Moral landscapes and manipulated spaces: gender, class and space in Victorian reformatory schools

This paper provides a comparative study of two Victorian reformatory schools; the Philanthropic Society farm school for boys at Redhill, Surrey, and Red Lodge girls' reformatory in Bristol. Situating the study within the context of broader Victorian assumptions about forms of human settlement and association most likely to foster "morally acceptable" behaviour, it explores contemporary ideas about the location and design of these environments of moral reform. It suggests that dominant ideologies of class and gender were central considerations in determining the location and design appropriate to each institution.     

Producing liminal space: gender,age and class in northern Ontario's tree planting industry

Drawing upon qualitative data, this article examines how tree planters in northern Ontario, Canada engage with liminality in terms of gender, class, age and space. In doing so, it provides insight into concepts of gender liminality and the variegated experiences of males and females in liminal space. The article focuses on four aspects of the liminal engagement. First, the spaces of tree planting are liminal as they are marked by homelife and worklife, but dominated by neither. Second, gender performances are liminal, as males perform masculinities seldom necessary or appropriate – yet often valorized – in their permanent communities, while females (who make up nearly half of the workforce) are offered opportunities to work and succeed in a traditionally male industry. However, success often requires that they adopt certain masculine traits. Third, most tree planters are in the interstitial age of ‘youth’, somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. Finally, tree planters are generally members of affluent urban middle-classes, yet the work they perform is more readily associated with rural or peripheral working-classes.     

Justifying exclusion: The politics of public space and the dispute over access to McIvers ladies' baths,Sydney

McIvers Baths is an ocean pool in the Sydney beach of Coogee which is open to women and children only. In December 1992, a male resident of Coogee lodged a formal legal complaint of 'discrimination on the grounds of sex' with the Anti-Discrimination Board of New South Wales. Over the next three years, a coalition of activists and institutions campaigned successfully to oppose this complaint and maintain the exclusion of men from McIvers. In this article, the author considers some of the implications of this dispute for contemporary debates over the meaning of urban public space. Drawing on recent re-theorisations of urban public space and the political public sphere, the author suggests that the problematisation of exclusion in critical urban analysis should not necessarily take the form of opposition to exclusion per se. Rather, exclusions should be interrogated with respect to processes through which they are politically justified, thus enabling critical theorists to distinguish between different kinds of exclusion. The article offers some reflections on the dispute over McIvers as a way of thinking through some of the conditions in which certain forms of exclusion might be compatible with a democratic 'right to the city'.     

论体育与政治

体育既是体育,又是国家政治的一个有机组成部分,体育与政治有着密不可分的关系。“跳出体育看体育”是对体育加深认识的重要方法。     

Partisan politics and the public sphere: The civil war north

The Civil War North presents an interesting case study of the relationship between a highly politicized public sphere and partisan electoral politics. Although the two‐party system remained intact throughout the war, the concept and practice of partisanship was challenged by the social experience of Northerners who ‘acted politically’ when they took part in the war effort. The creation of a mass citizen army and the mobilization of women and men on the home front meant that parties lost their function as the crucial mediating channel between citizen and government. The more that politics mattered, the less partisanship seemed to be relevant. The war exposed the latent non‐partisan political energies of Northern society. These conclusions bolster the arguments of those scholars who, questioning whether partisanship was as deep or as widespread as previously supposed, have begun to suggest that the ‘party period paradigm’ does not capture the entirety of the nineteenth‐century political experience.     

Black male: Advertising and the cultural politics of masculinity

During the 1980s, men's bodies began to appear with increasing frequency in television, cinema and billboard advertising. The advertisers’ preferred image of masculinity has generally been young, white, able‐bodied and staunchly heterosexual. This paper explores a partial exception to these generalisations: Ogilvy & Mather's highly successful relaunch of the soft drink, Lucozade. By using selected images of black male bodies and their popular associations with sporting and sexual prowess, Lucozade was able to shake off its long‐established associations with sickness and convalescence, becoming a popular ‘in‐health’ drink with a revitalised and revitalising image. The paper places contemporary representations of black men in British advertising in relation to wider changes in attitudes towards gender, sexuality and ‘race’, arguing that the success of the Lucozade campaign depended not so much on general associations between sport and ‘race’, manliness and muscularity, as on the reader's (socially constructed) knowledge of the particular personalities represented. This assumed knowledge effectively suppresses the more threatening aspects of a stereotypically anonymous and rapacious black male sexuality, provoking desire without evoking dread.     

The impact of gender,ethnic and cultural studies on colonial Latin American research

Mujer y cultura en la colonia hispanoamericana. Edited by MABEL MORAÑA. Pittsburgh: Biblioteca de América, 1996. Pp. 330.

Las colonias del Nuevo Mundo: Cultura y sociedad. Edited by CARMEN PIRILLI. Tucumán: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 1995. Pp. 190.

Amor y violencia sexual: Valores indígenas en la sociedad colonial. By WARD STAVIG. Lima: IEP/University of South Florida, 1996. Pp. 94.     

Unearthing global natures: Outer space and scalar politics

During the 1960s, the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) worked to develop laws that would regulate activity in outer space. In the treaty that followed, outer space, a resource that encompassed Earth, was to remain outside of existing political borders, free from sovereign claims, and open to use by all states. Because of these stipulations, many have labeled outer space a “global commons” or “global resource.” In most academic analyses of global commons, these laws rejecting sovereign claims are treated as the de facto way that a resource that materially spanned all states would be governed. As debates in and outside of COPUOS indicate, however, the status of outer space as beyond states’ sovereign territorial jurisdiction was not given. Rather, as I demonstrate in this paper, the status of outer space and orbits as beyond sovereign territories is a result of political contestation over the understanding of physical properties of outer space and Earth. I trace the debate in the late 1960s and 1970s over the border between sovereign air space and “global” outer space. This was a debate over how outer space would be incorporated into political–economic relations. By using a production of nature approach that recognizes the importance of physical materialities and scalar politics, I demonstrate the constructedness of outer space as a “global” resource and how its construction as such furthered uneven political–economic processes. Such analysis illuminates how such socionatures beyond and across borders are produced to achieve particular political–economic outcomes.     

Avant-garde modernism and Italian Fascism: cultural politics in the era of Mussolini

The article explores the efforts of Marinetti's futurists, Sarfatti's Novecento movement, and the Tuscan circle that propounded strapaese to shape a cultural basis for Italian Fascism. The first two movements sought to become an official art for Fascism, while the third sought to produce a culture that would remain true to Fascism's origins in 1919, but all were in different ways 'modernist' movements and they are therefore contextualized both in terms of the challenge presented by Fascism and those faced by their modernist counterparts elsewhere in Europe. It is argued that the three movements enjoyed some success in the 1920s but were effectively shut down by the rise of the intransigent Right in the 1930s. Yet it is also argued that they needed the regime because they were too weak by themselves to assert the principle of artistic autonomy in the face of an internationally ascendant commodity culture. L'articolo esplora i tentativi dei futuristi facenti capo a Marinetti, del movimento Novecento di Sarfatti, così come del circolo toscano detto di Strapaese, nel costruire e definire le basi culturali del fascismo italiano. I primi due movimenti cercarono di costituire un'arte ufficiale del fascismo, mentre la terza si protese a far nascere una cultura che rimanesse legata alle origini del movimento fascista del 1919; ma tutti erano, in maniera diversa, movimenti 'modernisti' e sono qui tra l'altro posti sia nel contesto del cambiamento, nel clima politico e culturale, rappresentato dal fascismo che in quello degli altri movimenti modernisti europei. Viene messo in evidenza che i tre movimenti ottennero un discreto successo negli anni venti, ma furono censurati da una destra intransigente che emergeva negli anni trenta. Tuttavia, è possibile affermare che tutti e tre i movimenti avevano bisogno del Regime perché troppo deboli ed incapaci di consolidare un principio di autonomia artistica nei confronti di una emergente cultura consumista nel contesto internazionale.     

The Hindu nationalist reinterpretation of pilgrimage in India: the limits of Yatra politics

ABSTRACT. Victor Turner's anthropological reading of pilgrimages in terms of communitas is of utmost relevance in the case of Hinduism: indeed, Hindu pilgrimages produce a relative and temporal obliteration of social cleavages – particularly caste divisions – allowing the emergence of a sense of group belonging. Moreover, the geography of pilgrimage sites maps out the sacred land, marking the area of extension of Hindu civilisation in space. Hindu nationalists have tried to exploit this particular alchemy to offer an ethnic definition of the nation (and its territory) and thereby gather a following by lending some of their demonstrations the appearance of a pilgrimage. This approach asserted itself in the early 1980s thanks to the Ekatmata Yatra (Unity March) in 1983, and was confirmed in 1990 during the Rath Yatra (Chariot festival). Nevertheless, the instrumentalist interpretation of such movements comes up against an issue that is already at the core of subaltern studies' historiography, i.e. that masses do not always mobilise for the reasons put forth by political leaders. More specifically, if women march massively in the streets during these Yatra pilgrimages, it is both because they feel concerned by the reason for demonstrations and because these demonstrations have legitimised their entry into the public space, which still remains relatively closed to them.