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.     

Displacing Barthes: Self,Other and the Anxiety of Theory

This article explores the relationship between the other and the writing self in three of Barthes's works and shows how the anxious and changeable state of the ‘je’ unsettles conceptions of ‘theory’ and its analytical object. Barthes attempts to conceptualise cultural otherness in Mythologies, L'Empire des signes and Incidents, and, on one level, his fantasies of encounter serve to displace or unground the writing ‘self’. On another level, however, the theorist's persona in these works turns out to be disorientated and unnerved by these displacements, and he couples his jubilant self-dissolution with a longing for a sense of origin or ground. Barthes as a result remains undecided about his positioning within his own discourse, and his works demonstrate the necessary interpenetration of theories of alterity with the contradictory subjective and affective desires of the writing self. The aim of the piece is ultimately to argue that, for its very flaws and inconsistencies, Barthes's writing about otherness may help us to understand the challenges and deficiencies of postcolonial conceptions of cultural difference.     

Circassian Encounters: The Self as Other and the Production of the Homeland in the North Caucasus

Diasporas are an increasingly important phenomenon in the ‘era of globalization’. Transnational networks structure and restructure economic exchanges, familial bonds, cultural identities and political mobilization. This article examines one such diaspora, which traces its origin to the North Caucasus, the Circassians. The break-up of the Soviet Union has enabled some people to journey back to their ‘homeland’ and even take up residence there once again. Through such journeys and the encounters that accompany them, notions of identity, history, culture and tradition are challenged. This has the dual effect of fragmenting ethnic identity while simultaneously transforming the ‘homeland’ from an abstract concept to an everyday reality. The ensuing interplay between nation and diaspora is translated by different individuals in different ways. Three narratives of journeys to the homeland are presented here, showing the complex motivations and consequences of such journeys. Ethnographies of globalization thus reveal that concepts of ‘ethnicity’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘ethnonationalism’ have to be rethought in the context of shifting borders, transnational encounters and the production of diasporas.