Women,Gender and Migration along a Mediterranean Frontier: Pre‐Colonial Tunisia,c.1815–1870

This paper investigates gendered mechanisms for regulating migrants and migration in a pre‐colonial Muslim state, Tunisia, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the eve of colonialism. Trans‐Mediterranean migration to, and permanent settlement in, nineteenth‐century Tunis, the capital city, constituted a major stimulus for political, cultural and social transformations that endured into the colonial period. Employing diverse documentation, the case study analyses this Mediterranean migratory current of ordinary women and men to test the theoretical literature based primarily on trans‐Atlantic movements, which has emphasised the ‘diversity of social positioning’ for women migrants. The paper argues that for pre‐colonial Tunisia, a state that was both an Ottoman province and a part of the larger Mediterranean world, the system of diplomatic protection represented a critical form of positioning. Moreover, Mediterranean states, both European and Muslim, had a long tradition of controlling the movements of women in port cities. Two distinct historical moments in the settlement of women from the Mediterranean islands in pre‐colonial Tunisia are compared. This approach not only enables an assessment of whether women's movements across international borders can attenuate, if only momentarily, patriarchal authority, but also encourages reflection on how gender explains historical variations in global migratory displacements as well as to what extent colonialism serves as an satisfactory explanatory framework for the gendering of communal boundaries.     

Shifting Bordering and Rescue Practices in the Central Mediterranean Sea,October 2013–October 2015

This counter‐mapping project illustrates the areas of intervention of different operations geared toward rescue and enforcement between 2013 and 2015, including the Italian Navy's “Mare Nostrum” search and rescue mission, the EU border agency Frontex's “Triton” enforcement operation, the humanitarian interventions of commercial vessels, and the action of civil‐society rescue vessels such as those operated by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF—Doctors Without Borders). The project offers a spatial understanding of the Mediterranean border‐scape, the practices of rescue and enforcement that occur within it, and the risk of sea‐crossing at this particular moment. Through these maps, the Central Mediterranean Sea emerges as a striking laboratory from which novel legal arrangements, surveillance technologies, and institutional assemblages converge.     

Reconstructing Diet of the Early Qin (ca. 700–400 BC) at Xishan,Gansu Province,China

Here we report the bone collagen carbon and nitrogen isotopic results of humans (n = 33) and animals (n = 58) to reconstruct the dietary practices of an early Qin population dating to the Zhou Dynasty (Late Western–Early Eastern period ca. 700–400 BC ) at the Xishan site in Gansu Province, China. The humans have a very large range of δ¹³C (−23.3‰ to −7.1‰) and δ¹⁵N (4.3‰ to 10.9‰) values which reflects extraordinarily diverse diets and included individuals with predominately C₃ as well as those with exclusive C₄ diets. This wide span of isotopic results produced a subtle linear trend (R² = 0.62) in the human data, which paralleled the animals across the C₃ and C₄ environmental gradient. However, the majority of the individuals had a predominately C₄ diet based on millet with δ¹⁵N results only slightly elevated above the animals, except for the pigs and cattle. This is evidence that many of the animals were likely used for their secondary products, labour or as sacrificial offerings and that pork and beef were the main sources of animal protein for the population. High status individuals had elevated δ¹⁵N values (10.2 ± 0.6‰) compared to medium (8.9 ± 0.3‰) and lower status (8.8 ± 0.8‰) individuals, possibly related to increased animal protein in the diet. Differences related to gender were also found with females having elevated δ¹³C (−11.2 ± 1.9‰) and δ¹⁵N (9.4 ± 0.8‰) values compared to the males (δ¹³C = −14.1 ± 4.2‰; δ¹⁵N = 7.9 ± 1.9‰), but these results necessitate caution given the large number of individuals that could not be sexed. The results of this study support the view that the early Qin people were a more sedentary society focused on millet agriculture and animal husbandry, and that they were influenced by the pre‐existing populations of the central Gansu region. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Erotic Modesty: (Ad)dressing Female Sexuality and Propriety in Open and Closed Drawers,USA, 1800–1930

When middle–class women began to wear drawers in the early 1800s, they were feminised by fabric, ornamentation and an open crotch. Incorporating open drawers into respectable women’s dress within a framework of ‘passionlessness’ constructed female sexuality as both erotic and modest. Crotch construction figured in the twentieth–century struggle to establish modern boundaries of women’s sexual propriety. The accepted sexual and moral meanings generated by open– and closed–crotch undergarments reversed as women increasingly chose to wear closed drawers during a period of women’s greater public presence and feminist activism. The transition from open to closed drawers reveals not only the power of clothing as a medium of significance, but how women’s struggles for autonomy interact with resistant social forces to reconfigure gender distinctions.