Feminicide as ‘act’ and ‘process’: a geography of gendered violence in Oaxaca

Feminicide in Mexico is most notoriously associated with the serial deaths of women in and around Ciudad Juárez. A 2005 congressional investigation expanded, nonetheless, the geographical scope of feminicide, arguing that the phenomenon was present throughout the country. One location that was identified early on as also experiencing a high rate of feminicide was the state of Oaxaca, in the southern part of Mexico. Inscribed within this shifting geopolitical terrain, this article draws on an understanding of feminicide as both act and process in order to offer a critical portrayal of feminicide in Oaxaca. Beginning with a discussion of the profiles of feminicide in Oaxaca, the analysis moves out to explore the multifaceted processes that enable feminicide to occur. In so doing, we also explore how feminicide intertwines with other forms of social and political violence in Oaxaca. From an ethical-moral terrain, this article joins a broader movement in certain corners of feminist geography that is concerned with ‘making bodies count’ and the politics of witnessing acts of violence.     

‘Just looking’: domestic workers' consumption practices and a latent geography of Beijing

The post-socialist Chinese city has been an important site to explore the formation of modernity in its everyday shape and manifestations. A common way of understanding urban experiences is through the prism of consumption. Rural migrants in the city cannot compare with urban residents in terms of their consumption level, but they are seen to be equally enthusiastic in partaking in consumption, and their identities are also believed to be (re)shaped by consumption practices. Drawing on several years' extensive ethnographic research in Beijing, this article suggests that these scenarios cannot adequately account for the diversity and complexity of rural migrants' experience in the consuming city. In this article, I put forward a methodological argument for considering the lived spatiality of ethnographic subjects in conceiving and considering consumption. Then, through an investigation of how migrant domestic workers use urban spaces, I consider the ‘dialectic of freedom and constraint’ which marks their agency and their individual choices and decisions. Finally, I explore the social production of space by considering migrant domestic workers' ‘subversive’ behaviours within rather than in opposition to the capitalist commercial logic and space. This discussion demonstrates that consumption practices are at the same time spatial practices, and despite the many obstacles and constraints, migrant domestic workers are actively availing themselves of the opportunities that the city has to offer. This creative process is crucial if we are to gain a new and more nuanced understanding of consumption as a social practice. I further argue that it is also a process by which rural migrants hold on to their sense of dignity and self-respect in an environment of exclusion and discrimination.     

Masculinity,place and a binary discourse of ‘theory’ and ‘empirical investigation’ in the human geography of Aotearoa/New Zealand

This paper discusses a binary discourse of ‘theory’ and ‘empirical investigation’ in the human geography practised in Aotearoa (New Zealand)[1]. I attempt to illustrate the way in which such dichotomous thinking articulates with the social construction of a hegemonic masculinity to effect a specific geographic understanding of the world. I suggest that this theory/empirical investigation binary gives rise to at least three significant problems in geographic research: a gendered and hierarchical structuring of geographic thought, a devaluation of the feminised term in the binary, and unworkable ‘mobile positioning’ of the researcher.     

The challenge of the oceanic feeling: Romain Rolland’s mystical critique of psychoanalysis and his call for a ‘new science of the mind’

In a letter written in 1927, the French writer Romain Rolland asked Sigmund Freud to analyse the ‘oceanic feeling,’ a religious feeling of oneness with the entire universe. I will argue that Rolland’s intentions in introducing the oceanic feeling to Freud were much more complex, multifaceted, and critical than most scholars have acknowledged. To this end, I will examine Rolland’s views on mysticism and psychoanalysis in his book-length biographies of the Indian saints Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, which he wrote just after he mentioned the oceanic feeling to Freud in 1927. I will argue that Rolland’s primary intentions in appealing to the oceanic feeling in his 1927 letter to Freud – less evident in his letters to Freud than in his biographies of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda – were to challenge the fundamental assumptions of psychoanalysis from a mystical perspective and to confront Freud with a mystical ‘science of the mind’ that he felt was more rigorous and comprehensive than Freud’s psychoanalytic science.     

The ‘Migrated Archives’ and a Forgotten Corner of Empire: The British Borneo Territories

The ‘migrated archives’, previously concealed files related to former colonies of the British Empire, were released over the period 2012–13. The first flurry of academic and journalistic interest, focused on possible revelations of the misuse of colonial power, soon subsided. Nevertheless, the archives have been valuable in enlarging knowledge of colonial policy-making. They have also aided exploration of the interstices between the official records of colonial administration and the often unrecorded life of peoples and communities. In this sense the ‘migrated archives’ are a rich resource in prompting a new look at established historical narratives of the British Borneo territories of Brunei, North Borneo and Sarawak. These territories have received scant attention in the historiography of British colonialism. This has been to the detriment of wider scholarship in studying issues such as the expansion of the wartime colonial state; the ‘second colonial occupation’ and the evolution of post-war British colonial governance; the development of anti-colonialism; the formation of Malaysia; counter-terrorism conflicts; and the nature of the colonial legacy. The colonial period may seem a fleeting phase in the age-old cultural and economic formation of the Borneo states, yet it continues to have contemporary relevance in a strategically sensitive part of the world. This article seeks to show that the Borneo territories merit greater attention from historians of British colonialism and that the ‘migrated archives’, used in conjunction with other sources, can make a significant contribution towards the history of colonialism in a previously neglected area.     

‘The races and conditions of men’: women in nineteenth-century geography school texts in the United States

Geography schoolbooks published in the United States were important opinion makers in the nineteenth century, often joining the Bible as the main source of information about the world outside North America. The texts examined here are noteworthy for their static and pejorative treatment of non-American cultures and may be seen as playing a key role in forming isolationist and chauvinist American public opinion. They also played a role in reinforcing ideas about the proper niche for women in American society, even though it may seem at first that these books could not have had much influence on ideas about American women because they barely mentioned women, almost always relegating them to illustrations and captions. The few women depicted were usually characterized as ‘poor souls’ in distant lands worthy of pity. We discuss the national political context in which these writers (many of whom were women) were producing geography school texts, the social roles they were fulfilling by reinforcing such limited images of ‘foreign’ women, and the sources they may have used in their research. Furthermore, we demonstrate that much more could have been drawn ethnographically from the illustrations of women. The images of women in these geography schoolbooks reinforced the marginalization of women, particularly non-white and non-western women.     

The Capture and Curation of the Cannibal ‘Vendovi’: Reality and Representation of a Pacific Frontier

ABSTRACT

The United States Exploring Expedition into the Pacific launched in 1838 was marked, like the continental expansion westward, by violent encounters with Native peoples. By examining the record of the expedition's kidnapping of the Fijian Ro Veidovi, the fate of his body after death, and the ways his story came to be invoked in the official narrative of the expedition, the popular press, the ‘National Gallery’ and, more recently, the Fijian press, this paper demonstrates how violent contacts on the Pacific frontier were remembered, effaced, and reconceived. The changing story of Ro Veidovi permanently bridged distant locales in an emerging ‘Pacific World’, setting in motion transcultural negotiations that continue to this day.     

‘Impressions of Weird Fate’: Revision and Crisis in ‘The Lady of Shalott’

Alfred Tennyson disliked the engraving of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ produced by William Holman Hunt for the 1857 Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems, accusing the artist of taking too many liberties in depicting the Lady’s hair and the threads of her weaving as ‘wildly tossing’ around her. This essay traces the histories of both Hunt’s image and Tennyson’s text, arguing that the poet’s objection is grounded in the fact the engraving reproduces the fierce agency that characterizes the Lady in Tennyson’s 1832 original but not his 1842 revision. That pattern of revision, I suggest, reflects the poet’s distress over the 1833 death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam and is motivated by his new ways of thinking, in the wake of that catastrophe, about the crisis of desire and the perpetual trauma of communication between the living and the dead.     

The spatial practice of public engagement: ‘doing’ geography in the South Wales valleys

This paper explores the spatial practices of public engagement through the consideration of an audio walk project that took place in Ebbw Vale in the summer of 2010. In the current political climate public engagement is often seen as a universal good, a way of demonstrating the productive dialogues that exist between ‘experts’ and their manifold publics. As studies in science communication have shown, however, this is a little misleading, for the term ‘public engagement’ masks a great diversity of projects and initiatives, which vary in the degree, methods and effectiveness of their engagement. In this paper, we argue that what is missing from many of these critiques is an attentiveness to the ‘placing’ and ‘spacing’ of our public engagement practices: where we work, who we work with and how we work all affect the nature, meaning and effectiveness of public engagement. Drawing on the idea of spatial practices, this paper explores the situated doing of the Ebbw Vale audio walk project.     

Scaling health and healthcare: re‐presenting Thailand's HIV/AIDS epidemic with world regional geography students

Authors of world regional geography textbooks have recently become more interested in the broader theoretical changes that have emerged in human geography. Relying on feminist and other critical perspectives, concepts such as space, place and scale are being re‐imagined in this ‘new world regional geography’. This paper intervenes on behalf of a more critical world regional geography by suggesting how world regional geography teachers can educate students about scale as a social construction through the use of empirical data. Relying on fieldwork conducted in Thailand, this paper lays out a lesson on the HIV/AIDS crisis and how different representations of that crisis, from the national to the individual, offer different ‘ways of knowing’ the epidemic. Furthermore, this paper examines how we can push students to consider the ways in which scales of analysis are constructed and constituted through our own geographic practices.     

‘Facing it Together’: Early Caregiving Responses to Vancouver's HIV/AIDS Epidemic

This article utilises oral history interviews with long-term survivors and caregivers in Vancouver, British Columbia to foreground the importance of gay men's early HIV/AIDS caregiving work. Caregiving was essential to the health and resilience of Vancouver's gay community and served as a political response to homophobic discourses that demonised gay men and devalued the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS. This analysis of the practical and political significance of HIV/AIDS caregiving demonstrates that historians must find better ways to recover the often-untold histories of men's caregiving and domesticity and appreciate their significance to the success of social movements.     

‘‘The Acceptable Face of the Unintelligible’: Intermediality and the Science Play’

Abstract

The limitations of the ‘science-in-theatre’ genre is explored and the concept of the intermedial science play is introduced as an alternative to conventional science plays. How the science-in-theatre play dampens the mediality of the stage in order to establish a specific contract with its audience in order to realize what Carl Djerassi calls ‘didactic realism’ is considered. By virtue of the dramatic form and the didacticism it establishes, the science-in-theatre play limits the means by which audiences may encounter and enjoy responding to science. In particular, when staging concepts from the postclassical sciences, the intermedial science play offers artists and spectators new approaches to the sciences of infinities, complexity and emergence whilst also establishing a new, interactive contract with the audience based on forms of pedagogy associated with the thinking of Jacques Rancière. Using the media theory of Peter Boenisch and others, intermediality is identified as more than the mere presence of multimedia, but in terms of the effects it produce on the sensorium of the spectator.     

The 1919 ‘race riots’ – Within and beyond exceptional moments in South Shields and Glasgow

Historicising riots is a challenging process. Balancing the characterisation of violent trauma alongside the longer trajectories of associated grievances, and acts of contestation, poses representational tensions for associated scholars. Emphasis, both in contemporary sources and recent scholarship, upon exceptional episodes of violence potentially overplays the particularity of the event, and perhaps detracts from the recognition of smaller, less visible, and everyday acts of exclusion and contestation. In this paper, we propose to revisit the 1919 British seaport riots through a political geography lens, considering continuities and variations in the experiences, trajectories and contexts of the events in South Shields and Glasgow. Theoretically, we draw upon intersecting work within cultural studies, history and geography to reflect upon critical space-time geographies in relation to the political atmospheres of violent events. This facilitates an engagement with a variety of sources to characterise the 1919 riots, including trade union records, Colonial Office documents, newspaper reports and police records. We argue that bringing together these archival materials allows a recognition of the heterogeneity of experience associated with seemingly exceptional episodes of racialised violence.     

‘Decision not to decide’: a new challenge for planning

This article examines how the policy-maker’s ‘decision not to decide’ affects different levels of internal organization and how it is reflected in the residential patterns of different population groups. The article explores the dynamics of residential patterns in two case studies: the Collective behaviour of the Sylheti community along Whitechapel Road in Eastern London and the Group Action of the ‘Kol-Torah’ Community in Zangwill Street, Jerusalem, where Inner-markets activities create clear property lines around/within their boundaries and result in a similar homogeneous pattern. Identifying the main engines of organized neighbourhood change and the difficulties of planning and dealing with individuals in the housing market shed light on similar processes occurring in other city centres with diverse population groups.