Being a man in the horse capital: Mexican farmworkers’ masculinities in Kentucky

Recent immigration to the U.S. south has been of much interest to scholars with economic, social, and regional interests. This article contributes to these interests by analyzing the ways that Mexican men who migrated to Kentucky think about, represent, and perform their masculinities on two foaling farms in the area surrounding Lexington. These perspectives point to how migration impacts the participants’ ideas about gender relations. By considering their masculinities as they intersect with other aspects of their identities, this analysis questions widespread notions of the Mexican ‘macho’ or ‘machista’, demonstrates how masculinities are created in tandem with other aspects of identity such as class, and discusses the complexity of interactions with hegemonic masculinities (e.g. a ‘machista’ identity). The research was performed through participant observation and semi-structured interviews on two horse farms with 15 farmworkers.     

Changing intergenerational contracts: gender,cohorts and elder care in central rural China, 2005–2013

In the absence of stable pension systems, elder care arrangements in rural China depend on intergenerational contracts. The existing scholarship on elder care in rural China tends to treat the elderly as a homogeneous group and depict them mainly as ‘care recipients’. Based on a diachronic qualitative study in central rural China between 2005 and 2013, this research examines the changing intergenerational contracts between two cohorts of rural elderly and their adult children. These cohorts hold different positions in terms of family structure, number and sex composition of adult children, living arrangement, physical situation, economic standing and appreciation of intergenerational exchange. These differences further produce different social exchange patterns and disparate elder care modalities between genders and cohorts. Drawing upon insights from gender theory on social gerontology, this research identifies the ‘agency’ of older rural women and explores ageing issues among older rural men. This study also presents policy implications by identifying the most disadvantaged group in terms of elder care support.     

Gender equality: a core dimension in Rural Development Programmes in Austria?

The supranational gender equality regime of the European Union (EU), in place since the 1990s, affects gender-related social policy including the so-called ‘gender-neutral’ policy fields such as the common agricultural policy and rural development policy. Especially, the implementation of gender equality in all policy fields through the strategy of gender mainstreaming in EU Structural Funds and Rural Development Programmes has become a key challenge for political and administrative players and stakeholders. Analysis reveals that the existing institutional, political and social barriers for an effective implementation of gender equality in rural development policy are manifold. Instead of promoting rural women's agency and empowerment, Rural Development Programmes and processes in Austria are preserving and perpetuating traditional gender roles and patriarchal structures in rural society.     

‘Flying Fräuleins’: the construction of single migrant women in discourses on migration in Australia and West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s

The migration of single women of German descent to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s attracted attention from both sides of the world. A closer look at the historical records reveals contradictory opinions of officials from both countries towards the role and desirability of unmarried women as potential migrants. Widows, divorcees and women with dependants therefore faced difficulties in pursuing their aim of migration to Australia. However, many of them assessed available migration opportunities and proactively called upon innovative channels to continue their endeavours. The public construct of ‘the single woman’ neglected the existence of a broad spectrum of diverse female life models present in the early post-World War II German society and official policies refused to recognize the agency of these women. This article explores the diversity present in the lives of women that were interested in migrating to Australia, discloses the mechanisms behind the images propagated in public and analyzes the consequences of this for the women in question. The analysis will show that the migration agreement was deeply influenced by gendered notions of what constituted desirable and undesirable migration flows.     

社会性别视角下的人地关系——国外女性主义地理学研究进展和启示

20世纪六、七十年代,在第二次女性主义运动的影响下,女性主义思潮与人文地理学研究相结合,致力于揭示和消除\"男造环境\"中的性别歧视,尤其是女性在空间和地方使用上面临的种种限制,从而开始了女性主义地理学的发展。本文对国外近几十年来女性主义地理学研究进行系统回顾,探究这一学科兴起的具体学术渊源,分析和评价它的主要的研究路径和成果。论文最后从三个方面展望在当下中国发展这一学术领域的前景,认为它将会有助于:①拓展性别分析的交叉性;②实践女性主义知识生产的位置理论;③为性别主流化提供政策依据。     

Counter-narratives of coping and becoming: Karen refugee women’s inside/outside figured worlds

The purpose of our research is to understand the socially and culturally constructed architecture within which refugee women produce and negotiate identity. This ethnographic case study discusses findings from data collected through participant observation and informal interviews in two refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. As Karen refugee women described their positionality within and negotiation between the socially constructed Inside and Outside Figured Worlds of the refugee camp, they depict the negotiation of a hybrid Third Space. Created at the intersection of the refugee camp structures that dominate individual agency and the discourses of gender and displacement that influence the social practices of women, this third space is characterized by the response strategies Karen women engage to support individual, family, and community health. Within the transformational spaces that refugee women constructed, the processes of coping and becoming reflected the relationship between structure and agency. Within these intersections a woman could express her resistance to a system that in its design represented a majority she was not a part of. As Karen refugee women moved to redesign their position within these systems, shifts in meaning of cultural norms resulted, inclusive of those that influence or define the role of women.     

Migration,knowledge production and the humanitarian agenda in times of crisis

By drawing on the Italian case, this article critically discusses the use of crisis as a tool of knowledge and expertise production. In recent years, the theme of crisis has played a key role in shifting migration management towards a humanitarian agenda based on the premise that contemporary migration to Europe is comprised of forced mass movement. The article considers the extent to which migrants’ subjectivities call into question the knowledge that has been produced during the current era. It also reflects on the ways in which gender and race provide fundamental insights for a better understanding of the evolution of migration management within the context of crisis.     

‘I am going,with or without you’: autonomy in Bolivian transnational migrations

Autonomy has often been seen as a precondition for achieving gender equality, yet feminist scholarship has been rather ambivalent towards it. In this article, I explore this ambivalence by drawing on the experiences of migrant women, particularly mothers, focusing on the ways in which they negotiated their mobility with their partners. By analysing women's experiences of migration within a context of multi-sited and longitudinal, itinerant ethnography, I historicise their life accounts and place them within a broader framework of social and economic structural changes. On this basis I explore the concept of autonomy, particularly in relation to the exercise of women's agency within a context of market-oriented neoliberal reforms. I also question the potential of women's autonomy for gender equality and argue that there are at least two reasons for feminist scholars to continue being ambivalent towards autonomy.     

(Re)Producing and challenging gender in and through urban space: women bicyclists’ experiences in Chicago

This research, which uses an intersectional feminist methodological approach, explores the relationships and intersections among women, public urban space, and bicycling, and the gendered processes through which the use of space is claimed, negotiated, and constrained. It builds on the existing scholarship on the gendered nature of public space, and uniquely uses bicycling as the site of inquiry. Drawing primarily from interviews with women cyclists in Chicago, this article explores how gender and other social identities are constructed, challenged, and constituted through an interaction with public space, urban processes and structures, and societal expectations and attitudes. It brings to the forefront and centers these narratives and empirically contextualizes them by linking the scholarship on the gendered (and raced, classed, and sexualized) nature of public space with the scholarship on women’s participation rates and barriers to bicycling. This research examines, through the everyday lived experiences of bicyclists and their multiple subject positions and privileges, how the gendered nature of public space affects the participation and experiences of women cyclists; how public space is negotiated and constrained; and how gender can be both (re)produced and challenged in and through urban space via women bicyclists’ actions. In particular, the research findings explore how women bicyclists must demand and negotiate public space; how their movement and activities are constrained in public space; how gender roles and social reproduction issues intersect with bicycling; and how social, quasi-advocacy group bicycle rides are used as a strategy, with mixed results, to address barriers to women bicyclists’ mobility.     

Sexuality in diasporic space: rural-to-urban migrant women negotiating gender and marriage in contemporary China

Feminist geographers use the term diasporic subjectivity to emphasize the relational quality of identity as it is constructed in the dynamic in-between space occupied by the migrant and traversed by norms and practices associated with the village community, migrant peers, and urban consumer society, as well as nation-states. Using ethnographic methods, I explore how young, single rural Chinese women who migrated to Beijing in the 1990s negotiate sexuality in diasporic space, within the discursive and institutional orders of state, market and family. Though migration does not fundamentally alter these structures that construct inequality around place-based identity, gender and class, it does enable rural women to shift position within them and, significantly, to imagine that further, future change is possible. Foregrounding migrant women's agency in remaking gender identity from so-called rustic peasants to modern girls as well as in choosing marital partners and conducting courtship provides an important counterweight to the primary emphasis on structure found in much of the migration literature.     

Reproducing,transforming and contesting gender relations and identities through migration and transnational ties

This article contributes to conceptual debates on gender transformations in the context of migration and transnationalism. We do so by discussing developments in gender relations and identities among Polish post-accession migrants in Norway; analysing the intersections of continuities and changes, relationally, as these are produced spatially and temporally. We draw on ethnographic data collected among Polish migrants in the Norwegian cities Oslo and Bergen (2009–2012). Our focus on continuity and change in gender relations and identities, in the context of migration and transnationalism, stems from a realization that migration often leads to assumptions of either radical change, or conservative continuity. Meanwhile through an analytical lens sensitive to relationality and socio-spatial circumstances, we find friction, disagreement, as well as negotiation and resolution, and we argue for the variety of ways in which continuity and change may run parallel, reflective of variations in transnational habitus produced in relation to social class. We pay attention to locations and scales, as salient for how gender relations and identities are reproduced, transformed or contested. The flexible continuum we find reveals diverse strategies of coping with migratory situations, as well as complex interplay between migrants’ agency, existing structures and engendered understandings.