Local gender contract and adaptive capacity in smallholder irrigation farming: a case study from the Kenyan drylands

This article presents the local gender contract of a smallholder irrigation farming community in Sibou, Kenya. Women's role in subsistence farming in Africa has mostly been analyzed through the lens of gender division of labor. In addition to this, we used the concept of ‘local gender contract’ to analyze cultural and material preconditions shaping gender-specific tasks in agricultural production, and consequently, men's and women's different strategies for adapting to climate variability. We show that the introduction of cash crops, as a trigger for negotiating women's and men's roles in the agricultural production, results in a process of gender contract renegotiation, and that families engaged in cash cropping are in the process of shifting from a ‘local resource contract’ to a ‘household income contract.’ Based on our analysis, we argue that a transformation of the local gender contract will have a direct impact on the community's adaptive capacity climate variability. It is, therefore, important to take the negotiation of local gender contracts into account in assessments of farming communities' adaptive capacity.     

Translations of Gender Equality among Rural Arsi Oromo in Ethiopia

How are global policies on women's rights and gender equality translated into local contexts and who are the translators in this process? This article describes and analyses contradictory and competing translations of gender equality in two districts in Ethiopia. Two main strands of translations are identified: ‘gender experts’ in the government's gender machinery emphasize the importance of changing the gendered division of labour while the ‘grassroots’ underscore the importance of collaborative work and mutual agreement through conjugal dialogue. Although these translations are similar in terms of their focus on labour, they represent fundamentally different visions of gender equality, the first reflecting a vision of equality as sameness, the latter ideals of gender complementarity. Rather than presenting one or both translations as examples of resistance against or misinterpretation of gender equality, I argue that contemporary theories of translation and discursively informed theories on global norm diffusion offer perspectives that allow us to recognize the potential of contestations in meaning creation. This opens up the translational space as the ‘grassroots’ are recognized as translators.     

Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis

This article examines the historically and culturally specific valence of ‘gender’ as currently deployed in the field of gender and women's history. It draws broadly on the scholarship on gender since the 1980s, while focusing particularly on the case of the British North American colonies and the early United States republic. The essay argues against the common practice of assuming that gender, understood as an oppositional binary, functions virtually universally as a primary process for representing differential power. It concludes by calling for a way of thinking about gender that can recognise important historical and cultural alternatives.     

Embodied negotiations: identity,space and livelihood after trade zones in the Dominican Republic

In this article, I analyze socio-spatial processes of subject-making at the center of the restructuring of export industries. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘embodied negotiations’ to explain the spatial and corporeal experience of trade zone workers reproduced as migrants with the collapse of garment exports in the Dominican Republic. Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine ‘rural return’ as both a livelihood strategy and a discourse shaped by inter-related gender and racial ideologies of labor as well as the uneven transnationalization of rural and urban localities. I show how the negotiation of social position by subjects marked by race, gender and class is always also a negotiation of spatial position in and between localities structured through raced, gendered and class relations. Men's efforts to remain in urban areas as a form of social ‘whitening’ are compared to women's resistance to rural return as an attempt to stay in circulation as paid labor. Overall, I argue that feminist research on global production should be ‘spatialized’ by attending to livelihoods and practices of subject-making that emerge in parallel to export restructuring.     

Medicalising menstruation: a feminist critique of the political economy of menstrual hygiene management in South Asia

Women's use of water differs from men in essentially one aspect: in cleansing the body of menstrual blood. The pledge of the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector to place ‘women at the centre’ of development has in recent years, therefore, come to focus on menstruation. International development agencies have begun to push the agenda of menstrual hygiene management (MHM), but their use of a medical approach requires critical rethinking. This article argues that through MHM lessons, menstruation is medicalised to construct new and repressive expectations of normality for the female body. A medical construction also poorly accommodates the natural biological process of menstruation within the gamut of existing sociocultural practices. Consequently, menstruation becomes associated with the perceived need for not only sanitisation of the female body of the rural poor, but also to turn it into a working body that is able to ceaselessly and ‘normally’ perform its productive and reproductive chores. I note that the success of medicalisation relies upon the separation of the body from its purported waste, the menstrual blood. Once menstruation is confined to a pathological condition, treatable only by public agents such as doctors and commercially produced goods such as sanitary napkins, a defining essence of womanhood is thereby dissociated from the female body.     

Constructing Gendered Workplace ‘Types’: The weaver–millworker distinction in Dundee's jute industry,c. 1880–1910

Victorian and Edwardian Dundee was labelled a ‘woman's town’ due to the high proportion of women who worked in the city's staple jute industry. In this article, drawing on a range of contemporary sources, I use the work of feminist historians and Foucauldian notions of discourse to interrogate this label and explore why and how working women came to be marked as particularly problematic. Further, in questioning this label, I demonstrate how two specific workplace ‘types’—the weaver and millworker—were identified and constructed in contrast to one another. This article probes the processes through which these two ‘types’ were created, contested and performed in relation to the segregations and working conditions of their respective workplaces, and argues for a markedly spatial interrogation of gender identities and the category ‘working woman’.     

Negotiating gender dynamics in heteronormativity: extramarital intimacy among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea

This article examines the liminal space that exists both as a structural condition engendered by transnational migration and as a state that is self-consciously carved out by migrants. It demonstrates that this space provides the grounds for migrants to develop ‘deviant heterosexuality’, such as extramarital relationships while simultaneously causing dilemmas and contestation of gender dynamics in conjugal and familial relationships. Drawing on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, I elucidate the extramarital relationships among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea. By incorporating discussions of ‘queer heterosexualities’ and Hubbard's geographical engagement of sexuality into analysis, I argue that migrants' extramarital practices are shaped not only by dominant discourse, but also through the particular social and spatial positioning of individuals. First, I demonstrate that the liminal space gives migrant Filipino workers a certain degree of autonomy from the power and ideological interventions of both sending and host societies. Second, I highlight the liminal space that is extended by migrants themselves, especially through the increasing economic ability and mobility of migrant women, which can reconfigure the modes of heteronormativity and gender structure in conjugal, familial and extramarital relationships. In the end, I argue that transnational migration results not only in provisional liminality but also prolonged liminality through migrants' initiative in pursuing their desired heterosexuality and their endeavour to convert extramarital relationships into long-term intimacy. This study contributes to the discussion of the interplay between heterosexuality/heteronormativity and gender in recent human migration.     

‘Filial son’, the family and identity formation among male migrant workers in urban China

This article is based on an ethnographic study of life histories of 28 rural–urban (internal) migrant men located within southern China. It explores their narratives with a particular focus on changing social relations within the family, from the perspective of migrant sons. It argues that traditional gender norms, such as those attached to being a ‘filial son’, are lived out, albeit reworked, among Chinese male migrant workers across generations. The men recount the role of traditional familial gender norms, which are central cultural resources in forging their ‘dislocated’ identities within specific temporal and spatial conditions. For example, being a ‘filial son’ has become an important reference point for these mobile male workers to actively negotiate their emerging masculine identities in the process of negotiating urban lives, while living away from their rural homes. The article also explores a more complex understanding of rural–urban migration in terms of critically engaging with the men's well-being as urban workers.     

Spatial Displacements: Transnationalism and the new social movements

This paper looks at connections between transnationalism and the new social movements in the USA. Drawing on feminist and 'queer theory' critiques of totalising 'lesbian-feminist' and 'radical feminist' arguments, as well as on the neo-Marxist analyses of transnationalism, I argue that it is possible to theorise transnational 'flexible accumulation' in terms of gender, race and sexuality as well as class. I analyse David Harvey's argument about the role of the 'spatial fix' and 'temporal fix' in post-modernity. I compare Harvey's approach to the analysis of post-modernity with Mike Davis's more local/global analytic. I contrast their approaches with the ways that the notion of displacement can be applied to the deconstructive reading of narrative and representational texts. I conclude with an analysis of the way transnationalism is displaced, as multiplanetary capitalism, in C.J. Cherryh's science fiction. Cherryh links the construction of spatialities to ways of constructing gender, species, and sexualities, as well as to changes in the mode of production. Her heroines, too, as translators, knowledge brokers and political intriguers, are centrally involved in the crisis of accumulation in the novels' fictive universe. In this way, Cherryh's fictions, and her heroines' actions, produce an implicit theorisation of accumulation, based on gender, and sexuality, as well as class.     

The English Patient and the Italian Risorgimento: Medical Tourism and the Body Politic in Giovanni Ruffini's Doctor Antonio (1855)

Doctor Antonio (1855), Giovanni Ruffini's novel of therapeutic travel, cross-cultural love and Risorgimento propaganda, pairs an English patient's quest for renewed health in Italy in the 1840s with the concurrent resurgence of the Italian nation through political action. An Italian revolutionary activist turned man of English letters, Ruffini wrote seven novels in English, of which the second, Doctor Antonio, was his greatest critical and popular success. Employing the popular Victorian practice of recuperative travel as a key plot device, and using this device to convey Italian political messages to nineteenth-century English readers, the novel offers a context-specific variation of the rhetorical tradition of representing the ‘body politic’ as a site of health, disease and medical management. This essay investigates Doctor Antonio's relation to Anglo-Italian literary, political and medical contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. More specifically, it analyses how the novel's medical plot supports Ruffini's aims of challenging negative stereotypes of Italians and advancing the cause of Italian liberalism. A reading of Lucy Davenne's illness and treatment as an allegory for the condition of the ailing, but potentially resurgent, Italian nation is developed and critically reflected upon. The intersection of medical and political frames of meaning in the text is further explored by interpreting the space and community of Lucy's convalescence as the model of an ideal society to which both English and Italians might aspire. Finally, the essay considers the novel's material impact on the development of medical tourism in northern Italy, and the political significance of this impact.     

The domestic residue: feminist mobility and space in Simryn Gill's art

Feminism, now nearly half a century old, is still fractured by two divisive forms – the desire to emancipate women from masculinist power structures, and the affirmation of woman's sexual difference. However, as Teresa de Lauretis and Gillian Rose argue, for feminism to remain relevant, it must also be attentive to the fluid hegemonic conditions of power, and thus, strive to evolve new ‘forms’, which emphasize feminism's political mobility. Developing this proposition, this article discusses how a new critical feminist mobility may be detected in the work of Sydney-based Malaysian artist Simryn Gill. Born in Singapore in 1959, and hailing from a migrant Punjabi family who first settled in Malaya in the 1920s, Gill constantly travels between her home in Sydney and her family bungalow in Port Dickson, a small coastal town in Malaysia. I will discuss how Gill's feminist perspective may be mapped through the artist's shifting spatial contexts by looking at three spaces – the gallery, the domestic interior and the tropics. Through these spaces, I will explore how the artist occupies the dual roles of ‘woman’ and ‘women’, thus demonstrating the changing and fluid energy of a mobile feminist stance. Gill's art valorizes the domestic sphere as a recurring theme with this subject being central to her self-definition in the public sphere. Yet, her treatment of domesticity is distinct in its furtiveness, a tactic, which I argue, enables a feminist agency that is politically mobile, and capable of engaging issues of gender, sexuality, race, class and citizenship.     

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 Gender Dynamics of Dress Gifts from Elizabethan Men at the Court of Elizabeth I

This article explores the gender dynamics of giving dress gifts at the Elizabethan court (1558–1603). Current scholarship considers the role of elite women and the ‘favourite’ in giving dress gifts. In contrast, this article seeks to understand the significant but largely overlooked role of merchant and courtier men as both givers of dress to Elizabeth I and holders of vital information that others relied upon in giving dress gifts to her. Drawing on New Year's gift lists, correspondence and records of progresses this article shows how an approach informed by material culture and situated in a gendered framework actually complicates our understanding of the Elizabethan court's culture of dress gifts. A gendered analysis highlights that merchant and courtier male subjects, sometimes in tandem with their wives, played a vital role in shaping the fashion and economy of early modern England by providing innovative and tasteful offerings to their queen. Dress gifts from male subjects strongly influenced Elizabeth's image of magnificence and made the English court one of the most fashionable in Europe.     

The salon as clinic: problematising,treating, and caring for skin

In this paper I draw upon Foucault's concept of the clinic, as well as his later work on the ‘care of the self’, in a consideration of the problems that are diagnosed, and the treatments that take place, within the beauty salon. As biotechnology descends to the sub-molecular level, so those spaces that are linked to the laboratory through the diffusion of knowledges, practices and material products—such as the salon—are also reworked. Traditionally the locus for an array of experts in both body and mind who instruct (mostly) women on how to care for the self, salons use a series of ‘cutting edge’ treatments to pamper and groom the body, correcting as it does so various problem areas such as the skin. I argue, using interview material from salon managers and employees, for the beauty salon as a key site wherein health and medical knowledge is disseminated, and the clinical gaze is brought to bear.     

St John's Ambulance Brigade and the Gendering of ‘Passive Defence’ in British Malaya, 1937–42

The St John's Ambulance Brigade established itself in British Malaya in the 1930s, as part of efforts to mobilise and train the colony's subjects for civil defence as the geo‐strategic climate in the Pacific deteriorated. This article demonstrates how the provision of emergency medical care was a gendered and racialised undertaking in the colonial context. Unlike the military, comprising mainly European and ‘trusted’ ethnic Indian soldiers, the realm of ‘passive defence’ was identified as a feminised undertaking for women and ethnic Chinese men who were considered to be either too vulnerable or too disloyal to bear arms. The rapid advance of Japan's military in south‐east Asia violently shattered such social boundaries, as many women and non‐European volunteers found themselves exposed by retreating Allied forces to the Japanese offensive and took up duties at posts from which their European supervisors had been forced to desert. Mainstream military historiography has often been highly gendered towards what is considered as the male‐dominated public domain of the battlefield. In this respect, the involvement of the St John's Ambulance Brigade reveals the process in which colonial ethno‐gender identities and hierarchies were being established, appropriated and subsequently subverted by the exigencies of the war in British Malaya.     

Erotic Attachment,Identity Formation and the Body Politic: The Woman‐as‐nation in Canadian Graphic Satire, 1867–1914

Using depictions of ‘Miss Canada’ in editorial cartoons and political campaign posters published in English Canada between 1867 and 1914 as a case study, this article argues that the repetitive deployment of feminised and eroticised images of the nation summoned particular gender, sexual and political identities into being and entangled viewers’ psychic investments in masculine, heterosexual and nationalist subjectivities. It also considers how Miss Canada's normative representation as white conflated racial whiteness and Canadian‐ness, and how images hailed viewers into racial subjectivities that were leashed to national identity. Rather than querying how or why the woman‐as‐nation trope elicited nationalist sentiment in an already‐constituted subject, this analysis examines how imagery provoked viewers’ identification with subject positions that were co‐constituted with nationalism. Impassioned and even violent nationalism becomes more comprehensible when we consider that the woman‐as‐nation was capable of producing attachments to national identity that, for some, were inseparable from and tantamount to psychic investments in gender, sexual and racial identities. While Canadian scholars have recognised that Miss Canada was a significant popular culture icon during the long nineteenth century and acknowledged this icon's embeddedness in gender, sexual and national discourses, studies have tended to describe Miss Canada's role in consolidating hegemonic ideologies and power relations and underestimate visual culture's constitutive capacities. The extent of Miss Canada's hetero‐erotic coding has also largely escaped historians’ notice. Although a few scholars have explored visual culture's role in Canadian national identity formation during this era, this study makes a unique contribution by foregrounding the productive work of popular imagery in co‐constituting and entwining national and sexual subjectivities.     

Drought policy in Australia: gender mainstreaming or gender blindness?

Australia is experiencing a major drought, one that has devastated the landscape and people for up to ten years. This major disaster has accelerated ongoing rural restructuring and created changes in the way farm family members order and live their lives. Yet despite evidence that drought is a gendered experience, that is, that generally women and men experience and respond to drought differently, and despite a rhetorical move to gender mainstreaming in Australian policy circles, drought policy remains significantly gender blind. In this article I use the example of emergency support to poverty stricken farm families to show how agricultural departments that attend to a notional norm of family farming as a unitary male pursuit can actively discriminate against women in their efforts to preserve the farm and support their families. The article exposes gender mainstreaming as an ‘empty signifier’ that is contextually grounded and that its success is highly dependent on making these issues transparent. For gender equity efforts to reach women at local levels, I argue that gender mainstreaming requires international collaboration by gender specialists to facilitate greater attention to gender assessments by national bodies. It also requires national coalitions of gender expert units, women's organisations and academics to work together to expose culturally specific gendered issues and discriminatory outcomes.     

The ‘Evidence’ of sex,the ‘Truth’ of gender: Shaping children's bodies

This paper is about the body, specifically a child's body, as a site where identity becomes contested. It is also about a surface or space where we lay claim—a site of vested interest. In April 2004, the Australian Family Court ruled that a 13-year-old child (Alex) had gender identity dysphoria and decided to allow reversible hormonal treatment. The Court ruling produced considerable legal, medical and public reflection over whether these decisions were in Alex's best interests, whether Alex was able to make such a decision at his age, and to assess Alex's competency. These debates also aimed to fix sex and gender through the deployment of a nature and nurture framework. The purpose of this paper, using the example of Alex, is to illustrate the various ways that these claims over a child's body, undermine the possibility for rethinking sex and gender.     

Making gender–work practicable: situating men's reconstruction of ‘women's job’ in a Swedish supermarket's micro-politics

Based on empirical data from one Swedish supermarket, this article argues that men's reconstructing of ‘women's work’ in accordance with a masculinised sense of self what Simpson (2004, ‘Masculinity at Work: The Experience of Men in Female Dominated Occupations’, Work, Employment & Society 18, no 2: 349–368) calls ‘gender–work’ is not limited to individual men's perceptions and creations of self. Rather, by investigating the gendered boundary work in which the manager and other workers engage, this study shows how these reconstructions are legitimised and made practicable by organisational micro-politics. By emphasising the specific skills required by ‘their’ department – produce – the male workers distanced themselves from the routine and standardised stocking that dominated the work performed at the supermarket. This notion that working in the produce department required specialised knowledge was legitimised by the manager and the organisation of work at the supermarket. While at times, other workers (most of them women) challenged the boundaries of the produce department, they simultaneously re-established those boundaries by glossing over potential conflicts and maintaining equal treatment existed within the organisation.