Gender and sexual violence,forced marriages,and primitive accumulation during the Cambodian genocide, 1975–1979

Abstract

Between 1975 and 1979 approximately two million men, women, and children died during the Cambodian genocide. These deaths are attributed to specific administrative policies and practices initiated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), all of which were geared toward the basic objective of increasing agricultural production as a means of building socialism. A crucial question regarding these practices was whether the CPK implemented policies designed specifically to destroy the traditional family structure of Cambodia. Drawing on the work of Silvia Federici, this article argues that policies and practices forwarded by the CPK constitute a variation of primitive accumulation; and that transformations of the traditional family structure were conditioned by the overall social organization of production initiated by the CPK. However, a more pressing form of gendered violence is apparent – a mode that pivots on the social ordering of the CPK’s political economy.     

国内外女性主义地理学研究述评

后现代思潮背景下,性别研究在人文科学领域越来越重要。性别不只是关于个体身份的自然属性,更是一种映射社会变革、社会不平等和反抗特权的社会关系。本文梳理国内外女性主义研究的相关文献,具体从女性主义地理学理论渊源、西方女性主义地理学和中国本土女性主义地理学等三方面对女性主义地理研究进行综述。较之于国外同行,国内女性主义地理学研究仍显单薄,多数是采借和沿袭西方的相关理论进而通过特定案例加以印证（佐证）,某种意义上是对西方同行的回应性研究。未来的我国女性主义地理研究,需要关注三个问题：从我国传统文化女性发展理论中吸取营养;聚焦女性日常生活世界领域的实践逻辑;女性作为能动者的个体和自组织的集体智慧需要引起注意。     

Teaching (Political) Economic Geography: Some Personal Reflections

Teaching economic geography is not a matter of replicating textbook models. It requires engagement with the ever-changing global economy, which often puts the lie to existing theory. It demands that the teacher break down the economy into its major parts, in a way that students can grasp. This does not mean abandoning theory; on the contrary, it means getting beyond static exchange models to grasp the dynamics of commodity systems, divisions of labour, technology and capital flows. To this, add how geography matters to the way economies work. And always maintain a critical stance toward the world and toward received wisdom.     

Labour Geography of the National Question in Times of Decolonisation: Sharecropper Politics in Western Punjab,c. 1945–1953

This article examines the labour geographies of nationalism through sharecropper “articulations” of anti-colonialism. I study the Punjab Kisan (peasant) Committee at the eve and dawn of Pakistan’s independence from British colonialism. I analyse their actions and claims through newsletters, activist memoirs, and colonial reports. I situate them in relation to other social and political forces: the state, landlords, and Muslim nationalists. Whereas labour geography has often ignored nationalism, I outline an approach for the sub-field to address this gap. First, subaltern nationalisms re-articulate labour, land, gender, and religion in place-specific ways. Second, exclusionary and liberatory nationalisms are variegated responses to the dynamics of being integrated to an imperialist world-economy. This study found these multi-religious peasant committees articulated sovereignty over labour, land, and social reproduction with the national question. Further, this article contributes to the subaltern and labour historiography of Pakistan.     

Feminist geographies in Greece: a personal trajectory between ‘local’ and ‘international’

Abstract

Feminist debates in the context of an active women's/feminist movement found their way into the Greek academy in the second half of the 1970s, initially in history. Urban studies and geography were ‘late-comers’ in these debates which took place in different disciplinary environments where geography courses were taught. The article presents a personal account in and through the development of feminist approaches in urban geography, drawing from my teaching and research experience since 1982 in a department of urban and regional planning. This experience has been accumulated as a hard exercise in navigating through the denial and reluctant consent of various levels of administration, students’ changing acceptance, some women’s valuable active support, in the university and beyond, and other colleagues’ opposition or indifference. In this process, recent and longer-term developments have contributed to form a (continuously negotiated and contested) space for feminism, for tolerance, diversity and difference, in which a ‘we’ has been tortuously formed which speaks across worlds, participates in a plurality of communities, communicates in more than one languages and in a plurality of voices between ‘local’ and ‘international’.     

Gendered divisions of labour in urban crop cultivation in a Kenyan town: implications for livelihood outcomes

This article highlights the labour contributions of men and women in urban crop cultivation in Eldoret, Kenya. Divisions of labour in urban gardening were mediated by social constructs of masculinity and femininity, gender differentials in entitlements and farming knowledge and intra-household power relations. The resulting labour distribution patterns manifested itself in the type of crops men and women took responsibility for, the specific agricultural tasks they performed and the spatial segregation of men's and women's activities and tasks. Traditional gender-related labour boundaries were also challenged and reworked. With regard to livelihood outcomes, women's labour contributed more directly to household food security, although men were increasingly getting involved in subsistence farming, which held prospects for improved productivity and therefore enhanced household food security.     

Envisioning Capitalism: Geography and the Renewal of Marxian Political Economy

This paper offers a reinterpretation of what critical theorist Moishe Postone calls 'the fundamental core of capitalism'. In so doing, it seeks to lay a set of theoretical foundations for a renewed Marxian political economy in geography, at a time when Marxism has been eclipsed as a leading critical paradigm within the discipline. The argument works on two fronts simultaneously. On the one hand, the ongoing hegemony of economic and political neo-conservatism is occluding the violent realities of a capitalist world economy behind the anodyne logics of free-market theory. These realities suggest the continued relevance of, and need for, a strong Marxian critique of political economy. But on the other hand, Marxism has been reprimanded by its erstwhile allies on the Left of geography for being too 'modern' and too capital- and class-centred. In light of this double challenge, the paper seeks to develop a 'both/and' Marxism for geography that can chart a third way between the antinomies of modern and after-modern modes of theorizing capitalism and class. A project of 'envisioning capitalism' is suggested on this basis, which combines the 'power' of modern theory with the epistemological reflexivity of after-modern theory. At the same time, capitalism and class are rethought at an ontological level and shown still to be essential features of the fin-de-millennium world, but far less closed and hegemonic than is suggested by modern modes of Marxism. Finally, a return to a class politics of redistribution is suggested, but in a way that draws in more recent Left geographical concerns with identity, difference and recognition.     

The role of recruitment agencies in imagining and producing the ‘good’ migrant

This paper focuses on representations of labour migrants and interrogates how such imaginaries shape migrant recruitment and employment regimes. The recruitment and employment of labour migrants inevitably involves a range of knowledge practices that affect who is recruited, from where and for what purposes. In particular, this paper seeks to advance understandings of how images of ‘bodily goodness’ are represented graphically and how perceptions of migrant workers influence the recruitment of workers to the UK from Latvia. The research described in this paper is based on interviews with recruitment agencies, employers and policy makers carried out in Latvia in 2011. The analysis results in a schema of the ‘filtering’ processes that are enacted to ‘produce’ the ‘ideal’ migrant worker. An important original contribution of this paper is that it details how recruitment agencies, in not only engaging in the spatially selective recruitment of labour from certain places but also drawing socially constructed boundaries around migrant bodies, play a key part in shaping migration geographies both in sending and destination countries.