Gender Binary and the Limits of Poststructuralist Method

In contemporary gender history, the story about the making of the gender category is inseparable from the concept of ‘gender binary’. It at once signifies a research agenda and constitutes a persistent problem pervading feminist analysis itself. On the one hand, it points to the massive historical record of persistent inequality between the sexes. On the other hand, the concept of ‘gender binary’ undergirds gender history's analytics, which empowers historians to pursue, expose and deconstruct the binary organisation of gendered – woman/man – identities as well as social relations and discursive formations that produce them. In both capacities, the concept carries a rich repertoire of connotations, which informs and influences the gender category: those of radical distinction, opposition, mutually exclusive and exhaustive differentiation, hierarchy, domination, oppression – in all their myriad historical forms. As a result, it captures the entanglement of gender – in theory, an open‐ended category – in binary, that is, negatively and positively determined connotations of feminine and masculine and, consequently, in a particular, historical form of heterosexual subjectivity, the one structured like a binary system. The entanglement of gender history's foundational category – gender – in the binary systems of assigning difference has had many critics. What has been left unexamined however and what gives this article its focus is the poverty of gender as a binary device to analyse those gendered identities that constitute heterosexual relations but do not fit the binary matrix. The goal in this article is to enable the conditions for the continuous development – not abandonment – of the gender category and our theoretical framework. To do that, I explore how the gender category became a binary category, tightly identified with connotations of asymmetry and hierarchy, by undertaking a deconstructive rereading of a foundational work by one of the discipline's most influential poststructuralist theorists – Joan Scott. I conclude by arguing that in order to address the problem of gendered, heterosexual identities that do not fit the binary matrix we need to revisit the concept of dichotomy and differentiate it from binary connotations of difference found in heteronormative gender systems.     

Reception and use of intersectionality. A reading from French perspective

This text seeks to provide an overview of the concept of intersectionality as it was introduced and disseminated in French social and cultural geography. To understand this reception and use, I will recall the place occupied by each matrix of domination that constitutes intersectionality – gender, race and class. First it is important to remember that the notion of intersectionality has been introduced in a French academic context in which research on gender is still disputed. Second, it is worse in the case of race because it is a blind spot in French republican ideology (one nation, one people). Third, class has always had a central dimension in the analysis because of the weight of the Marxian heritage in the social sciences. The introduction of the notion of intersectionality thus marked a return of the class and materialist perspective in analysis. After this review of the context, I highlight to the work accomplished as intersectinalists outside the category of intersectionality and explain why the notion of intersectionality may be easier and better accepted in this light. I conclude with two examples of work on intersectionality.     

The Intersection of Gender,Caste and Class Inequalities in Child Nutrition in Rural India

While studies have investigated inequalities in child nutrition along single axes of social power such as, gender, caste and class, there has not been any study that has examined the intersection of the different axes in determining nutritional outcomes of children. This paper examines the intersection of gender, class and caste in determining children's nutritional outcomes for rural north, rural south and rural India as a whole. The paper investigates the intersectionality of the three axes in rural India and focuses on regional differences. The results show that children with particular disadvantageous group affiliations often find significant compensatory benefits from other beneficial identities. Class inequality dominates caste inequality and caste inequality dominates gender inequality in rural North India for all levels of stunting. In contrast, caste inequality dominates class inequality which in turn dominates gender inequality for severe stunting in rural South India.     

Gendered Space: A New Look at Turkish Modernisation

This article examines how an understanding of gender has challenged and changed the perception of ‘modernisation’ and its relation to Western culture. In so doing it also shows how the traditional division of disciplines, especially between political and social history and historical demography, has limited insights into beliefs and behaviours of both women and men. The decline in the numbers of children born within a family was accompanied by many shifts in daily living, not least in the way housework was structured as indicated by the spatial patterns of both formal social life and domestic labour. A detailed examination of these issues, including the use of various types of household labour – slave, free, waged and the ‘adopted daughter’(evlatlök), and poor relation – brings into sharp focus how the leading segment in the process of modernisation, the urban middle class, was active in and responded to such major changes. Women's involvement in education, politics and the labour market was intimately intertwined with these aspects of family and domestic life – but so, in very different ways, was men's.     

Escape from the country: the gender politics of Chinese women in pursuit of transnational romance

This study focuses on two marginalized groups in Chinese society: 27-years old (or older) ‘left-over’ (never-married) women and divorced women. Both these kinds of women are subject to discrimination and ridicule by the mass media and even their own families. This essay argues that despite the economic prosperity China has enjoyed over the last thirty years, gender relations in the country are rooted in a patriarchal discourse that reveals a hybridity of old and new ideals – family responsibility and individual self-fulfillment – in which the pursuit of love and marital commitment cannot be divorced from larger social-cultural-economic structures that endorse intergenerational responsibility and obligation, as well as promote gender inequality in the home and workplace. For these two groups of ostracized women, romance with foreign men may seem an alternative to the constraints of this structural framework. Drawing from a pool of evidence, published interviews, media reports, and printed ethnographic studies, this study analyzes the predicaments of leftover and divorced women, the interactions between these women and foreign men, and what their experiences with these men say about gender and racial differences in relation to gender inequality.     

Social class and wealth inequality in Italy over 20 years, 1993–2014

Italy is facing its worst economic crisis since the Second World War. As many studies have already shown, the crisis is affecting the country’s social class structure, thus accentuating several inequality tendencies. In this connection, the empirical purposes of this article are twofold: (1) to analyze whether accumulation and inequality in wealth are growing or declining in absolute terms; and (2) to investigate the relationship between social class and wealth inequality. To this end, we adopt a longitudinal approach – that is, we take the 1993–2014 period into account – by using data from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Our findings suggest that overall net worth has trended down in the years following the beginning of the crisis, and that inequality in wealth has basically been increasing during the 20-year period, with a decline from 2012. However, there has been no persistent social splitting process in wealth distribution by social class. Rather, there is a high (and increasing) level of domestic differentiation in terms of household wealth by class, mainly within the lower class and self-employed middle class, which could put further stress on social cohesion standards and allow new forms of social vulnerability to emerge.     

Jobless growth and relative surplus populations (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Growth can be dangerous – especially when it displaces current forms of livelihood, and fails to provide viable alternatives. The old transition narratives – farm to factory, country to city, tradition to modernity – are still promulgated by development planners and they continue to have popular appeal but they are misleading. Tania Murray Li's editorial argues that emergent patterns of jobless growth, the uneven distribution of waged work, and the tendency of large scale farms and plantations to gobble up land and expel people should be a red flag: far too many people are being relegated to the position of a “relative surplus population.”     

The Company Owns the Mine but They Don't Own Us: Feminist Critiques of Capitalism in the Coalfields of Kentucky in the 1970s

This article examines women's involvement in the Brookside Mine strike of 1974, which captivated US audiences and provided women with an unprecedented public platform to challenge the class and gender system undergirding coalfield capitalism. During the strike, female kin of miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, started a club to support striking miners and their families and to organise picket lines; they were joined by women from across the region and country. With the strike as their foundation these women generated a women's movement that revealed the specific ways class and gender inequality shaped their lives, defined by the heavy‐duty care work characteristic of the coalfields. This article argues that the Brookside women's support of striking miners was fundamentally about gendered class inequality: the denigration of working‐class, female caregivers alongside the devaluing of men's labour. Using collective memory and individual experience as their interpretive devices, the Brookside women forged a class‐conscious feminism. In it they exposed the traumas of coalfield capitalism, shone a light on women's unpaid care work (one of the foundations of corporate capitalism) and destabilised the gender and class hierarchies that defined coalfield communities.     

Rumour and Myth in the labour camps of Qatar (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The petroleum‐rich states of the Arabian Peninsula comprise one of the principal transnational destinations for the global movement of labour. In the Gulf States, much of that labour force comes from South Asia. Legions of unskilled male labourers are typically housed in labor camps, a nomenclature that masks a wide variety of both formal and informal accommodation that, in spatial terms, is a fundamental mechanism for the social segregation of this foreign labor force from the citizenry. Building upon recent fieldwork in Doha, Qatar, this paper examines the myths and narratives that proliferate amongst the South Asian men in these labor camps – men who, often despite years of experience in the Gulf States, typically have little or no interaction with the native citizenry. This paper suggests that these myths and stories can be understood as instruments of governance in that they portray the collectively‐established boundaries of appropriate behavior in a culture foreign to these unskilled laborers. A close analysis of the content of these myths and rumors, however, also helps us grapple with the connections and contradictions between power, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender and sexuality in the extraordinarily heterogeneous context of the contemporary Gulf State. As such, the analysis not only sheds light on the experiences of these foreign men and women, but also their collective understanding of that experience and of the society that hosts them.     

On the question of historical injuries: Transitional justice,anthropology and the vicissitudes of listening (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In this paper I am concerned with how certain kinds of violence and injuries, located simultaneously in multiple spaces and temporalities, question the prospect of what I call an ‘imagined new future’. I take the proceedings of a recent workshop on transitional justice, held in a university situated in the global North, as an avenue to unpack this idea. Here, I distinguish two instances when testimonies of violence embodied by survivors, may challenge broader assumptions about transitional justice. Firstly, when the prospect of historical injuries emerge, when difference and inequality – despite the promise of new post‐violence nations – are in fact woven together into a longue durée, a longer temporality, that remains beyond the theoretical contours and technical mandates defined by experts in the field. From this perspective, transitions may be experienced by specific communities not as fractures but as relative continuities, for example, of historically rooted political and economic hegemonies. Secondly, when the voice of survivors fracture the theoretical space created by larger discourses of reconciliation. In this case, they may incarnate an unforgiving victim, displaced outside the moral economy of reconciliation that stresses forgiveness and unity over resentment and fragmentation. In the end, the question I would like to pose is how certain forms of violence are rendered unintelligible by mainstream transitional justice discourses.     

Alltagswissen – Körperwissen – Praxiswissen – Fachwissen. Zur Aneignung,Bewertungs‐ und Orientierungslogik von Wissenskulturen

Everyday knowledge – body knowledge – knowledge of experience – specialized knowledge: Acquisition, assessment and the orientation of logic concerning cultures of knowledge. – The essay explores changes in the understanding, legitimisation, and practice of midwifery. It was one of the earliest professional activities for women. During the eighteenth century a new culture of expertise emphasized theoretical knowledge and adherence to medical disciplines over the empirical practice gained by women. This early phase of professionalisation, with its hierarchies and preferred use of medically accredited knowledge, was not, however, solely divided along gender lines. Female professionalism was not just supplanted by male academic medicalisation. New ways of attaining and assessing knowledge, a different perception of how it is organised, and above all, social change created new patterns of understanding. This process achieved a new professional ethos. In pursuing the issue of gender, various examples are chosen to illustrate how changes in scientific knowledge and its relevant application are mediated. The construct of scientific knowledge and how it is used reflects gender relations and power structures. There is not only competition between female and male perceptions of knowledge, but also male stereotyping of female knowledge, in particular male notions of what kind of knowledge is necessary and how this is perceived by women. Karen Offen used the term ‘knowledge wars’ to describe how a monopoly of scientific expertise and relevant knowledge works within the professions.     

Reform in Turkey: Liberalization as government and critique (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Turkey is in the midst of a wide‐ranging reform of historic proportions, the most profound reorganization and restructuring of institutions and practices since the foundation of the Republic in 1923. These reforms, inspired and guided by the country's EU integration, are multifaceted but can be summarized as liberalization of economy, politics and society. While capitalist penetration and privatization are obvious features of the reform, its techniques, kinds of knowledge and objects, as well as its reflexive aspects – the ways in which it studies itself unfolding – have not been sufficiently conceptualized.     

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.     

Freedom of information and transparency in Scotland: Disclosing persons as things and vice versa (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Contemporary ideals of democratic governance hold that public trust in the workings of public authorities is achieved through measures such as allowing free access to information. Yet 18 months participating in and observing the activities of users of Freedom of Information legislation – introduced in Scotland in 2005 – and civil servants disclosing information under it reveals that public trust and transparency do not always flow from increased access. Treating ‘transparency’, not as a known phenomenon, but as something that emerges in ethnographic observation and analysis, this article moves beyond an idea of transparency as being the simple revelation of an object by a subject, and in doing so challenges the fixed distinction between persons and things on which transparency as it is understood by Freedom of Information legislation appears to rely.     

Intersectionality and water: how social relations intersect with ecological difference

A cornerstone of feminist scholarship, intersectionality theory and method explore how gender intersects with other forms of social difference such as race and class. However, in light of the entangled relationships between nature and society, this article argues that human experience cannot be understood through social analysis alone, as offered by intersectionality. This article interrogates how materialities in the physical world might be incorporated within intersectionality. Drawing on gender and water research, the article explores how intersectionality complicates the social dimensions of water access, use, and control. Yet, applying intersectional thinking to water, scholars show how ecological processes of differentiation are also at play. Case studies from Sudan and Bangladesh exemplify how spatial and temporal aspects of water distribution intersect with the social complexities of water access. The article then returns to examine how intersectionality works to explore a framework for including these spatial and temporal dimensions. Four mechanisms – simultaneity, situated specificity, relationality, and fluidity – are elaborated for facilitating the study of eco-social relations within intersectionality theory. The article concludes that the materiality of water offers theoretical insight for developing intersectionality theory, with implications for gender and water research.     

South Africa,the world and AIDS (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

South Africa has been at the centre of world history for over a century and it is now the focus of all eyes for the World Cup. The country has been a by‐word for racial inequality and more recently for crime and violence. But it is also notable for social progress and cultural vitality. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has claimed more victims there than anywhere else, a tragic sequel to apartheid. Successive political leaders highlight the contradictions of this historical moment in poignant, even Shakespearean ways. The author briefly reviews three books by anthropologists on AIDS there and suggests that South Africa is likely to remain a source of innovation for the discipline. But we need to take a broader view of world history than at present.     

Feminism,the false consciousness of neoliberal capitalism? Informalization,fundamentalism, and women in an Indian city

Neoliberal globalization produces complex terrains of gender exploitation, with – some feminists argue – contradictory impacts on women. On the one hand, it subjects more women to increasing domination and devalorization by capital; on the other hand, women often ‘work’ globalization in ‘enabling’ ways. Informal jobs are often preferred sites for crafting economic emancipation and breaking away from patriarchy at home. Another body of literature argues that the feminization of informalization does not dismantle androcentric, neoliberal capitalism; moreover, reading these moments as women ‘working’ globalization represents a co-optation of women. Using examples of the feminization of informalization and ethno-religious gender violence in Ahmedabad city, India, this article critiques the concept of co-optation and argues that ‘actually existing women’ forge complex negotiations in the context of diverse exploitation, which can be conceptualized better with Marxian and Gramscian notions of false consciousness. The article also contends that understanding false consciousness as an assemblage where gender, class, caste, and ethnicity intersect in myriad ways will create possibilities for resistance.     

An Archive of Difference: Syrian Women,the Peddling Economy and US Social Welfare, 1880–1935

Historians have scrutinised the racial classifications of Arab immigrants in the census, in immigration documents and in early‐twentieth‐century naturalisation cases. However, recent scholarship has shown that other archives – ones that do not focus on interactions with the law – reveal a different process of Arab‐American racialisation. This article contends that looking in other archival spaces, specifically the US social welfare archive, shows how ideas about gender, sexual and class difference constituted early Arab‐American racialisation. Social welfare reformers in institutional settings, including the International Institute of Boston, the National Conference of Social Work and the pages of the social work periodical The Survey, systematically linked Syrian labouring practices with notions of dependency, sexual and gender deviance, and Orientalist difference. Syrian women were racialised through their participation in the peddling economy – a network of peddlers, suppliers and domestic labourers that sustained a widespread profession of the early Syrian American community. Syrian women's labouring practices conflicted with white middle‐class femininity and posed a threat to Syrian claims of whiteness. This analysis demonstrates the centrality of gender, sexuality and class to studies of early Arab America and demonstrates how Arab migrant women's labouring practices affected their communities’ standing in the American context.     

Gender and globalization. A century in retrospect

In the past, power structures of the nation-State have been organized around patriarchal assumptions, granting men monopoly over power, authority, and wealth. A number of structures have been erected to achieve this imbalance, which have disguised its inequity by making it appear as natural and universal. However, with globalization, this centralization of power within the Sovereign State has been fragmented. Although globalization opens up new spaces by weakening the nation-State, subsequently making possible the undermining of traditional gender hierarchies and devising new bases for gender relations, the reality that the State is no longer the sole institution that can define identity and belonging within it has denied women the space to assert their own claims to gendered self-determination. In this regard, globalization has impacted upon gender relations in complex and contradictory ways. This paper discusses such impacts of globalization on gender relations. Overall, it has become apparent that forms of inequality still exist regardless of a State's prevailing political ideology. Their manifestations may differ, but the reality of women's subordination remains constant.     

Gendered Geographies of Environmental Injustice

Abstract:  As environmental justice concerns become more widely embedded in environmental organizations and policymaking, and increasingly the focus of academic study, the gender dimension dissolves into an exclusive focus on race/ethnicity and class/income. While grassroots campaigning activities were often dominated by women, in the more institutionalized activities of organizations dominated by salaried professionals, gender inequality is neglected as a vector of environmental injustice, and addressing this inequality is not considered a strategy for redress. This paper explores some of the reasons why this may be so, which include a lack of visibility of gendered environmental injustice; professional campaigning organizations which are themselves gender blind; institutions at a range of scales which are still structured by gender (as well as class and race) inequalities; and an intellectual academy which continues to marginalize the study of gender—and women's—inequality. The authors draw on experience of environmental activism, participant observation, and other qualitative research into the gendering of environmental activity, to first explore the constructions of scale to see how this might limit a gender-fair approach to environmental justice. Following this, the practice of "gender mainstreaming" in environmental organizations and institutions will be examined, demonstrating how this is limited in scope and fails to impact on the gendering of environmental injustice.