‘Playing family’: unruly relationality and transnational motherhood

Scholarly literature on interpersonal relationships between tourist women and local men has been largely discussed under the heteronormative framework of love and sexuality. However, the plenitude of ways in which these intimacies manifest themselves requires that we pay attention to the manifold forms of heterosexual relatedness that these intimacies generate. This article considers how intimate liaisons between Western women and Balinese men that commenced as holiday romances in Bali transform into unruly relationality and transnational motherhood. Focusing the analysis on women's narratives, the article explores how subjects engage in the production of sexual, reproductive, social and economic forms of transnational relatedness wherein the mother and child live permanently in the women's country of citizenship while the Balinese father remains in Bali. Rather than aspiring towards a monogamous relationship and cohabitation as heteronormativity prescribes, the article demonstrates how these non-conventional, transnational families perpetually challenge the nuclear family norm, boundaries of normative motherhood and dichotomies of home versus away.     

Feeling sexual transgression: subjectivity,bodily experience,and non-normative hetero-erotic practices in women's cross-border sex in Costa Rica

Participating in sexual tourism and cross-border sex, heterosexual Euro-North American women are a targeted social group whereby accusations, such as ‘fucking gringa’, label them as sexual transgressors for violating multiple boundaries of heteronormativity. The complex power dynamics of women's cross-border sex are due to negotiations of race, gender, and class that are played out in specific locales and political economies of desire. Within these dynamics, women are agentive social actors and exert considerable sexual agency in their desires for local men who are positioned unevenly vis-à-vis tourist women's mobilities within erotic markets. Yet women's hetero-erotic sexual practices, which are experienced at the level of the body, cannot be assumed; looking at the lived experiences of women as sexual trangressors in these spaces promises to complicate non-normative heterosexuality and the gendered dynamics of (straight) transnational sex. Using critical ethnography and a performance approach to writing that places subjectivity at the center of the ethnographic record and analysis, this article conveys an ‘insider’ or emic account of women's transnational sex taking place in a Caribbean region of Costa Rica renown for women's sexual and romance tourism. In taking this approach, I aim to show how heterosexuality, hetero-erotic practices, and cross-border sex are not always what they seem and a glimpse into ‘the subjects’ worlds in their words' (Madison, Soyini. 2005. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. London: Sage, 174) has implications for theory concerned with the body and performance as fundamental to the social production of sexual transgression.     

Tourist,local, or other?: Greek Canadian women and the heritage fling in Greece

This article examines the romantic and sexual encounters between Greek men and Greek Canadian women vacationing in Greece and addresses how constructions of Greek Canadian female sexuality are related to foreign and local Greek conceptions of femininity during these ‘holiday flings’. Because of their Greek ancestry, Mediterranean ‘looks’, and familiarity with language and culture, Greek Canadian women exhibit ambiguous identities that uphold and cross boundaries between outsiders and insiders. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, I explore the conceptualizations of ancestral and national identity underpinning Greek women's erotic desires for Greek man who embody ethnic authenticity to them. Yet, Greek men thwart these desires when they subvert Canadian women's economic power through challenging their cultural literacy (such as a lack in language skills, etiquette, or sexual knowledge). This article addresses the question of how diasporic women's heterosexuality subjectivities – bound up with hybrid ethnic and national affiliations – take on different meanings across locales and times where transnational sex and romance are everyday occurrences.     

Bridewealth a Pardon: New Relationships and Restoration of Good Daughters

Bridewealth is recognized as vital in the reproduction and reconfiguration of Pacific environments and women play an integral role in this process. In contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG), bridewealth is reconfigured by kin to acknowledge the considered actions of women as they enter into relationships with men. This paper will explore how women's choices impact and influence their experience of these exchanges and determine the role of women and their kin as they undertake these practices. Here I aim to understand how the social relatedness that frames bridewealth exchanges enables the practices of bridewealth to be used as a tool for recognition of women's choices, autonomy and personhood. Although women enter into relationships without initial kin approval, bridewealth practices converge ultimately with a women's autonomous choice of husband. Wardlow suggests (2006:86) 'bridewealth confers value and dignity on female gender', and going beyond her observation, I show that bridewealth has been useful in achieving this in regard to managing and supporting social, kin and affinal relationships. This article will explore two cases, to identify what each tells us about women's ability to act in ways that are beneficial to them and important to kin. I show how moral evaluations frame (pasin) and recognize (luksave) kin and social relationships that ultimately constitute their personhood.     

‘Shades of grey’: spaces in and beyond trafficking for Thai Women involved in commercial sexual labour in Sydney and Singapore

In this article I explore the migration trajectories of some Thai women trafficked internationally for commercial sexual exploitation, suggesting that many figuratively ‘cross the border’ between coerced and consensual existence in volatile migrant sex industries during the course of their migration experiences, thus complicating debates around the notion of choice in ‘sex’ trafficking. In exploring these women's transitions I seek to understand why women who had either never previously been sex workers or who were sex workers operating without duress, but who were then trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation remain in, or re-enter volatile forms of migrant sex work at a later point under voluntary arrangements. In answering this question I focus on the temporal and spatial aspects of individual women's experiences in migrant sex industries drawing in detail on the narratives of two Thai women trafficked to Sydney, Australia and Singapore. I make some suggestions about methodologies used in trafficking research that can assist in bringing to light some of these complex time–space dimensions of women's experiences through their shifting positions in commercial sexual labour. The article also reflects on the implications of these women's trajectories for the ‘prostitution debate’ as it relates to trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation by suggesting that many trafficked women occupy ambiguous or in-between positions in migrant sex industries, neither easily distinguishable by the label of victim of trafficking or migrant sex worker.     

Embodied cosmopolitanisms: the subjective mobility of migrants working in the global sex industry

Anti-trafficking rhetoric and policies emphasise the extent of exploitation and coercion of female migrant sex workers and obfuscate the shared ambivalences and contradictions experienced by migrant female sex workers and their male agents and partners. By engaging in the global sex industry, both young men and women negotiate their aspiration to cosmopolitan late modern lifestyles against the prevalence of essentialist patriarchal gender values and sexual mores at home. In the process, established gender normativities, legitimising women's subjection to men, are both reproduced and challenged. The evidence informing this article shows that a minority of women are coerced into the sex industry. There is a direct link between the adherence to essentialist gender/sexual roles and the recourse to violence and exploitation, because migrants' prolonged involvement in the sex industry coincides with the adherence to more cosmopolitan gender/sexual roles, translating into less authoritarian and violent discourses and practices. Hegemonic understandings of migrants' involvement in the global sex industry in terms of ‘trafficking’ erase these important dynamics and dimensions, which underpin intricate feelings and experiences of advantage, disadvantage and exploitation. By failing to engage with the meanings that migrants working in the sex industry ascribe to their working and personal lives, the (anti)trafficking logic of ‘humanitarian intervention’ enforces forms of solidarity and support that appeal to the minority and harm the majority of the people they are supposed to ‘rescue’.     

Feminism,Gender, and Women's Peace Activism

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on ‘Women, peace and security’, passed in 2000, reflects a recent growth in women's peace activism. Women's resistance to violence is widely believed to be a mobilizing factor in both local and international peace movements. This provokes questions around essentialism and violence of concern to feminists: are men inherently territorial and aggressive, and women naturally nurturing and peaceable? Or is the behaviour of both conditioned by particular local configurations of social relations of power? This contribution reviews these questions in the light of the experiences of women's peace organizations. It concludes that essentializing women's roles as wives, mothers and nurses discourages their inclusion as active decision makers in political arenas, as well as overshadowing the needs of other disadvantaged groups. Rather than seeing war as the violation of women by men, we should recognize that men and women are each differently violated by war.     

Have sex will travel: romantic ‘sex tourism’ and women negotiating modernity in the Sinai

Since the 1970s, studies on western women's ethnosexual tourist–local relationships have tended to focus on the beaches of the Caribbean and have come to one of two main conclusions – either they are no different from the overtly exploitative relationships of heterosexual male sex tourists or they are different because they involve a softer, caring element of romance. This article proposes that both positions have led to constrictive, circular research that highlights the racialised and economically disparate nature of these exchanges but mostly ignores the importance of imaginative and emotional geographies caught up in such relationships. Based on fieldwork interviews with men and women in the resorts of the South Sinai, Egypt, I argue that these encounters can be seen as examples of a modern subjectivity that are defined by and take place within imagined (fixed) constructions of landscapes, native third world masculinity (in this case Arab/Bedouin), femininity (white, heterosexual, western), freedom and love (spiritual and physical): all presented in some form of opposition to a particularist idea of modernity and viewed through a filter of selective (and spatially circumscribed) histories. By adding a geographical dimension, this article aims to open up the current debate on female sex tourism to a wider range of issues and reveal more of the conflicts, tensions and imaginations that make up these encounters.     

Ethnographic Understandings of Gender and Economic Transition in Siberia: Implications for Planners and Policy Makers

Economic transition has been defined by neo-liberal restructuring policies and understandings. Using ethnographic data from Omsk, Russia, I examine structural adjustment policy implementation in the context of socially constructed gender norms. These policies have complicated implications for women and men's economic survival. The ethnographic understandings gained from interviews with women provide vital information that would improve planning processes in Omsk. For example, using an economic gardening approach to support women's small business development and workforce development targeting survivors of violence would advance women's economic self-sufficiency. I suggest that if planners use ethnographic understandings they will be able to more effectively respond to planning challenges such as poverty, education and health care issues.     

Introduction: Foreign travel,transnational sex,and transformations of heterosexualities

Transformation of heterosexuality in the context of transnational mobility has been much neglected in the scholarly literature. In this themed issue we bring together four articles to contribute to the debates about negotiations of heterosexual sexual relations and practices between European and North American women and local men at holiday destinations. The focus is on Euro-North American women's performances of heterosexuality as bound up with gender, race, age, and nationality. Each article uses ethnographic methods to demonstrate how transformation of heterosexuality is spatially and culturally contingent and contested in relation to normative expectations of heterosexual love, sex, and romance regulating women's sexuality both in the women travellers' home countries and in the destination of the encounters. More broadly, articles in this themed issue contribute to the emerging literature aiming to re-think heterosexualities.     

Fellowship and Citizenship as Models of National Community: United Church Women's Fellowship in Ranongga,Solomon Islands

From humble beginnings in the 1960s, the United Church Women's Fellowship (UCWF) is now viewed as one of the most effective organizations on the island of Ranongga (Western Province, Solomon Islands). This essay considers reasons for the success of women's fellowship in Ranongga, focusing on the distinctive position of women in gendered local and translocal forms of social organization. Far from being isolated from the outside world, Ranonggan women have long been engaged in drawing outsiders into local communities. I explore this theme in narratives of Christian conversion and of the beginning of women's fellowship; I also consider the practices of local and national women's fellowship groups that work to constitute unified communities out of diverse groups of people. My discussion of Ranonggan women's fellowship illustrates local dynamics of community‐making that do not map easily on to dominant models of nation‐states and ethnic groups. I ask whether the UCWF provides an alternative model for thinking about larger‐scale political formations, particularly in the Solomons. This question is especially relevant considering the significant contribution that women's Christian organizations have made in efforts to reconstitute a national community in the context of the ongoing political crisis in Solomon Islands.     

Mothers/Fighters/Citizens: Violence and Disillusionment in Post‐War El Salvador

This article explores post‐war El Salvador as characterised by disillusionment in the nation's neoliberal rebuilding project. A key part of my argument is that this disillusion‐ment is gendered. Specifically, I focus on a spectrum of gendered experiences and responses to social and inter‐personal violence in El Salvador's recent history. Is there a relationship between wartime political violence, continued processes of exclusion (i.e. education, healthcare, housing), and post‐war waves of domestic violence, youth violence and ‘random’ violence? While some scholars posit questions regarding Salvadoran toler‐ance to violence through time, I tackle this question by focusing on emerging criticisms of El Salvador's post‐war reconciliation. I privilege a focus on the everyday and people's ambiguities as they deal with political change and a neoliberal economy that marginalises the rural sector. In particular, I argue for placing many rural women's stories of gender‐based violence, their assertions of an embodied vulnerability and daily insecurity, within a political economic understanding of the contradictions of El Salvador's peace and nation‐building project. Through a series of ethnographic examples based on seventeen months of research in a former warzone, I suggest that a daily and gendered violence is rendered invisible. My aim is to theorise a range of women's and men's losses and to impart the urgency of their narratives that problematise assumptions of what constitutes pain, sorrow and the challenges of war‐torn life. This is an attempt to write outside privileged texts that ask subaltern women to speak in a collective voice and articulate their past loss and future hopes. In doing so, I discuss methodology and historicise my own fraught positioning as an international witness/researcher at a very particular moment of El Salvador's transition to democracy.     

Women running for neighborhood offices in a Turkish city: Motivations and resources for electoral candidacy

This study is about how gender and local urban scales interact with each other to influence individuals' motivations and resources for political recruitment. The data came from interviews with twenty women who ran for and lost the 2004 local elections for their neighborhood office, muhtarlik, in Eskisehir, Turkey. Considering both individual and institutional factors and the neighborhood scale as important for women's candidacy for local offices, this paper relies on a “relational” view of citizenship while examining the mediating roles of the local scale for citizenship. My findings overall disagreed with the arguments that “women's interests” drive women to enter politics and that the local offices provide more opportunities for women's political recruitment. As women's roles and responsibilities had been changing across multiple spaces, they ran for elections to search for ways to practice their capacities in public arenas. Yet to the electorates, first, even women with high qualities for the office did not appear as the most qualified candidates. Second, most electorates tended to evaluate candidacy qualities in relation to the neighborhood office's weak status in Turkish political system and as an unskilled job. Third, they seemed to associate this “job” positively with men's traditional domestic role as the main breadwinner, consider women's charity and communal works as women's traditional care responsibilities, and to vote mostly for over-middle-aged male incumbents with locally embedded relations. Finally, women missed an opportunity for their candidacy by not transforming their local network-based assets into resources for candidacy.     

The Perils of the Back Seat: Date Rape,Race and Gender in 1950s America

Dating among white American teenagers in the 1950s caused parents considerable concern, as it represented disturbing developments in sexual expectations. While the rhetoric surrounding marriage celebrated traditional gender roles and monogamy, Americans bemoaned social and moral decay, caused in part by women's encroachment on male prerogatives. Sexual experience for boys increasingly became a defining gender characteristic and a means of achieving manhood as well. Ideas about proper marital norms and studies of dating practices among young people naturalised male aggression as proof of masculinity, which made girls, even ‘respectable ones’, vulnerable to violence from their dates. As teens' acceptance of going steady became more widespread, older racialised narratives of sexual danger evolved to incorporate new dating trends. Whereas American, and especially southern white, women knew the dangers of the supposed ‘black beast rapist’, they learnt during the 1950s that a special danger could confront them in the back seat of cars, despite the presence of their white, male date. Even with a white protector, white women remained vulnerable to violence on dates, whether from black men or from their white date. As dating conventions loosened, white women found that that the perils of the back seat only increased.     

Rape on the Railway: Women,Safety, and Moral Panic in Victorian Newspapers

In the Victorian press, the railway carriage was painted as a site of particular danger for women travelling alone. As a hybrid public and private space, the carriage placed strangers together in an intimate, quasi-domestic setting for which there were few established norms of behaviour. When male and female solo travellers found themselves confined together, it set the scene both for sexual assault and for false charges of assault, which the newspapers played upon; solo female travellers were depicted as either potential victims or potential Potiphar's wives. These representations were prominent in two moral panics that attempted to regulate women's movement. In this article, I examine accounts of sexual assault from the Lancet, The Times, the English Leader, and the People's Advocate from the 1860s and 1870s and consider newspaper reports as a source of erotic stimulation in a late-century pornographic novel, Raped on the Railway. I argue that the newspapers' fascination with sexual violence on trains, while connected to the weakened division between public and private spaces and an association of railway engines with virility, was primarily a response to fears about women's increasing freedom.     

Black sisterhood: The situation of urban aboriginal women and their relationship to the white women's movement 1

The article argues that Aboriginal women in urban aboriginal society experience very different oppressions than do white women in urban white society. Aboriginal women believe that their greatest oppression is racism not sexism. When their objective conditions are examined it becomes obvious that this is indeed so. In fact Aboriginal women are statistically better educated and better employed than are Aboriginal men. Other economic and societal factors combine to produce a situation whereby a black woman's status within her own society is very different to that of her white sisters. Black women are more likely to be heads of household; more likely to be political leaders and less likely to be child‐burdened than their white counterparts. Consequently women's movement demands such as abortion, child‐care, the right to work and sexual liberation are not given high priority by the Aboriginal women's movement. Aboriginal women's demands stem from the politics of poverty and discrimination. These are caused by racism not sexism.     

Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professionally Violent Women‐Fighters in 1930s Stalinist Russia

Over the course of the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945, over 800,000 Soviet women volunteered to the front and served in the field army. Among them were thousands of snipers, riflewomen, machine‐gunners and mortar women. Thousands of women were trained to serve as commanders and commissars of rifle, machine‐gun and mortar subdivisions. Women also mastered fighter planes, dive bombers and night bombers as well as light and heavy tanks. I pursue three questions in the article: how did this women's entitlement to fighting become thinkable in the first place, acceptable in the second, and thirdly, realisable in Soviet society? I argue that the conceivability of women's compatibility with combat, war and violence was a product of the radical undoing of traditional gender differences that Stalinist society underwent in the 1930s. By the late 1930s, combat duty in wartime became an acknowledged option for women in Stalinist political culture. The construction of alternative gender personalities enjoyed both public articulation in press and military expert approval. The alternative femininity encompassed and redefined the traditionally incompatible qualities: maternal love and military violence, feminine charm.     

‘The Kite is Tied to You’: Custom,Christianity, and Organization among Kanak Women of Drueulu,Lifou, New Caledonia

This paper explores Drueulu women's engagement in an organized collectivity during the late 1980s and early 1990s. I focus particularly on the Drueulu Women's Group, a group affiliated to the umbrella Catholic organization, mouvement féminin vers un Souriant Village Mélanésien (mfSVM), to illustrate how these women mobilized cultural elements, including customary bonds, religious affiliation, and maternal relations, to assert their agency and empowerment. To move beyond a given and unchanging representation of Lifouan men and women means bringing to the fore multiple changing identities which are negotiated in different times and places. This does not mean privileging localism over national commonalities. By examining a 1990 protest march against alcohol abuse by men, I attest to the various articulations of women's concerns, customary linkages, and denominational affiliation which informed women's agenda at the village level. I then consider how these configurations were articulated in the 1992 annual general assembly of the mfSVM when 200 women gathered in Drueulu from all over the country for the twentieth anniversary of the movement. In the wider social settings here examined, the ubiquitous metaphorical use of maternal tropes gained strategic efficacy.     

Unpacking the landscape of female sex tourism in Kenya: a film analysis of Paradise: Love

This article examines Paradise: Love (2012, Dir. Ulrich Seidl), a compelling filmic account of the problematics of race, ethnicity, gender, and nation that organize contemporary accounts of female sex tourism. The storyline and visual imagery of the film positions Kenya – and a Eurocentric, homogenized, and reductive (mis)understanding of parts of ‘Africa’ – as an imagined site of racial and sexual adventure for older white Western women seeking intimate relationships with a category of local black men, many of whom enter into these sexual relationships in order to supplement personal and family economic shortfalls. This economy of intimate exchange is positioned as a trade of these black Kenyan men’s desire for money, local status, and the potential to travel to the West, for white Western women’s desire for sexual fulfillment from young black men’s bodies and their assumed sexual prowess. Deconstructing the discourses of female sex tourism through Paradise: Love centres the visual and representational components of processes of racialization and sexualization, wherein beach boys and white Western women gaze upon and ‘Other’ each other through essentialist and fetishized understandings of racial and sexual difference. In focusing on the power dynamics of female sex tourism in particular, the film plays up the shock value of women sexually exploiting men, pushing viewers to question: who counts as a sex tourist? Ultimately, this article seeks to enrich and extend scholarship that troubles intersecting power structures that shape and inform transnational inter-racial intimacies within economies of eroticized exchange.