Women,Wages and Intra-household Power Relations in Urban Bangladesh

This article examines the implications of women's access to income-earning opportunities for their position in intra-household relationships. For those who believe that such relationships are egalitarian, this issue may not appear relevant; for others, however, there is a divergence of views between those who offer an optimistic analysis of the effects of earning power for women's status, and those who provide a more pessimistic prognosis. In exploring this issue, the article makes use of first-hand accounts of women workers in the recently emergent export-oriented garment factories in Bangladesh, both in order to evaluate the ‘fit’ with theoretical insights of intra-household relations from the social science literature, and to assess what the ‘everyday lived realities’ described by the women workers tell us about the workings of power within family-based households in urban Bangladesh.     

Migration,the Urban Periphery,and the Politics of Migrant Lives

This paper explores the politics of migration through a focus on labor migration regimes and the urban lives of migrants in the Seoul Metropolitan Region of South Korea. In particular, it draws attention to the ways in which migrant lives highlight the limits of the contemporary emphasis on control in migration management regimes. The paper contends that while migration management certainly reworks the socio‐legal status of migrants, the desire for control is often displaced in the everyday presence and practices of migrants as urban residents. In order to develop this argument I focus on the notion of the urban periphery as a spatio‐temporal configuration that manifests marginalization but is also potentially generative, innovative and destabilizing. The paper proceeds by exploring three dimensions of the periphery: (1) the mobile commons that emerges in everyday life; (2) the process of becoming undocumented and the subversion of control; and (3) the tactics of recognition that challenge the peripheral location of migrants. In each case the focus on the urban periphery draws attention to the importance of visibility and invisibility in migration, to the uneven spatio‐temporal configuration of migrant lives in the city, and to the ways in which migrant desires constitute a politics that exceeds what is normatively expected of them.     

Women In The City: Feminist Analyses of Urban Geography

Four different sites of gendered social practice are identified as major concerns of socialist feminist urban geography: the home or domestic sphere; the paid workplace; the city's built environment; and localities. Literature about each is described and reviewed Theoretical implications of the feminist reading of urban geography are then considered in particular the feminist criticisms of traditional models of urban spatial structure, and challenges to existing forms of feminist geography from debates in social theory.