Men and anti-violence initiatives: transnational feminist reflections from Afghanistan and Pakistan

Abstract

This article looks at how international development’s rhetoric for enlisting men to take up anti-violence against women’s work is translated into reality. Based on fieldwork conducted in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I argue that whilst there have been success stories of men’s behaviour changing, the localisation of gender concepts and ideas into local frameworks has not been as successful. Furthermore, inattention to how gender relations are shaped by conflict and violence results in the dilution of feminist values around work on violence against women. This inattention also privileges middle-class men’s activism at the expense of activism by women and men from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds. The article concludes with a call for further transnational feminist dialogue and interventions in the area of men’s involvement, so that current and future initiatives are critical, reflexive and relevant.     

Autistic culture online: virtual communication and cultural expression on the spectrum

In this article, I examine cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness in the commercial Hollywood film: Girl Interrupted (1999). In contrast to most of the disability studies literature concerned with cultural representation, this article explicitly examines how the spatiality of ‘mad women's’ lives is constructed through film. Drawing on post-structuralist, and feminist perspectives on disability, and on conceptual ideas from the limited social geographic literature concerned with the lives of persons with mental illness, I explore the contradictory cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness constructed through this film. This approach recognizes that representations of ‘mad women’ and their places in society and space involve contradictory, tension-laden relationships between spectator and cultural product, complex discursive negotiations of meaning, and gendered processes of meaning-making, in some ways affirming mad women's lives and in others perpetuating negative stereotypes about women with mental illness and where they belong.     

‘Now they’re coming after our schools’: interrogating urban intimacies of children and displacement

ABSTRACT

Education scholars grappling with policy issues related to community and identity issues may pay attention to the work of emotion. Rationalist, psychological frameworks that bound many educational researchers’ policy analyses are limited in scope: the policy process is seen as a linear cause-and-effect process. A feminist geographic attention to this research offers a more complex understanding of the experiences of policy. Using children’s displacement by gentrification as an example, this commentary will show how a feminist geographic understanding of place attachment offers a more complete understanding of the effects of gentrification. Specifically, using the concept of the ‘intimate city’, I show how the global process of gentrification is entangled with the intimate embodiment of emotions. And in order to effectively study education policy, we must be attuned to how children embody their emotions.     

Generative spaces of gender and feminist geography in Singapore: entanglements of the personal and political

Abstract

While geographers’ work in Southeast Asia has yet to engage substantively with theoretical developments in gender/feminist studies generated by Anglo-American academic centers, we argue that Singapore has proven to be somewhat of an exception. Focusing on the National University of Singapore, this article discusses how the development of gender and feminist geography in Singapore has benefitted from being able to engage with international debates in feminism through the country’s and NUS’ internationalization efforts, and working in the English language. Using the notion of generative spaces, we highlight first, the importance of using our teaching to engage in feminist activism to encourage feminist change in the classroom, as well as within our immediate communities and further afield; and second, the nascent yet significant contributions of feminist geographers based in Singapore to feminist theorization from and about the Global South.     

Student housing as a learning space

ABSTRACT

This paper is an initial exploration of the significance of students’ accommodation as spaces for learning. In interviews, students of Geography and Planning discuss the spatiality of studying, and how their student housing features in this. The diversity of student living and studying emerges clearly. Yet there are some commonalities, notably the significance of the materiality of accommodation as a factor that shapes and is in turn shaped by students’ agency. Their accounts underline the ways they seek to shape key aspects of their lives, and the reflective, learning, approach many take to this task. The paper concludes by drawing out implications for university tutors and lecturers. It also suggests avenues for further research.     

10th Anniversary Address For a feminist geography of ambivalence

This article argues for and invokes an ambivalent feminist spatiality. Drawing on the idea that the position of feminist academic is a contradiction in terms, together with my ambivalence about presenting the Gender, Place and Culture 10th Anniversary Lecture, I illustrate ways in which feminists successfully inhabit unresolved tensions about academic authority. I then explore four themes in feminist politics—equality, autonomy, difference and deconstruction—showing how each contains internal tensions that are held as ambivalences through the spatialities to which they appeal. The two sections of the essay deploy different voices with a view to generating space for ambivalence.     

Street child spaces: belonging,conflict and resistance in the city of Durban through the eyes of street youth

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned with the everyday ‘spatial tactics’ deployed by children in a street situation in order to deal with notions of public space that define them as ‘out of place’, marginal and deviant. Using photovoice, we reconstruct former street children’s definitions of and feelings about their spaces in the city, bringing into view a complex set of social problems, attitudes and strategies that moves beyond the traditional binary notion of street children as either deviants or victims. This work points to the importance of finding ways to ensure the voices of marginalized and disadvantaged children are heard and presents the narratives that are important to our understanding of their worlds. Analyzing their spatiality in contexts of conflict, belonging and resistance, we found that children and youth in a street situation are mainly concerned with empowering themselves and resisting dominant labels and police repression.     

Narrating feminisms: what do we talk about when we talk about feminism in Estonia?

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with women who identify as feminists in Estonia, this article explores how the stories we tell about feminism and its past influence the kind of theoretical and political work we are able to do. Zooming in on the story of the emergence of feminisms in postsocialist Estonia which has not been thoroughly researched yet, this article calls upon feminists in Estonia to reflect critically on how they conceptualize feminisms, while at the same time building a framework to think about local feminism within transnational feminist context. Starting from stories of how women became feminists in Estonia since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, I reflect on the gaps, chance encounters and tensions that my fieldwork revealed to narrate feminism differently, to bring forth new aspects of feminism in this context. In particular, I focus on two moments: the common imaginary of ‘real’ feminism as Western mass movement and the tensions between the local context and ‘Western feminism’. I complicate the narrative in the article through including interludes in between the main text to highlight how the incidents that happened outside and around the interviews shape my story of feminism in Estonia.     

Contingent meanings,shifting practices: grandmother to grandmother solidarity as transnational feminist praxis

Abstract

While ‘solidarity’ is frequently evoked in transnational feminisms, it is less clear how this concept is understood and practiced among different actors in different contexts. This article addresses this limitation by investigating a movement of some 10,000 older Canadian women who, drawing on longstanding commitments to feminist advocacy, have mobilized over the past decade in solidarity with ‘grandmothers’ impacted by AIDS in southern Africa. The article investigates one pivotal development within this movement as an entry point to consider the productive friction surrounding transnational feminist practice more broadly: the splintering of the campaign in 2011 into separate advocacy and fundraising networks. Drawing on archival materials and interviews, the analysis depicts how changing perspectives on advocacy within the movement, which became most evident in this splintering, provide critical insights into thinking about the complexities of ‘solidarity’ as transnational feminist praxis. In particular, it extends existing scholarship on solidarity-building, suggesting that theorizing ‘solidarity’ in this context requires an understanding of its contingent practices. It also draws on older Canadian women’s reflections to challenge notions that ‘Second Wavers’ do not adequately grapple with how differences in power and privilege shape and inform their movements.     

Identities in the making: conservation,gender and race in the Maya Biosphere Reserve,Guatemala

This article examines how the daily discourses, practices, and performances of conservation projects are instrumental in mapping ways of life that are gendered and racialized. With the goal of bringing a feminist approach to the study of conservation, I present an ethnographic account of identities‐in‐the‐making in three conservation encounters in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, a protected area in northern Guatemala. In the first two encounters, I examine the ways in which gender and race are constituted in the relations between the Women’s Group for the Rescue of Itza’ Medicinal Plants and a United States‐based international environmental non‐governmental organization. The third encounter highlights the relations between the Women’s Group and myself, the researcher, to analyze how social‐science, through methods such as ethnography, is also implicated in (re)configuring social identities.     

The bodies of others in Swedish feminism

Abstract

The body – or, more specifically, women’s bodies – has long been one of feminism’s central topics. This discussion has ranged from explorations of the cultural meaning of biology to the challenging of classification systems regulating bodies not only culturally coded as female or male but also understood through race regimes. This article seeks to explore the location of bodies within Swedish feminism, examining how women’s bodies are understood, designated and acted upon in feminist agendas. Our focus is on the location that bodies take in political conflicts among and between feminists. In particular, we explore the impact of the presence of black bodies within the field of Swedish feminism. On a theoretical level, this article bridges decolonial feminist contributions of Black, Chicano and Latin American feminist thought on the body. The research methodology combined autoethnography with feminist ethnography, including an analysis of 25 narratives of young feminist activists engaged in public resistance against, and confrontation with, the growing presence of right-wing xenophobic social movements and political parties in the public sphere.     

Trans/national knowledge production through difference: dilemmas of doing research on veiling in Amman,Jordan

Abstract

This article examines some dilemmas I experienced while doing research on fashionable veiling in Amman, Jordan. My fieldwork experience and the knowledge I co-produced with the participants were shaped by each layer of my identity as a Jordanian, Muslim, non-veiled woman, with a particular classed, spatialized Ammani heritage and affiliation with western feminist academia. The article engages with the implications my positionality had on my insider-outsider status and the knowledge the participants and I co-produced. I argue that the research setting, while fraught with difference, constituted a site for transnational solidarity and knowledge production. The participants and I had divergent understandings of, and aspirations for, Jordanian Muslim femininity shaped by our varying positions within the Global North-Global South. I argue that we practiced solidarity by collaborating and co-constructing a transnational site to unpack and defend their viability. I found that our collaboration was not fuelled by a shared sense of injustice and did not produce a shared outlook on Islam, Jordanianness or femininity. Rather, it created a site where we were able to emphasize our divergent sense of these paradigms as women positioned differently within the trans/national, cultural, and religious spaces we shared.     

‘I am not a feminist but…’: women’s activism in post-1991 Albania

Abstract

This article examines the shape organized women’s activism took in Albania after the fall of the communist regime. It also analyses how gender and feminist studies have positioned themselves within the higher education system, the relationship between media and feminism and the new alternative spaces of women’s activism and feminist resistance to gendered power relations. The analysis follows the longue durée of the fraught relationship of debates around feminism during and after the fall of Communism starting with the communist top-down ‘women’s emancipation model’ as well as the lack of bottom-up women’s activism, the post-1991 neo-liberal frame and the generalized post-1991 stigma about ‘emancipation’, ‘equality’ or ‘feminism’, along with the need to resist post-1991 hierarchical gender regimes.     

How not to build a world wireless network: German–British rivalry and visions of global communications in the early twentieth century

Abstract

Edward Snowden’s revelations laid bare an unprecedented scale of state influence on communications technology. But government elites have frequently shaped technological development through their beliefs about potentially nefarious uses of communications. This article argues that beliefs about how other states or groups might use a technology can shape innovation. In particular, German visions about the British use of cables spurred German investment in developing wireless telegraphy. Germans imagined that the British were using cable technology to damage Germany’s reputation, spy on Germany and ‘poison’ neutral countries against the Central Powers. The German government and military at first created a colonial wireless network to bypass British cables. In World War I, however, they sought to establish a world wireless network. In the end, innovation was significantly shaped by how Germans imagined their enemies’ uses of communications technology.     

China and Japan in Myanmar: Aid,Natural Resources and Influence

Abstract

This article highlights the parallels between Japan’s leveraging of foreign aid to secure access to strategic natural resources in the post-World War II period, and China’s similar use of foreign aid since the early 1990s. It then shows how both countries have applied similar strategies in their aid programs in Myanmar, and points out how dramatic shifts in Myanmar’s domestic politics have shaped their opportunities for economic engagement. China seized upon Myanmar’s political transition in 1988 to expand its aid program, while Japan has responded to Myanmar’s reform measures since 2010 by resuming its aid efforts. The article concludes by considering the potential for China–Japan cooperation through their aid programs in Myanmar.     

Anthropological race psychology 1820–1945: a common European system of ethnic identity narratives

ABSTRACT. This article examines ethnic stereotypes in biological race classification of Europeans between the 1830s and 1940s as part of political discourse on national identity. Anthropologists linked physical‐psychological types to nations and national character stereotypes through ‘national races’, achieving an often quite enduring international consensus on each race's mentality. The article argues that race mentality narratives were therefore partly dictated by their place within a dynamic interlocking European system. I focus on two key interacting elements that structured this system: the central role of the Germanic‐Nordic blond and the geographically uneven process of modernisation. I consider the spatiality of socio‐cultural and political factors ‘external’ to the stereotype system, such as geopolitics and modernisation, but also emphasise that discursive relationships between national stereotypes helped structure the international stereotype system. My conclusion argues for greater consideration of the influence of both scientific and international systemic factors in research on national identity.     

Consumption,exclusion and emotion: The social geographies of shopping

In recent years, a productive dialogue has developed between retail geographers and those social geographers concerned with the spatiality of consumption. This has resulted in a series of accounts of shopping that emphasize notions of consumer creativity. Nonetheless, this paper argues that many of these have struggled to reconcile the meaning of shopping with an understanding of the material parameters within which consumers operate. Recognizing that this tendency has distracted from the socio-spatial inequalities evident in retailing, the paper examines how shopping rituals are embedded in social relations that discourage particular shoppers from visiting certain retail locations. Drawing on extensive and intensive data derived in Coventry (UK), the paper questions the extent to which this geography of exclusion is the product of constraint, arguing that shopping is shaped by a more complex spatiality of inclusion and (self-) exclusion. Accordingly, the paper makes the case for a social geography of shopping that pays careful attention to the emotionally laden transactions played out in particular settings.     

Feminist geographies and participatory action research: co-producing narratives with people and place

Abstract

This review offers thoughts, queries and hesitations regarding articles drawing on participatory action research (PAR) published over 25?years of Gender, Place and Culture. It foregrounds the interconnections and overlaps between PAR and feminist geographies, and considers a continuum of participations-collaborations-actions-knowledges co-produced across a range of interrelated feminist methodologies. I emphasise epistemological commitment as central to PAR, pointing to work in GPC that evidences critical approaches to research process, embedded in feminist perspectives regarding how scholars re-produce the world and/as act/ing in the world, particularly in attending to shifting, situated and complex subjectivities and power inequalities. Working together with participants is vital, through an ethic that centres participants’ voices, as actors in their own lives. Highlighting the emotional and embodied geographies that weave through such research and writing, this review suggests deepening and strengthening interdependences and a feminist ethos of care as researchers, to further foreground diverse stories and voices, work towards social and spatial justice, and co-produce progressive changes with people and place.     

Avoiding the “F” word: feminist geography in Iran

Abstract

Little attention has been given to how feminist geography is defined, applied, and taught in non-Anglophone countries, especially in Muslim majority societies where Women’s Rights are quite different from the western world. The case of Iran among other Middle Eastern countries becomes even more isolated due to the several political, linguistic, and cultural limitations opposed on Iranian academics and international collaborations after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Women make half of Iran’s 80 million population, 63% of university graduates, almost half of informal workers, 30% of Iranian professors, 13% of high level management position holders, and under 5% of the Islamic Majlis (Iran’s Parliament). However, feminist geography, the sub-discipline that has been traditionally dedicated to the inclusion of gender as an analytical lens within Geography, is not a recognized field at any departments in Iran. This essay aims to present the current status of feminist geographic research and teaching at selected Iranian Universities. My goal is to offer a better understanding of how the local social and political context affect what constitute feminist geographic work and how geographers navigate the political and hierarchal university systems to engage in gender studies. Through informal interviews via emails and Skype with several Iranian geographers, I illustrate why Iranian geographers often avoid using “feminist” terminology in recognizing their work, even though their work is feminist.