape of Stockholm, with a particular focus on white, middle-class areas, and how social difference and racial positioning are produced in and through the processes of urban segregation. Although Stockholm consists of different multiethnic and middle-class white suburbs, a discourse of sharp division between ‘the suburb’ and the inner-city is prevalent in the daily press. Here ‘the suburb’ is either portrayed as dangerous or exotic. This article is based on qualitative research with 29 young Latina women living and attending schools in both the suburban and inner-city areas. This approach facilitates an understanding of how gendered, racialized and classed aspects of segregation are embodied in multiple directions and how mechanisms of spatial exclusion prevail in predominantly white areas – often seen as ‘neutral’ or non-racialized areas. In conclusion, in order to capture the realities of young people's lives within materialized discourses of race and space, I argue that it is crucial to include white settings in the analysis, and experiences of exclusion.     

Female Icons,Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women's Agency in 1950s China

This article examines the construction of female subjectivity in emulation campaign materials of early Maoist China. Through critical examination of ‘nüjie diyi’ (the first female) model workers, I argue that Maoist proletarian subjectivity reflects a situated agency produced through empowerment and salvationist impulses. As the first women to engage in traditionally male professions like tractor driving, ‘nüjie diyi’ models can be read as objects of CCP policies and ideology. At the same time, however, their public presence challenged gendered conceptualisations of workplace, technological competence and proletarian identity. Moreover, their close ties to Soviet experts located these women within a geopolitical structure that occasioned alternative sites of female agency. As icons of socialist China and representatives of state‐sponsored feminism, ‘diyi’ women embodied historical progress and social change. Through these women multiple contending subjectivities emerged which simultaneously promised and delimited national feminist rhetoric and agency.     

美国劳工史研究中“阶级”的概念重构与范式更新

在20世纪美国劳工史研究中,“阶级”概念的内涵被多次重构。旧劳工史家们依据马克思主义的社会分析理论,把“阶级”视为在生产力基础之上形成的一种社会结构。60到80年代美国的新劳工史家在社会史的广阔视野中重新研究阶级。他们反对“阶级”的结构化定义,重视工人自身在“阶级”形成中的能动性,但是,这种“社会转向”也让阶级研究变得碎片化。90年代以后,受后现代主义思潮影响的学者们把种族、性别等分析范畴嵌入劳工史研究,从而解构了“阶级”概念的确定性,将其变为一个不稳定的、模糊不清的“社会和话语构造物”。随着“阶级”概念被多次重构,其作为一个分析范畴在劳工史中的重要性也呈现出弱化的趋势。     

‘Dulling it down a bit’: managing visibility,sexualities and risk in the Night Time Economy in Newcastle,UK

Drawing on qualitative interviews with young women in the UK, this article highlights how gendered and sexualised negotiations of visibility intersect and continue to be important in the ways in which young women self-regulate bodies and identities to manage risk in the Night Time Economy (NTE). Adopting visible markers of normative, heterosexual femininity on a night out can be understood as simultaneously mitigating against the risks of experiencing certain types of harassment, whilst increasing the risks of experiencing others. This article reaffirms the relevance of negotiations of visibility in shaping non-heterosexual women’s dress as a strategy for managing the risk of homophobic abuse and demonstrates some of the ways in which all young women – regardless of actual or perceived sexual identification – are required to police their bodies in order to manage the additional risks of ‘heterosexualised’ harassment in the NTE. These include threats of sexual violence and harassment primarily associated with women’s positioning as subordinated gendered subjects rather than with the policing of ‘non-normative’ sexualities, with findings suggesting that young women are more concerned with managing the risks associated with a heterosexualised male gaze rather than a homophobic gaze. ‘Everyday’ experiences of harassment are trivialised and normalised in bar and club spaces, and adopting markers of normative, heterosexual femininity was felt to increase the risks of receiving this kind of ‘unwanted attention’. Clearly, young women face challenges as they attempt to negotiate femininities, sexualities and safety and manage intersections of gender and sexuality in contemporary leisure spaces.     

‘English Vinglish’ and Bollywood: what is ‘new’ about the ‘new woman’?

Bollywood’s transnational mechanisms offer a unique space to study gendered subjectivity. My article studies a specific Bollywood movie, English Vinglish (2012) to draw out the profile of the ‘new woman.’ Persistently, I question the ‘new-ness’ to the construction of women when the ‘new’ reiterates the values of tradition, nation, and family. The ‘new’ seems to exist as a particular and unique transaction between local traditions and the global spread of populations that make limiting conceptions of woman, nation, or family, anomalies in a world propelled by expanding market needs and demands. The ‘new’ while offering possibilities for women, concomitantly carries different exclusions based on class, religion, language, and other identities. Understanding the formation of gender under contemporary conditions of transnationalism requires attentiveness to an insidious partnership of possibilities and exclusions that makes it simplistic to think in terms of progress or regress.     

Avenging ‘Bridget’: Irish domestic servants and middle-class America in the short stories of Maeve Brennan

This article will examine the representation of Irish women servants in Maeve Brennan's short stories, first published in The New Yorker in the 1950s, and collected in The Rose Garden (2001). The Irish ‘Bridget’, the most publicly visible, if troubling, image of Irish womanhood in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, has received much-needed attention from historians and social scientists in the last decade, and is a central figure in discussions of Irish women and diasporic identity in the American context. Drawing on this body of work, and focusing in detail on key stories from the collection, including ‘The Bride’, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, ‘The Anachronism’, ‘The Divine Fireplace’, and ‘The Servants’ Dance', I argue that Brennan's reimagining of the Irish Bridget can be approached as a form of feminist revisionism, as Brennan's stories enter into a charged dialogue with the history of imagining the Irish woman servant as an undesirable but necessary presence in middle-class American domestic culture. Brennan's self-reflexive reworking of this paradigm is informed by her work as a satirist for The New Yorker, and proves an effective means of writing back to this problematic history, as she takes up recognisable tropes and motifs from earlier representations of Bridget in popular and literary culture, and alters them in knowing and subversive ways.     

Four English ‘Bohemians’ Manqués: A Short-Term Resident,a Lost Opportunity,One to Do Without,and a Case of Confused Antecedents

Abstract

The article reflects the author’s longstanding interest in the appearance in the English lexicon of items emanating from the Bohemian/Czech environment, including the incidence of the very word Bohemian/bohemian. It discusses four cases where ‘Bohemian’ does not feature, though might well do so. These are: one bird name, the waxwing, once the ‘Bohemian waxwing’, which name survives only in American English because of the local need to distinguish the bird from another in the family; one spring flower, the early star-of-Bethlehem, restricted in Britain to a single site on the Welsh border, which could, on the basis of its Latin name, Gagea bohemica, have become the ‘Bohemian star-of-Bethlehem’; one pernicious hybrid knotweed, Reynoutria × bohemica, which has no common English name, but was identified and named in Bohemia, and would be potentially nameable geographically as ‘Bohemian knotweed’, like one of its parents, the Japanese knotweed; and one modest vegetable, the swede, which owes its name to a perceived origin in Sweden, though it is conjectured that during or after the Thirty Years’ War it was first taken to Sweden from Bohemia and so might have become analogously the ‘bohemian’. The article contains other conjectures as to the items’ origins and explores the history of their naming in Czech and German as well as English.     

20世纪30年代美国南部妇女阻止私刑协会的活动及其影响

20世纪30年代,以埃姆斯为首的中产阶层的白人妇女成立了美国南部妇女阻止私刑协会,开展了大量的反私刑活动,以女性的身份驳斥了私刑作为保护她们免受黑人性侵的正当性和必要性。她们的斗争不仅导致了私刑的减少和公共舆论的改变,而且迫使民权组织把斗争重点由反私刑转向反对教育中的种族隔离。她们不仅改善了南部的种族关系,成为民权运动的先驱,而且提升了妇女的社会形象,展示了妇女在社会改革中的重要性,成为女权运动的先驱。     

‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex,Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa

Based on archival research in Ghana and Britain, this article documents the sustained but failed attempts of working‐class West African seamen to repatriate to the colonies with their European wives during the interwar years. Colonial authorities crafted policies to prevent these couples from making British West Africa home because they feared that the presence of European women living ‘in native fashion’ with their African husbands would destabilise colonial race relations. After discussing the origins of this policy in the context of the 1919 race riots that swept Britain's port cities, the article draws on the case of a West African man married to a German woman to illuminate how concerns about race, sex, gender, nationality and class informed the politics of repatriation to British West Africa during the interwar years.     

An Archive of Difference: Syrian Women,the Peddling Economy and US Social Welfare, 1880–1935

Historians have scrutinised the racial classifications of Arab immigrants in the census, in immigration documents and in early‐twentieth‐century naturalisation cases. However, recent scholarship has shown that other archives – ones that do not focus on interactions with the law – reveal a different process of Arab‐American racialisation. This article contends that looking in other archival spaces, specifically the US social welfare archive, shows how ideas about gender, sexual and class difference constituted early Arab‐American racialisation. Social welfare reformers in institutional settings, including the International Institute of Boston, the National Conference of Social Work and the pages of the social work periodical The Survey, systematically linked Syrian labouring practices with notions of dependency, sexual and gender deviance, and Orientalist difference. Syrian women were racialised through their participation in the peddling economy – a network of peddlers, suppliers and domestic labourers that sustained a widespread profession of the early Syrian American community. Syrian women's labouring practices conflicted with white middle‐class femininity and posed a threat to Syrian claims of whiteness. This analysis demonstrates the centrality of gender, sexuality and class to studies of early Arab America and demonstrates how Arab migrant women's labouring practices affected their communities’ standing in the American context.     

What ‘Difference’ Does a Camera Make? Crime,Youth, and Representation in Mid-Century Mexico City

This article examines the discourse on juvenile crime in mid-century Mexico City through an analysis of visual culture namely the nota roja genre of sensationalist press, and the role photography played in ‘capturing’ delinquency. Placing visual technologies like photography as more active players in nation-building, the article traces the social role of photography in shaping moral panics and public perceptions of crime. Not breaking entirely from its Porfirian past, I observe how elites and the new urban middle class conflated criminality with the clases humildes and saw the causes of delinquency in the ‘degenerative’ traits of the poor. In a time of rapid demographic change and the expansion of mass culture, tabloid representations of juvenile crime reflected anxieties around social reproduction and the fear of political instability. This photographic record of life in Mexico City reveals one way that capitalinos would come to ‘see’ social difference and youthful citizenship in the post-revolutionary period.