Mapping women in Tehran's public spaces: a geo-visualization perspective

Functioning public spaces, as ‘public’ political, social, and cultural arenas of citizen discourse, affect not only the citizen's quality of life, but are also indispensable infrastructure in democratic societies. This article offers a nuanced understanding of Iranian women's usage, feelings, and preferences in public spaces in present-day Tehran by not simply importing Western theories that sustain distinctions between traditional and modern women, but instead by hearing women's stories. This article raises concerns related to the gender identities, the politics of space, and design of these places. Meidan-e-Tajrish, Sabz-e-Meidan, and Marvi Meidancheh in Tehran accommodate an ethnographic visualization of gendering space. The process by which Iranian women attach symbolic meanings to those public spaces offers insight into the mutual construction of gender identities and space politics. The contrasting urban locations, different design styles, and distinct social activities provide an excellent comparison between the selected public spaces. Findings suggest caution in using gender as an essential category in feminist geography research to better represent the diversity of experiences in public spaces. Binary categorization of modern versus traditional, secular versus religious, public versus private, and male versus female in urban studies should be carefully validated as Iranian women's lived experiences challenge the homogenizing Western theories, particularly the predominant critics of modern public spaces in North America. The research process also highlights the benefits of geo-visualization in understanding the complex interaction between gender identities and the built environment.     

他者的身体实践与城市公共空间融入研究——以“麦宿者”为例

“身体”是管窥和解读社会文化现象的重要视角。基于身体地理学,探讨他者身体与城市空间之关系,可为理解边缘群体与城市公共空间融入提供有益视角。文章以长期夜宿于麦当劳餐厅的“麦宿者”为例,探讨其身体实践与城市公共空间之相互作用,以剖析边缘群体对城市公共空间融入的过程机制。研究发现：麦宿者身体特征具有鲜明的他者性,并主要通过物质性和非物质性的身体实践来与饮食空间开展协商,通过在特定时空下的弱化他者性,来实现饮食空间的融入。文章建立了他者身体与城市公共空间相互作用的理论框架,在身体实践方面对身体地理学的相关理论进行了补充。     

‘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.     

Emerging geographies of disciplining the ageing body: practising cosmetic technologies in the aesthetic clinic

Despite attention to the body over the last two decades, there has been a lack of geographical consideration of the emotional and embodied contexts of ageing. In this article I argue that examination of the multiple ways in which the ageing body is experienced and modified offers productive insights into geographical perspectives on gender, health and technology. This article introduces cosmetic anti-ageing practices as a form of ‘management’ and ‘modification’ of the ageing body. Anti-ageing practices have become increasingly ubiquitous in the last decade and are a significant driver of growth and innovation in the cosmetic industry. Despite their prevalence, however, there has been a lack of geographical attention to the knowledges, practices and spaces associated with cosmetic modification of the ageing body. This article draws on ethnographic and interview data from extensive fieldwork conducted in a range of aesthetic clinics in South-West England, exploring the emotional, embodied and spatial encounters of anti-ageing practices and the intertwining, and explicitly gendered, discourses of health and well-being in which they are situated.     

Hearing girls’ silences: thoughts on the politics and practices of a feminist method of group discussion

Many contemporary feminist research methods employed in the interest of realizing social justice advocate ‘listening’ to subordinated others, groups variously categorized and marginalized by gender, sexuality, race, age, and so on, in order to examine the sources and workings of knowledge construction and social power. Increasingly, feminist scholars are using group discussion or focus groups, in an effort to give subordinated others ‘a voice.’ Group discussions are seen as potentially empowering in exploring and enabling group members’ social agency and knowledge production while at the same time diminishing the unequal power relations between the researched and researcher. In this article, I argue that the attention given to ‘voices’ in group discussions (dis)misses meaning‐ful silences thereby limiting its political potential. There exists an ‘epistemological messiness’ inherent in a feminist group discussion method that makes it difficult to hear meaning‐ful silences. Through reflection on my own research into the spaces of adolescent Latina gender identities, this article offers some insights into this messiness and recommends that a feminist group discussion method be guided by a politics of voice which includes ‘silence within voice.’     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

Gendered Couchsurfing: women from Western Europe and East-Asia contesting de-sexualised cosmopolitanism

Couchsurfing is a social-networking site for hospitality exchange. To promote the site, the organizer, Couchsurfing.org, creates the discourse of Couchsurfing cosmopolitanism to emphasize the value of sharing with strangers and tolerance of cultural difference in Couchsurfing practice. This study argues that the discourse production is under a patriarchal system, in which the experience about women’s fear of men’s harassment and according practice are concealed. By conceptualizing the sexed-and-gendered body in Couchsurfing, this study exposes the power, knowledge and social relation in the cross-cultural context of Couchsurfing, represented not only in women’s feeling, performance and interaction but also in their embodied cosmopolitanism. The comparison between with Western-European and East-Asian women’s experience is also included in the analysis. It highlights the effects of the gender role inscribed on women’s body which makes a difference in women’s cross-cultural interaction as well as their embodied cosmopolitanism.     

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 unavoidable salience of gender: notes from Australian childcare work

This article explores the gendering of work in Australian childcare settings from a post-gender perspective. Much early childhood research focuses on encouraging men into the field, seeing their presence as beneficial to the perceived worth of childcare work. Such research ignores how women’s gendered experiences, as the overwhelming majority of the workforce, are already shaping the field, creating an image of this work apparently unpalatable to most men. I show how gendered relations have a profound impact, even in mono-gendered spaces like childcare, to the continuing disadvantage of women. Workers caught within binary understandings of gender appear to draw on normative gendered discourses to understand the social and economic positioning of the field, rather than more emancipatory framings. This article argues that perspectives that actively question biomedical understandings of gender can be useful in understanding and challenging the gendering of particular societal spaces, such as childcare services.     

Devout Muslim masculinities: the moral geographies and everyday practices of being men in Turkey

While the academic focus on Muslim women’s dress and comportment has enriched our understanding of the multifaceted formation of pious femininities, there has been much less consideration of the embodied practices of Muslim men. What work does exist on Middle Eastern men’s piety, sexuality, and everyday conduct too often falls back on established categories, such as traditional, Western, or Islamic identities. Yet it is crucial not only to critically examine how we conceptualize masculinity in the Middle East, but also to recognize the political and cultural importance of how masculinities are enacted through everyday practices. In this article, we argue that questions of dress and bodily practice are relevant to an understanding of how young devout Muslim men navigate the complex spatiality of piety, morality, and masculinity in contemporary urban Turkey. Drawing on fieldwork with young devout men in Konya and Istanbul, we illustrate how multiple, competing devout Muslim masculinities participate in the production of uneven moral geographies in these two very different Turkish cities. Further, we find that the possibility of different ways to enact devout masculinity opens questions about the universality of Islamic knowledge and practice. We suggest that the embodied construction and regulation of the looking-desiring nexus tethers male sexual desire to the public performance of Islamic morality. Our intervention is thus to demonstrate how different versions of masculinity and Islamic piety striate the moral geographies of these two Turkish cities, and thereby to further recognition of the contingency and plurality of both masculinity and Islam.     

Like father,like son: negotiation of masculinity in the ethnographic context in Hong Kong

Feminist geographers have indicated that ethnographic research is an inter-subjective process constructed in relation to the intersection between the gender and other social dimensions of both the researcher and the informants relevant to the field. In particular, the matching and adaptation of masculinities in the research context is a complex methodological issue that receives relatively little attention. Using my fieldwork experience, this article builds on the contribution of feminist geographers to discuss how my masculine self-presentation was negotiated with the research topic, the caring masculinity endorsed among my middle-aged male informants, the sociocultural milieu and my positionalities and bodily representations in producing collaborative ethnographic data. My young age and doctoral student status, combined with my ‘soft and meek’ self-presentation, produced wen masculinity within the Chinese cultural context, which facilitated the paradoxical reception of me as both a son and a consultant in the men's groups. This masculine embodiment not only facilitated our rapport but also signified my cultural competence to participate in decision-making and activist activities in the discussion groups, which brought me to some unexpected research lands. The effect of my masculine embodiment on the ethnographic research process indicates that fieldwork is not only situated in a place but is also itself a space constructed through cultural understanding of social interactions and embodied gender representations.     

#Follow: exploring the role of social media in the online construction of male sex worker lives in Dublin,Ireland

This article draws from qualitative interviews with 18 South American male sex workers in Dublin, exploring how their use of the gym and new social media has created alternative spaces for the conduct of commercial sex. The interviews reveal how sex workers alternatively use escort specific sites in conjunction with mainstream dating apps like Grindr, offering greater flexibility and control over how they are self-defined within the sex industry. These male sex workers become known for their presence in gyms and clubs within the small gay community offering potential clients a real-time embodied interaction. Social media, like Instagram, offered the men in this study a further platform to share part of a choreographed online world with thousands of followers presenting new economic opportunities. The men trade access to their bodies and to their taste in designer commodities and lifestyle to interact with followers who can financially contribute to dictate the format of the photos available for private or public consumption.     

Manoeuvring men: masculinity as spatially defined readability at the grandes manoeuvres of the Belgian army, 1882–1883

This article uses the case study of the Belgian grandes manoeuvres of 1882 and 1883 to explore the ways in which self-defined ‘all male’ spaces can contribute to the study and deconstruction of historical masculinities. Using the manoeuvres of the Belgian army at the end of the nineteenth century as a theatre of (military as well as civilian) corporeal and discursive practices, the simultaneous enactment of masculinity and nation is analysed. The material spaces in which these military exercises took place are understood as contingent creators instead of passive containers of masculinity: that is, rather than as a passive background to soldiers' movements, the champ de manoeuvres appears as an active stage, aiding the construction of a gendered military identity, but also challenging dichotomous understandings of gender. Likewise, the gaze upon both landscape and soldiers by different audiences plays an active part in the story of the construction of masculinity and nation: the act of recognition, performed by male and female civilians, during and after the manoeuvres was crucial for the continuous repetition of the discourse that created and upheld notions of ‘man’ and of ‘Belgium’.     

A feminist-phenomenology of women’s activism against hydropower plants in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region

Taking a feminist-phenomenological perspective of the body, this article provides an empirically grounded analysis of the embodied subjectivity of women in the movement against hydropower plants (HPPs) in the culturally and spatially specific context of the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. Informed by a feminist engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of ‘the body-subject’, ‘the flesh’ and Einfühlung, the article places subjectivity within a relational ontology of sentience and intelligence in which corporeal experiences, senses and affects condition cognitive and agential processes. Bodily senses and affects are thus treated as media of subjectivity. The relationship between water and identity, established through memory, heritage and history, is also produced and/or conserved by the embodied relation between women’s bodies and bodies of water, within the connective ‘flesh’ of the physical world. The case of the Eastern Black Sea demonstrates how political subjectivity of women in the movement against HPPs is conditioned by an intimate embodied relationship with river waters that is sustained by a series of sensory-affective experiences. Their statements emphasize, over and over again, an interconnectedness with the rivers, which makes the cause of anti-HPP struggle vital and urgent for them. This feeling of urgency is a source of women’s radicalism in opposing HPPs. The article maintains the female subject as embodied and transversal, and stresses the centrality of corporeal experience, sense and affect in formation of political subjectivity. By developing a body-centred feminist-phenomenological approach to political subjectivity, it introduces a novel way of analysing women’s activisms within and beyond environmental movements.     

Hyper or hypo-masculine? Re-conceptualizing ‘hyper-masculinity’ through Seattle’s gay,leather community

This article offers a critique of the concept of hyper-masculinity and a more nuanced, place contingent, critical way to think about masculinity. I use the concept of hyper-masculinity to highlight a conceptual problem between essentialist and de-essentialized notions of gender. Constructionist notions of masculinity (and gender) do not escape the essentialist problem; however, by critiquing and offering a placed conceptualization of hyper-masculinity based on Seattle’s gay leather community, I push the boundaries of masculinity and gender to arrive at a more nuanced, embodied, place-based and contingent understanding of hyper-masculinity thereby side-stepping debates that essentialist/constructionist. Through participant-observations and ethnographic interviews with men who practice hyper-masculinity within the gay leather community in Seattle, USA, I interrogate hyper-masculinity within the community to demonstrate how it reinforces and subverts heterosexual gender roles and homonormativity.     

Bosnia‐Herzegovina

Abstract

As a newly emerging sub-field within human geography, carceral geography offers a unique perspective and understanding of closed spaces. Reflecting this development, three types of closed institutions provide the background for this empirical paper. The nature and experience of these spaces of confinement are explored by using in-depth qualitative interviews with young women in Scotland. The focus on gender-/age-specific characteristics and physical and spatial features reveals the processes of being ‘locked up’, of the perception of confinement and emotional responses to prison, secure care and closed psychiatry. The young women's accounts of these closed institutions are seldom heard in discourses on crime and punishment, providing an in-depth insight into these otherwise enclosed spaces. Considering the geography of three carceral systems, this study extends beyond physical detainment and works towards an understanding of the carceral experience as an emplaced, gendered, embodied, emotional and often repetitive practice. This paper is based on a larger empirical study and uses selected results of this more extensive data to exemplify ‘the carceral’ in this particular context.     

BodiesTouchingBodies: Jenny Saville's over-life-sized paintings and the ‘morpho-logics’ of fat,female bodies

Recent work in geography on materiality and embodiment has drawn attention to the ways that the varied materials of bodies, their capacities to leak and flow, to grow and shrink and endure and disappear, are central to an understanding of the spatialities of bodily experience. This article seeks to contribute to this work by considering how bodies touch themselves, or what I have termed ‘intra-body touching’, through an interrogation of two over-life-sized paintings (Branded and Propped) by the artist Jenny Saville. Her paintings present the topographies of a female fleshy body through detailed observations of bodily surfaces and orifices which include breasts hanging, hands grabbing and fat rolling and pressing upon itself. In drawing upon Luce Irigaray's critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty's account of hands touching, the article seeks to utilise her notion of the mucous for highlighting the ‘morpho-logics’ of sexed and sized bodies as they are produced through the example of intra-body touching. A focus upon the embodied spatialities of intra-body touching challenges accounts of the female body that centre upon women being located in a position of estrangement and distance from its varied materialities. Instead it will suggest that Saville's bodies are centred upon distinctly geographical relations of proximity and intimacy in ways which surprise and challenge our understandings of what a fleshy body can do.     

‘Working out’ for two: performances of ‘fitness’ and femininity in Australian prenatal aerobics classes

In this article, I consider the distinctly classed places/spaces in which affluent Australian pregnant women physically maintain their bodies through aerobics. The case study described is drawn from data obtained between 2006 and 2008 in a longitudinal study examining feelings about body image and ‘fatness’ in a sample of pregnant women in Melbourne, Australia. The ways in which pregnant bodies are disciplined within gym spaces are discussed through a case study of a prenatal fitness centre, FitForTwo, and drawing on narrative data of pregnant informants. FitForTwo is described as a primary site for the performance of ‘fit’ pregnancy and underscored by bodies that can be shaped, trained, moulded and modified. This case study is analysed against a backdrop of a growing Australian moral panics about ‘fighting’ maternal obesity. It adds to a body of feminist geographical and qualitative studies of pregnancy, bringing both a more sustained, longitudinal analysis than previously offered, and an Australian context that offers rich comparative material.     

Genderism and the Bathroom Problem: (re)materialising sexed sites, (re)creating sexed bodies

This article introduces the possibilities of a new term, ‘genderism’, to describe the hostile readings of, and reactions to, gender ambiguous bodies. Genderism is used here to articulate instances of discrimination that are based on the discontinuities between the sex with which an individual identifies and how others, in a variety of spaces, read their sex. The article suggests that intersections between queer theories, that destabilise the dichotomy of man/woman, and performative geographies, that recognise the (re)formation of space, could facilitate, and indeed necessitate, a consideration of how the illusion of dichotomous sexes is (re)formed at the site of the body (re)constituting men and women in context. Nine women, who participated in a wider research project about non‐heterosexual women's lives, spoke of being mistaken for men yet understanding themselves and living as women. Using these narratives the ‘bathroom problem’, where women are read as men in toilets and as a result subjected to abusive and even violent reactions, is examined. These policing behaviours demonstrate the instability of sexed norms as well as how sites can be (re)made ‘woman only’ and simultaneously ‘women's’ bodies (re)produced. The article then examines how women negotiate the policing of sexed spaces such that bodies, sexed sites (toilets) and the location of these sites (nightclubs, service stations) are mutually constituted within sexed regimes of power. In this way the article aims to explore how sexed power relations (re)form the mundane ‘stuff’ of everyday life by examining moments where boundaries of gender difference are overtly (en)forced.