‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his collar,and elsewhere about him’: Slaves' Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans

Drawing on slave testimony from criminal trials, this article suggests that slaves in French Colonial Louisiana articulated a nuanced relationship to material goods premised less on a static vision of West African culture, than on variable notions of gender and ethnicity. Here, articles of dress could be used by slaves to distinguish among themselves, as revealed in the 1766 investigation against one runaway marginalised in spite of his self‐conscious sartorial identification as a slave and as an ‘African’. This paper thus offers an example of slaves engineering social control within black spaces by manipulating the legal apparatus of the white hegemony. Sartorial performances of ethnicity and masculinity were key to this process.     

The ‘Global’ versus the ‘Local’: Cognitive Processes of Kin Determination in Aboriginal Australia

ABSTRACT Morgan and his informants' interpretation of Australian social categories as ‘marriage classes’ has survived in Dumont's (and Viveiros de Castro's) distinction of a ‘local’ (Dravidian systems) and a ‘global’ (Australian systems) formula. This paper explains that the ‘global formula’ is neither a necessary nor an applied device in Australian kin category determination, even when genealogical memory is short and when there is a non‐limitation of range in the extension of categories. Instead, a heuristic model, which is called the relational triangle, is proposed. This model depicts the procedure through which Australian people pragmatically determine and extend kin categories. Moreover, it also offers a visualisation of the cognitive schema and processes framing discourse and behaviour in relation to kinship and draws some parallels with Greenberg's hypotheses on markedness in kinship classes.     

‘Comradeship’ and ‘Friendship’: Masculinity and Militarisation in Germany's Homosexual Emancipation Movement after the First World War

This article analyses the impact of the First World War on Germany's homosexual emancipation movement. I argue that the war was a turning point for the nation's gay movement, as it provided a central ideal – comradeship – which altered the ways in which homosexual rights organisations defined homosexuality and masculinity. A militarised rhetoric permeated the language of gay rights groups in the 1920s, providing a vision of a spiritually and politically emancipated hypermasculine gay man who fought to legitimise ‘friendship’ and secure civil rights. The article relies on the publications of three major homosexual rights organisations recently collected at the Schwules Archiv und Museum in Berlin.     

The Making of an Australian ‘Airport City’

Globally, the changing nature of airports, and particularly the juxtaposition of general commercial land uses alongside aviation functions, is captured in the concept of the ‘airport city’. In Australia, commercialisation has impacted nearly all privatised capital city and general aviation airports. Essendon Airport's contested transformation from a run‐down general aviation facility into an emergent business and retail hub in Melbourne's north‐western suburbs serves as an instructive case study of the evolution of the airport city as a new suburban typology. Drawing in part on in‐depth interviews with key stakeholders involved in the redevelopment process, this paper examines the conflicting forces that have driven commercialisation since the late 1990s, the spatial outcomes and the wider planning issues arising.     

From ‘Relief’ to ‘Justice and Protection’: The Maintenance of Deserted Wives,British Masculinity and Imperial Citizenship, 1870–1920

In the early twentieth century, local British poor law guardians’ concerns with the maintenance of deserted and neglected families were transformed into imperial, and later transnational, policy promoting justice for abandoned wives and children. Both local court cases concerning maintenance and policy debates at the national and imperial levels reveal the ways in which a breadwinner model of masculinity shaped maintenance policy and practice. Although the maintenance problem was framed differently by local welfare providers and imperial heads of state, concerns about welfare costs and human rights intersected in the figure of the irresponsible male citizen, who challenged the dominant model of British/imperial masculinity by refusing to maintain his wife.     

Managing ‘Aboriginal selves’ in South‐Western Sydney1

ABSTRACT This paper explores Aboriginal people's multiple sense of selves in suburban situations. While the Aboriginal self has been usually conceived as forged through relationships with kin, in the contemporary world, Aboriginal lives are constrained by a genealogical understanding of Aboriginality, that is, one based on descent. This understanding is endorsed by the state system, by Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal organisations, and by non‐Aboriginal people. In the suburbs there are different ways in which people come to understand and identify their Aboriginalty. Drawing on ethnographic field‐work in south‐west Sydney, this paper explores these forms of identity, how they are perceived, and the effects this has on their sense of self. The focus is on two individuals with different backgrounds and understandings of what it is to be Aboriginal. The increasing role of Aboriginal organisations to offer new forms of relatedness is also discussed.     

Rethinking Aboriginal ‘Resistance’: The Community Development Employment (CEPD) Program

In this paper I wish to contribute to an understanding of ‘Aboriginal resistance’ by a study of the politics of remote Aborigines' ‘employment’. I begin by highlighting some themes in recent discussions of the Community Development Employment Projects (cdep ) policy, before looking back at some features of the welfare and pastoral economy in the Central Australian hinterland, c. 1950 to c. 1975. My aim is twofold: to show some of the cultural continuities in the relationships between remote Aborigines and government; and to criticise constructively the notion of ‘Aboriginal resistance’, to advocate a structural and processual notion of ‘resistance’ and to move away from one based on the clear identification of actors.     

‘If the Teacher were a Man’: Masculinity and Power in Stalinist Schools

This article explores questions about identity among Soviet men teachers, about the construction of masculinity in the Stalinist context and more broadly about the significance of power in structuring gender identities. By examining the personal experience, classroom practices and political perspectives of a man teacher in a ‘women's profession’, this article demonstrates how masculine identity involved the exercise of power even in the context of a repressive political system. Focusing on the multiple layers embedded in the identity of one teacher makes possible a gender analysis of the political processes, social relations, and educational practices characteristic of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Using an interview to understand the formation of masculinity illustrates how individual agency and subjectivity shaped and were shaped by the broader patterns and processes characteristic of Stalinism.     

Embodying the Colonial Encounter: Explaining New Zealand's ‘Grace Darling’, Huria Matenga

Focusing on the heroine of an 1863 New Zealand sea rescue, this article is concerned with gender, race and the colonial encounter. The rescue became an example of harmonious race relations, advocating Maori service as part of settler society governance. The article analyses Huria Matenga's place in the rescue as white settlers endorsed, rewarded and constructed her in relation to the imperial reference point of British heroine Grace Darling. It is argued that the gendered imperial narrative of Grace Darling combined with transcultural representations of women and the sea to accord Huria Matenga a central place in the rescue. While in the early twentieth century Grace Darling's memory was more entrenched in mainstream New Zealand society than Huria Matenga's, by the beginning of the twenty‐first century, Grace Darling as imperial signifier had disappeared, and the legend of Huria Matenga existed alone in a state of postcolonial irony. The article demonstrates that mythologies of and commemoration for heroines are constantly recast and operate across a complex network of local, national and transnational levels.     

From ‘Global’ to ‘Revolutionary’ Development

This article argues that Horner and Hulme's call for moving towards ‘global development’ to do justice to changing 21^st century development geographies neither contributes to advancing our understanding of contemporary development challenges nor helps articulate realistic responses to tackle them. A key problem is that they try to explain several general trends in the geography of development with reference to mainstream statistics without appropriate critical reflection or adequate theorization. Focusing specifically on the environmental and conservation aspects of development, this article contends that these omissions not only confuse the debate on the current state and geographies of development, they risk something more serious, namely the reinforcement of a generic development narrative which will intensify 21^st century development challenges. The article concludes that what we need is not global development but revolutionary development.     

Overcoming ‘Simply Being’: Straight Sex,Masculinity and Physical Culture in Modern Egypt

This article considers the specific deployment of gender and sexuality in interwar Egypt against the general backdrop of a universalising colonial modernity, which since around the middle of the nineteenth century aimed at producing a repeatable subject everywhere. It examines the magazine Physical Culture as an artefact of that colonial modernity and as a watermark of an ineffable style of performing gender and sexuality – a culmination of nearly five decades of historicising Egypt and of exercising Egyptians. That the cultivation of healthy and desirable bodies was constrained by Egypt's asymmetrical location in a global economic and political order constituted by colonialism was a well‐established fact of social life by the end of the 1920s; consequently, the problem of the modern subject in Egypt was posed in terms that were not exclusively nationalist and examined in terms that were keenly attuned to circulations of global cultural forms and discursive practices. In the resulting process of subject formation, a gendered and sexualised other was also produced, as a de‐formation, wherein the terms of its prior being would no longer be intelligible.     

Kinship,Organisations and ‘wannabes’: Aboriginal Identity Negotiation in South‐western Sydney

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ambiguous and dynamic nature of Aboriginal identity in south‐western Sydney. While for most of the Aboriginal people in rural and remote areas, identity has been primarily a matter of kinship ties associated with their perceived place of origin, Aboriginal people often recognize each other as Aboriginal by sharing and recognizing certain ‘Aboriginal’ cultural mores and traits. These two principles of identity are flexible enough to be extended to those who are not raised in an Aboriginal family environment; one meeting with their Aboriginal family is a minimum requirement. In south‐western Sydney, where organizations dealing with Aboriginal issues provide ways of connecting Aboriginal people from various backgrounds, in line with the government's homogenized notion of Aboriginality, Aboriginal people from Aboriginal family environments encounter those who cannot even meet this compromised criterion. Their presence gives rise to tension and conflict revolving around the concept of Aboriginality. Aboriginal cultural values that emphasize actual engagement provide ways of overcoming such dilemmas. Through common participation in the activities of the aforesaid organisations, Aboriginal people in south‐western Sydney develop a new sense of ‘Aboriginality’, which embraces those who cannot claim kinship ties.     

Recategorizing ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Property in Ghana

In the course of political struggle in northern Ghana, the classification of land and resources has shifted between the two ‘master categories’ of public and private. Despite the fact that master categories may be wholly inadequate in accounting for the actual complexity of property objects, social units and rights, they are not divorced from the agency of people who have something at stake. Laws, rules and by‐laws are referred to as important markers and fashion the local political struggles over the rights to and control over resources. This article offers a general account of conflicts and the recategorization of resources in the property system of small‐scale irrigation. It examines the logics and positioning of the different stakeholders, and discusses how different levels of public policy have provided opportunities for such changes. A case study presents the opportunity to examine the details of a particular controversy demonstrating the social and political powers involved in the recategorization of property.