‘The World is Our Campus’: Michigan State University and Cold‐War Home Economics in US‐occupied Okinawa, 1945–19721

Since the rape of a twelve‐year‐old girl by three American marines in Okinawa in 1995, a trope of masculinised domination and feminised subjugation has shaped many feminist discussions of US‐Okinawa relations. However, post‐war US domination in Okinawa has entailed far more complex dynamics involving gender and nation. This article examines domestic reformism that flourished in US‐occupied Okinawa where a group of home economists and home demonstration agents dispatched from Michigan State University (MSU) played an instrumental role in disseminating ‘scientific domesticity’. Following the land‐grant philosophy of educational outreach and self‐help, MSU home economists engaged in a series of domestic reform activities where they attempted to transplant notions and practices of ‘scientific domesticity’ and modernise and empower local women. Taking place amidst the intense militarisation of Okinawa under American rule, domestic reformism generated much excitement and enthusiasm among local women. By analysing how domesticity and militarism became intertwined in post‐war Okinawa, the article explores the complex links between domesticity, international educational aid, militarism and the cold war in the Asia‐Pacific region.     

‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise,as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’: Gender and Middle‐Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910

In the middle‐class home in late nineteenth‐century England, drawing rooms, morning rooms and boudoirs became increasingly associated with women, while dining rooms, studies and smoking rooms were viewed as male spaces. Historians have linked this to the exclusion of women from social power and a male ‘flight from domesticity’. This article questions these interpretations and explores gendered space through advice manuals, inventories and sale catalogues, and autobiographies. While the notion that domestic space should be divided between men and women had considerable cultural purchase, the ways in which this should occur were subject to dispute and limited by the practical contingencies of everyday living. In homes where gendered material culture was present, it exerted a powerful influence on childhood experience and the formation of adult identities.     

Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth‐Century Britain

Eighteenth‐century England is, for many scholars, the time and place where modern domesticity was invented; the point at which ‘home’ became a key concept sustained by new literary imaginings and new social practices. But as gendered individuals, and certainly compared to women, men are notable for their absence in accounts of the eighteenth‐century domestic interior. In this essay, I examine the relationship between constructs of masculinity and meanings of home. During the eighteenth century, ‘home’ came to mean more than one's dwelling; it became a multi‐faceted state of being, encompassing the emotional, physical, moral and spatial. Masculinity intersected with domesticity at all levels and stages in its development. The nature of men's engagements with home were understood through a model of ‘oeconomy’, which brought together the home and the world, primarily through men's activities. Indeed, this essay proposes that attention to how this multi‐faceted eighteenth‐century ‘home’ was made in relation to masculinity shifts our understanding of home as a private and feminine space opposed to an ‘outside’ and public world.     

Cogs in the Machine: The Experiences of Female Munitions Workers and Members of the Australian Women’s Land Army in South Australia, 1940–45

Mobilisation on the Australian ‘home front’ during the Second World War enabled some women to move temporarily into employment usually reserved for men, and to earn significantly higher wages than they were accustomed to, but the benefits of this have been often overstated. Focusing on South Australian women in the city and rural areas who took up the new working opportunities — in munitions factories and the Australian Women’s Land Army in particular — this article demonstrates that relatively few women were entitled to higher wages, such wages were lower and paid later in South Australia than in other states, and that working conditions were unattractive and often dangerous. At the war’s end, the social imperative to marry and raise children, coupled with demands that they give up their place for male workers, then saw many women return to domesticity or less-rewarded and lower status ‘female occupations’.     

Intellectual property and national security: the case of the hardcastle superheater, 1905–1927

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complex and changing relationship between technological development, intellectual property, and national security in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Its specific case study concerns an important invention developed by a naval officer. Technological innovations not only were vital to British security but also embodied commercially valuable intellectual property. The state’s interest in acquiring control of the intellectual property to maintain Britain’s naval supremacy was not automatically aligned with the interests of inventors. The alignment was especially fraught in the case of service inventors—that is, inventors in government service, rather than in the private sector. Service inventors, who played a crucial role in maintaining Britain’s naval-technological edge, were governed by special regulations, and they invariably utilized state resources for their inventive work. Exploring these issues sheds important light on the attitude of the British state toward innovation and technological development from the 1850s through the 1920s.     

Seductive Alienation: The American Way of Life Rearticulated in Occupied Japan

This article explores how the notion of American domesticity promoted by US occupation forces in postwar Japan was decoded and rearticulated by non-elite Japanese women, a social group that has been largely overlooked in studies of the global promotion of the American way of life during the early Cold War years. Specifically examined here is the case of Takehisa Chieko, an actress and the wife of an American officer, who enjoyed high visibility in popular women’s magazines as the embodiment of the idealised postwar American lifestyle. A reading of Takehisa’s magazine writings, interviews, and photographs suggests, however, that she was far from a passive recipient and transmitter of this cultural message. As such, a close unpacking of her rearticulation of the idea of American domesticity toward the particular socio-cultural fabric of postwar Japan reveals the particular nature of this supposedly universal American model. In demonstrating the various dilemmas that stemmed from confronting both the seductive and alienating features of the American way as promoted in occupied Japan, this study illuminates a point of rupture in the larger US global promotion of American domesticity as a means toward cultural hegemony and political containment in the early Cold War period.     

Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen's Troubled Archive

Rachael Pringle Polgreen, a freed‘mulatto’ woman who owned an infamous brothel/hotel in Bridgetown, Barbados during the 1770s and 1780s became known to her contemporaries through her role in the (sexual) entertainment of transient naval officers and the visits of Prince William of England. Piecing together ‘evidence’ from her will, estate inventory, a nineteenth‐century novel, a lithograph and an interview with a British officer, I engage Polgreen's complicated and fragmented archive, revealing how Polgreen represents an example of the problems with sources depicting women of African descent who lived in a slave society and the silences that inundate their archive. The first part of this article critically re‐examines pieces of her archive, through which an image of Polgreen emerges incommensurable with narratives of her triumphs. Next, through an analysis of the processes by which Polgreen is historically confined by powerful archival and subsequent historical representations, I challenge previous assumptions about her life. Finally, introducing material from the British parliamentary debates in which an incident involving Polgreen is described and new material from Barbados deeds left by Polgreen's former slave, I expose the nuances of Polgreen's ‘agency’ in a slave society – that which depended upon her sexual subjugation of other women of African descent.     

An officer and an activist: Futuring,precarity and life after exile in Namibia

This article explores the life histories of two Namibians who grew up in SWAPO's exile camps in Angola and their ‘futuring’ trajectories once they returned home to Namibia after independence. Presenting these actors’ life histories of navigating Namibian society helps challenge a one-sided economic interpretation of precariousness. More critical than asserting dichotomies between ‘elite’ and ‘precariat’ are the stratagems and choices shaping lived experiences.     

Nunneries,Communities and the Revaluation of Domesticity

This is a review of three books: a collection of essays edited by Diane Watt on medieval women in their communities, and two monographs, by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Marilyn Oliva, on nunneries in late medieval Germany and England. All three suggest in different ways that women's activities are regularly undervalued by the assumption that women try to do the same things as men, and fail. Hamburger argues that the artistic production of late fifteenth‐century nuns has been dismissed because it does not satisfy the criteria of (male) ‘high’ art. He shows that ‘nuns' work’ is in fact the product of a complex symbolic visual and textual culture. Oliva argues that the study of nunneries has been neglected because it is assumed that, since they were not rich and powerful like the monasteries, there is no evidence about them. She shows that it is possible to undertake a detailed prosopographical study of a group of nunneries from a single diocese. I argue that when in this context we talk about ‘women’, we are often in fact talking about the domestic sphere, with which women were so strongly associated. A revaluation of women's activities entails a revaluation of domesticity and the home.     

Simultaneous love: an argument on love,modernity and the feminist subject at the beginning of the twentieth century

This article explores an argument on love as it was articulated within the framework of the ‘New Ethics’ sexual reform in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. While many commentaries on the alienating impact of modernity projected authenticity onto the ‘non‐modern’ woman and her love, the feminist authors at issue in this article promote ‘modern love’ as a medium of women's participation in modernity. Furthermore, they address the problem of love's temporality and non‐exclusivity. Yet, the engagement with these topics is a tricky one because non‐exclusivity and impermanence are at the same time dismissed as ‘decadent’ ways of loving and attributed to ‘archaic’ Europe and non‐European cultures.     

The domestic residue: feminist mobility and space in Simryn Gill's art

Feminism, now nearly half a century old, is still fractured by two divisive forms – the desire to emancipate women from masculinist power structures, and the affirmation of woman's sexual difference. However, as Teresa de Lauretis and Gillian Rose argue, for feminism to remain relevant, it must also be attentive to the fluid hegemonic conditions of power, and thus, strive to evolve new ‘forms’, which emphasize feminism's political mobility. Developing this proposition, this article discusses how a new critical feminist mobility may be detected in the work of Sydney-based Malaysian artist Simryn Gill. Born in Singapore in 1959, and hailing from a migrant Punjabi family who first settled in Malaya in the 1920s, Gill constantly travels between her home in Sydney and her family bungalow in Port Dickson, a small coastal town in Malaysia. I will discuss how Gill's feminist perspective may be mapped through the artist's shifting spatial contexts by looking at three spaces – the gallery, the domestic interior and the tropics. Through these spaces, I will explore how the artist occupies the dual roles of ‘woman’ and ‘women’, thus demonstrating the changing and fluid energy of a mobile feminist stance. Gill's art valorizes the domestic sphere as a recurring theme with this subject being central to her self-definition in the public sphere. Yet, her treatment of domesticity is distinct in its furtiveness, a tactic, which I argue, enables a feminist agency that is politically mobile, and capable of engaging issues of gender, sexuality, race, class and citizenship.     

Class,Place, and Gender: Contested Industrial and Domestic Space in Kohler,Wisconsin, USA, 1920–1960

The Kohler company, a family‐owned plumbing manufactory in Wisconsin, USA, known for the ‘garden industrial village’ erected for its workers during the 1910s, managed class relations through a gendered spatial arrangement of its model town. In the 1930s and 1950s, unionists striking at the plant responded by articulating their class alliances within and outside the town in spatial terms that revised the meaning of the place. In the process, the Kohler unions also necessarily refigured domestic space in ways that challenged the company's mapping of domesticity in the 1930s, but they drew back from such challenges in the 1950s.     

NGOs as Social Movements: Policy Narratives,Networks and the Performance of Dalit Rights in South India

Donor‐funded development NGOs are sometimes portrayed as co‐opting, privatizing or depoliticizing citizen action or social movements. This much is implied by the term ‘NGOization’. Alternatively, NGOs can be seen as bearers of rights‐based work increasingly threatened by tighter regulation or substitution by corporate social responsibility models of development. This article engages critically with both perspectives. It traces the role of NGOs and their funders in agenda setting, specifically in bringing the previously excluded issue of caste discrimination into development policy discourse in the form of a Dalit‐rights approach in Tamil Nadu, south India. The authors explore the institutional processes of policy making and NGO networking involved, the alliances, entanglements of NGOs and social movements, and the performativity of NGO Dalit rights. But at the same time, the article illustrates how NGO institutional systems have constrained or failed to sustain such identity‐based claims to entitlement. In Nancy Fraser's terms, the article explores success and failure in addressing ‘first‐order’ issues of justice, that is rights to resources (in this case, land), and in tackling ‘second‐order’ injustices concerning the framing of who counts (who can make a claim as a rights holder) and how (by what procedures are claims and contests staged and resolved). This draws attention to the important but fragile achievements of NGOs’ discursive framings that give Dalits the ‘right to have rights’.     

Uganda's Flower Farms and Private Sector Development

The European Union's (EU) pledge to assist private sector development (PSD) in the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) states is a key pillar of its bilateral trade relationship with former colonies. It is this ostensible support to PSD that allows the EU to contend that its pursuit of market opening in ACP countries under Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) is not detrimental to human well‐being in low‐income countries, in spite of risks of import flooding and EU monopolization of emerging sectors. This article explores the legitimizing ‘development’ rationales of EU PSD frameworks from the perspective of stakeholders in a strategic site of private sector activity in the ACP grouping. Specifically, it explores Europe's PSD agendas from the standpoint of investors, managers and workers in Uganda's cut‐flower sector, which is domestically seen as one of the sectors most likely to bring economic benefits to Uganda. Based on interviews with stakeholders in the industry, the article explores whether actors in this business sector concur with the underlying ‘pro‐poor’ rationales of Europe's PSD framework and whether Europe is seen as a meaningful partner in this prioritized site of private sector activity.     

Diasporic dwelling: the poetics of domestic space

This article explores the politics of diasporic dwelling in domestic spaces. Heidegger's concept of ‘dwelling’ is popular in studies of diasporic life as it articulates a sense of belonging in mobility without the problematic connotations of rootedness conjured up by ‘home’. However, the way Heidegger's ‘dwelling’ functions in diasporic contexts is rarely considered, an absence this article seeks to address by exploring the concept in more detail, focusing in particular on ‘the fourfold’ and preservation. This discussion is grounded in the domestic spaces of two Palestinian women living in Britain. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the article explores how these women's houses, and particular spaces within them, enable and constrain their dwelling. I argue for greater attention to be paid to the expansive and integrative capacities of domestic space and demonstrate the need to address houses in their social context and as internally heterogeneous. This article also contributes to ongoing debates about material and symbolic dwelling and diasporic identities that include but also exceed territorialised belonging.     

Business Fashion: Masculinity,Class and Dress in 1870s Australia

This article explores the emergence of ‘business fashion’ as a new mode of male dress in 1870s Australia. The focus is on men at the vanguard of this new fashion: namely, bankers and sharebrokers in New South Wales’ gold-mining towns during a gold rush between 1871 and 1874. The rise of business dress offers us insight into the surprising extent of male interest in fashion in late-colonial Australia – and fresh perspectives on the history of Australian masculinity, class and consumption as a consequence.     

‘It Was Another Skin’: The kitchen as home for Australian post-war immigrant women

This article examines the importance of the kitchen for immigrant women who arrived in Australia in the late 1940s and 1950s. Using oral history interviews with 27 immigrant women I examine the multiple and overlapping ways in which they ‘make’ home. Women construct home through the kitchen by re/negotiating the kitchen space to ensure that the kitchen and their central placement within it produces a ‘feeling’ of being ‘at home’. Women shape the architecture and design of the kitchen in terms of their own understandings of the discourses of efficiency and domesticity, and also through colour and decoration, to ‘make’ the kitchen home. These understandings will be explored through nuanced readings of the immigrant women's stories of their kitchen lives.

In those days a woman's home, [well] you were in the kitchen all the time. You felt safe and confident in your kitchen because it was yours, your job, your work or whatever you do, you feel confident, but if you meet someone else outside of that you lose a little bit of that confidence … In the kitchen, I felt good … Cooking or whatever it may be, we just sat down at the table and it was a wonderful feeling. (Emily: interview, 1998, Scottish immigrant)1 1. Emily is a Scottish immigrant woman who arrived in Western Australia in 1951. Pseudonyms are used to maintain anonymity. View all notes.     

Becoming the State in Northern Australia: Urbanisation,Intra‐Indigenous Relatedness,and the State Effect

In Australia's Northern Territory, the Larrakia have been involved in a decades‐long effort to gain recognition as traditional owners through Land Rights and Native Title legislation. From one perspective, their claims have failed to achieve the entitlement and recognition grounded in these governmental regimes (Scambary 2007; Povinelli 2002). However, over the past decade the Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation (LNAC) and the Larrakia Development Corporation (LDC) have emerged as locally powerful corporate bodies that pursue programs and exercise forms of power on behalf of the Larrakia that can be understood in terms of state and governmental practice. Through suburban development, a night patrol, educational and vocational training, a radio station, and through forms of policy research and statistical enumeration, the Larrakia nation have emerged in the eyes of many as a de facto Aboriginal ‘state’ in the Darwin region. This paper explores the intra‐Indigenous relations through which these practices have emerged, and analyses the extent to which the LNAC might be understood as a kind of ‘state’ within a state, responsible for world‐shaping activities of knowledge production, housing and health outreach, vocational training and education, and policing. Focussing on the forms of ‘stateness’ that accrue to the Larrakia Nation in Darwin through its policing, knowledge production, and outreach programs for Aboriginal campers, the article explores the differential articulation of Aboriginal groups with the state. It concludes by asking how such differences matter in contexts of planned urbanisation in the Northern Territory.     

Monitoring and Medicalising Male Sexuality in Semi‐Colonial Egypt

This article examines the ways Egyptians monitored male sexuality in Ottoman and semi‐colonial Egypt. An exploration of the legislative proposals and press debates about marriage, prostitution and venereal disease reveals that the state attempted to medicalise the sexuality of Egyptian men to create ‘healthy’, disciplined men who would later marry and form fit families to serve as the foundation for a strong postcolonial nation. In their attempts to medicalise male sexuality, reformers delineated the normative heterosexuality of the ‘healthy’ male colonial subject for the emerging nation. This article explores the sexual practices of male colonial subjects to demonstrate how Egyptian notions of sexual diseases were gendered.     

Wrathful Ancestors,Corporate Sorcerers: Rituals gone Rogue in Merauke,West Papua

Anthropological studies of ritual ‘failure’ challenge the assumed efficacy of ritual in affirming the social order. Drawing from fieldwork in West Papua, I examine the ‘failure’ and ‘success’ of two rain‐making ceremonies – one hosted by an indigenous Marind expert, the other by an Indonesian oil palm corporation. Participants conceived the failure of the first ritual as a punishment meted by ancestral spirits against Marind who support agribusiness expansion. Meanwhile, the success of the corporate ceremony confirmed rumours that corporations wield foreign and powerful forms of sorcery. Drawing on Gregory Bateson's notion of the double bind, I suggest that the ritual outcomes dramatize the irreconcilable demands placed on Marind by custom and capitalism. Attempts to endorse agribusiness incur ancestral punishment, while efforts to oppose it are thwarted by the superior power of corporate sorcerers. In this context, I argue, the moral implications of the corporate ritual's unexpected ‘success’ prove just as problematic as those of the customary ritual's dramatic ‘failure’. Co‐opted yet efficacious, corporate rituals point to a new social order in which both Marind and their ancestral spirits find themselves subjected to foreign sources of supernatural control.