‘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.     

Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining,Water and the Nature of Enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano

Abstract: This paper examines processes of primitive accumulation and livelihood dispossession on the Bolivian Altiplano. Through empirical examination of the social and environmental effects of mining waste, the paper demonstrates that indigenous campesino community members are experiencing livelihood dispossession by way of three interrelated forms of accumulation: accumulation of toxic sediments on agricultural fields; accumulation of water and water rights by mining firms; and accumulation of territory by mining operations. In the case under examination, full proletarianization is not taking place, and processes of dispossession are not a “fix” for an overaccumulation crisis. The paper argues for greater attention to the contingent role of nature's materiality in processes of dispossession and accumulation.     

The Game: Or, ‘the making of migration’ along the Balkan Route

‘The Game’ is how many refugees describe their attempts to informally travel to Western Europe via the so-called Balkan Route. This article conceptualises The Game as a spatial tactic implemented by refugees as a response to the impossibility of legally entering the EU and as a gray area in the governance of informal migrant mobilities. It does so by engaging with the recent literature on the Balkan Route to analyse how The Game has been performed and ‘managed’ in Serbia, a key ‘buffer state’ along this corridor. Drawing from Tazzioli's work on ‘The Making of Migration’, and in particular on her understanding of refugee forced mobility as a form of ‘migrant management’ on the part of the authorities, this article shows how the ambivalent connotations of The Game reveal the troubling configurations of EU border politics and of its formal and informal geopolitical arrangements. At the same time, it argues that the practices related to The Game ultimately reflect the extraordinary determination of the refugees in creating new itineraries, spatial interstices, invisible networks and ‘holes in the border walls’ that allow them, despite all the difficulties, to challenge such border politics. We conclude by proposing to understand The Game as part of the biopolitics of migration and by suggesting that it represents a powerful manifestation of the condition (and the field of possibility) of thousands of refugees along the Balkan Route today.     

Gender and sexual violence,forced marriages,and primitive accumulation during the Cambodian genocide, 1975–1979

Abstract

Between 1975 and 1979 approximately two million men, women, and children died during the Cambodian genocide. These deaths are attributed to specific administrative policies and practices initiated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), all of which were geared toward the basic objective of increasing agricultural production as a means of building socialism. A crucial question regarding these practices was whether the CPK implemented policies designed specifically to destroy the traditional family structure of Cambodia. Drawing on the work of Silvia Federici, this article argues that policies and practices forwarded by the CPK constitute a variation of primitive accumulation; and that transformations of the traditional family structure were conditioned by the overall social organization of production initiated by the CPK. However, a more pressing form of gendered violence is apparent – a mode that pivots on the social ordering of the CPK’s political economy.     

Banking Nature? The Spectacular Financialisation of Environmental Conservation

Abstract: In this paper I emphasise the financialisation of environmental conservation as 1. the turning of financiers to conservation parameters as a new frontier for investment, and 2. the rewriting of conservation practice and nonhuman worlds in terms of banking and financial categories. I introduce financialisation as a broadly controlling impetus with relevance for environmental conservation. I then note ways in which a spectacular investment frontier in conservation is being opened. I highlight the draw of assertions of lucrative gains, combined with notions of geographical substitutability, in creating tradable indicators of environmental health and harm. I disaggregate financialisation strategies into four categories—nature finance, nature work, nature banking and nature derivatives—and assess their implications. The concluding section embraces Marx and Foucault as complementary thinkers in understanding the transforming intensifications of late capitalism in environmental conservation, and diagnosing their associated effects and costs.