The construction of a "population problem" in colonial India, 1919-1947

This article examines the construction of a "population problem" among public health officials in India during the inter-war period. British colonial officials came to focus on India's population through their concern with high Indian infant and maternal mortality rates. They raised the problem of population as one way in which to highlight the importance of dealing with public health at an all-India basis, in a context of constitutional devolution of power to Indians where they feared such matters would be relegated to relative local unimportance. While they failed to significantly shape government policy, their arguments in support of India's 'population problem' nevertheless found a receptive audience in the colonial public sphere among Indian intellectuals, economists, eugenicists, women social reformers and birth controllers. The article contributes to the history of population control by situating its pre-history in British colonial public health and development policy and outside the logic of USA's Cold War strategic planning for Asia.     

Farmwomen's emotional geographies of care: a view from rural Ontario

This article contributes to geographies of rural women's health by investigating farmwomen's perceptions of their caring roles and responsibilities, which are crucial to the wellbeing and sustainability of rural people and their communities. Featuring a thematic analysis of interviews and a focus group with farmwomen from Ontario, Canada, the research examines farms and farming as unique places and spaces of care. Informed by the literature on emotional geographies, the article examines how care is situated and performed through farmwomen's negotiation of multiple, overlapping identities and how these are embodied and affective in emotional work. The findings not only confirm the paramount role of women in rural care, they demonstrate the interdependence of family, community and work as central to the challenges of rural women's health. The article argues that the link between health and productivity on the farm is crucial to understanding farmwomen's caring, and highlights the paradox that their emotional work is as much about opportunities for power and resistance as it is about obligation and subordination.     

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.     

Crossing boundaries: bras,lingerie and rape myths in postcolonial urban middle-class India

Abstract

With the processes of modernization, urbanization and the entry of women in the formal labour market in Indian metropolitan spaces, this article examines how the modern middle-class woman’s sartorial choices become enmeshed in popular rape myths (false beliefs) that serve to blame her for the wearing of western clothing. The article articulates the ways in which middle-class women’s social realities are shaped by historical, colonial and nationalist ideologies of modernization, constructed and mediated through moral codes of dressing. By drawing upon original and contemporary empirical narratives from the urban spaces of Delhi and Mumbai, we emphasise how everyday sartorial choices, in relation to particularly the bra and lingerie, can reveal the nuanced ways in which Urban Indian Professional Women (UIPW) seek to understand, negotiate, and resist patriarchal power. Our findings shed light on conflicting and contradictory spatial experiences, where some women internalize and negotiate moral codes of dressing, out of fear, and others who transgress are subject to sanctions. Given the paucity of scholarly literature in this area, the article makes an important theoretical and empirical contribution with its focus on postcoloniality and everyday discursive material spaces of gendered and sexualized dress practices. It argues for the consciousness raising of everyday urban geographies of dress that reveal complicated structures of power that are often deemed hidden.     

Expanding women's rural medical work in early modern Brittany: the Daughters of the Holy Spirit

During the eighteenth century, orders of nursing sisters took on an expanded role in the rural areas of Brittany. This article explores the impact of religious change on the medical activities of these women. While limits were placed on the medical practice of unlicensed individuals, areas of new opportunity for nuns as charitable practitioners were created by devout nobles throughout the eighteenth century. These nuns provided comprehensive care for the sick poor on their patrons' estates, acting not only as nurses, but also in lieu of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries. This article argues that the medical knowledge and expertise of these sisters from the nursing orders were highly valued by the elites of early modern Brittany.     

No longer good girls: sexual transgressions in Indian women's writings

Indian women's writing in English has long depicted Indian women as victims of society, whose rights are routinely exploited and whose welfare and happiness are commonly sacrificed for the good of their families and communities. The literature has often depicted the women as complicit, accepting and upholding the definition of a good woman as one who is faithful, virtuous, self-effacing and obedient. This definition is also one the women instil in their daughters, thus reinforcing this code of ethics. This article observes that there is a tide running contrary to this and that there is a new breed of women in twenty-first century Indian literary fiction in English: women who are single and married, working and non-working, middle and upper-middle class and wives and mothers, who are no longer prepared to be ‘good girls’. These women knowingly, thoughtfully and successfully defy societal conventions to have pre and extramarital affairs, divorces and even custody battles for children, without shame, guilt, dire consequences or even societal condemnation. This article argues that these writings represent a quietly radical departure from the conventional depictions of the roles, expectations and morals of middle-class urban twenty-first century Indian women.     

‘Unlike Vancouver … here there’s nothing’: imagined geographies of idealized health care for LGBTQ women

This article explores imagined geographies of health care among Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) women in Halifax and Vancouver. In expressing the possibilities and limitations of accessing care, participants frame their own experiences through spatialized narratives of how LGBTQ people are thought to be treated elsewhere. Participants’ explicit connections and distinctions between Halifax and Vancouver gave insight into how their perceived difficulties in one health care context are sometimes framed by imagining more ease in accessing care in the other. We explore here the implications of these imagined, idealized spaces, which may set up false expectations that things are always better elsewhere. We reveal imagined geographies and senses of place as highly relevant features in LGBTQ women’s accounts of experiences with and access to health care and expand conventional arguments about physical access to care.     

Welfare Systems and the Parish Nurse in Early Modern London, 1650–1725

Abstract

This article argues that the part played by parish nurses in the capital's welfare system requires radical reassessment. Such women were playing a central role in the lives of the poor by the early 18th century. It will demonstrate that, at least in some of London's large suburban parishes, there existed a surprisingly sophisticated network of parish nurses who played an important part in the overall care package delivered to paupers. Such nurses, often operating on a very substantial scale, were running what were in effect nursing homes for the homeless and sick poor. These women were running multi-functional enterprises. In addition to caring for the sick poor, they looked after abandoned and orphaned children, pregnant women and lunatics. The existence of these individuals has not been hitherto identified in the metropolis, has been almost completely missed by those interested in the history of women's work, and hardly features in the small but growing literature on nursing in early modern England. Such neglect is not surprising, because, as the article concludes, such 'multi-functional' parish nurses, in all probability, only existed in the metropolis for a relatively short period of time. The metropolitan workhouse movement undermined many functions of the London parish nurse. By the mid-18th century, the roles and responsibilities of 'the parish nurse' had become restricted largely to the rearing and nursing of children and infants.     

印度国际移民与侨务工作的历史与现状

论文介绍了印度国际移民人口分布的历史根源、印度独立后长期忽视海外侨民工作的原因、后果以及面对经济全球化大潮的出现,印度经济自由化与海外侨民政策的改变;并根据印度政府发表的《海外印度人问题高级委员会报告》和海外印度人事务部从2006年至2011公布的历年《工作报告》等官方文献和新资料,分析了海外印度人社会发生的深刻变化,着重探讨了印度2004年建立海外印度人事务部以来,在开展海外印度人社区服务、对外移民和劳工保护、引进海外印资、印智以及行政管理等方面工作的成就与不足,以及对中国侨务政策的若干启示。     

Indian Messiah: The Attraction of Meher Baba to British Audiences in the 1930s

This article considers the British reception of Meher Baba, an Indian religious figure, who first travelled to Britain in 1931. Following a tradition of Indian religious figures who toured Britain and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Baba was removed from organised religion and placed emphasis on self‐realisation, and attracted large British followings notably dominated by women. This article argues that the 1930s witnessed a continuing interest in Indian religious figures and adherence to Orientalist stereotypes about Indian religiosity despite changing political dynamics. Exploring a range of public and private responses to Baba, following comparison with his contemporary Jiddu Krishnamurti, and discussing the role of British mediators Paul Brunton and Francis Younghusband, this article explores British impressions of Indian religious figures in the 1930s and how they were informed by notions of race, religiosity, and gender.     

Supporting women's empowerment in Djibouti

This article reports on the work carried out by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in the small island of Djibouti, Africa. The republic's population has been plagued with problems of high levels of unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, an almost non-existent family reproductive health care service, 100% prevalence rate of female genital mutilation and low literacy rate, especially for women. In addition, refugees from Ethiopia and Eritrea have settled in the country increasing the risks of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), HIV/AIDS, prostitution, and other social ills. In 1983, UNFPA started funding family planning and later reproductive health projects aimed at assuring access to services for a majority of Djiboutan women. The first country population program of assistance was started in 1992. This would help the government with health care for its population and to conduct a population census. In addition, the Fund has paid for training of doctors, midwives, and traditional birth assistants in the country and for rehabilitating maternity clinics and information centers. Moreover, it has supported agencies concerned with educating people on STDs, HIV/AIDS, safe motherhood and reproductive health for men and women, and other important issues.     

Examining social isolation by gender and geography: conceptual and operational challenges using population health data in Canada

In 2003, the Canadian Federal/Provincial/Territorial Task Force on Seniors identified social isolation as an important issue for further study and policy development given that socially isolated persons are considered to be more vulnerable to both inappropriate use of the health care system and poorer health outcomes. In order to provide adequate support to this vulnerable population, it is critical to untangle the complex web of relationships that influence the need for care, and the health status and service utilization patterns of socially isolated older adults. Using data from the 2000–01 Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), this article explores social isolation as a multidimensional social construct examining in particular the axes of gender and geography to try to tease out some of this complexity and its relationship to health status and service utilization. When individual characteristics like gender are considered together with broader contextual variables like place of residence, a more comprehensive and layered portrait of vulnerability among socially isolated persons begins to emerge with insights into their unique patterns of health and service use. For example, home care may be an extremely critical resource for keeping older women in their homes and out of hospital. On the other hand, among socially isolated older men, those living in rural communities may be particularly ‘invisible’, neither benefiting from home care nor having strong social supports. It seems plausible then that both men and women may be in need of special interventions or targeted programmes to help them to remain, or to become, more socially integrated in their communities as they age in place. In addition, this article addresses some of the limitations of using both a quantitative analytic approach and the CCHS dataset itself in grappling with such complexity.     

‘I arranged my own marriage': arranged marriages and post-colonial feminism

This article looks at the practice of arranged marriage among women of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin resident in Britain. It examines the conflation of arranged marriages with forced marriages and the assumption that arranged marriages are examples of cultural practices that thwart individual agency. Drawing upon original empirical data, this article will argue that in the practice of arranged marriage, some South Asian women are able to exercise agency while choosing their marriage partner. They adapt traditional arranged marriage practices to navigate their way around strict cultural expectations and to negotiate with their family members the choice of a match that is favourable for them. It provides a corrective account of arranged marriages by challenging the stereotype of the ‘oppressed third world women' and their experiences of such marriages. The article will do this by employing the idea of post-colonial feminism and by highlighting two long-standing issues in feminist debates: the idea of agency and the conception and role of power in the struggle for women's rights. It will make a case for a post-colonial approach to feminism as one way of reconciling feminism with the politics of multiculturalism.     

The care of women's health and beauty: an experience shared by medieval Jewish and Christian women

In this article I intend to elucidate the extent to which medieval western Jewish and Christian women shared customs, knowledge and practices regarding health care, a sphere which has been historically considered as part of women's daily domestic tasks. My study aims to identify female agency in medical care, as well as women's interaction across religious lines, by analysing elusive sources, such as medical literature on women's health care, and by collating the information they provide with data obtained from other textual and visual records. By searching specific evidence of the dialogues that must have occurred between Christian and Jewish women in transmitting their knowledge and experiences, I put forward the idea (developed from earlier work by Montserrat Cabré i Pairet) that medical texts with no clear attribution can be used as sources to reconstruct women's authoritative knowledge.     

The care of women's health and beauty: an experience shared by medieval Jewish and Christian women

In this article I intend to elucidate the extent to which medieval western Jewish and Christian women shared customs, knowledge and practices regarding health care, a sphere which has been historically considered as part of women's daily domestic tasks. My study aims to identify female agency in medical care, as well as women's interaction across religious lines, by analysing elusive sources, such as medical literature on women's health care, and by collating the information they provide with data obtained from other textual and visual records. By searching specific evidence of the dialogues that must have occurred between Christian and Jewish women in transmitting their knowledge and experiences, I put forward the idea (developed from earlier work by Montserrat Cabré i Pairet) that medical texts with no clear attribution can be used as sources to reconstruct women's authoritative knowledge.     

A postcolonial framing of Indian commercial surrogacy: issues,representations, and orientalisms

Although only legalised in 2002, Indian commercial gestational surrogacy (CGS) is an industry worth an estimated 2.3 billion USD to India at its height. Not only has this contentious topic been researched extensively from a spectrum of academic angles, representations of Indian CGS abound in both the Indian and Western popular media (novels, documentaries, films, etc.), and increasingly online, particularly in CGS websites, advertisements, and (personal) blogs. Popular media representations as well as commercial ones can often be inclined towards the sentimental and even sanctimonious, but are immensely influential in shaping public perception. This article seeks to position the discourse and representation of transnational Indian CGS more explicitly within the postcolonial framework. Thus, it addresses a theoretical gap in explicitly connecting the problematic issues of power and ethics in CGS within the paradigms of postcolonial studies, drawing also on gender and feminist frameworks. The neo-colonisation of the body has been already considered to some extent – mostly in neo-liberalist contexts – but the industry’s systemically orientalistic set up and structure has been surprisingly little mentioned, particularly where transnational surrogacy is involved, with little framing of the imperialistic hangovers and undertones dogging these particular sets of international contracts. This article maps the orientalisms (and sometimes re-orientalisms) at play in this already fraught and contentious context, positioning transnational surrogacy as another instance of imperialism, as yet another form of cultural colonisation, othering, subalternising, and peripheralising working-class Indian surrogate women in the twenty-first century.     

India's policy on Diego Garcia and its quest for security in the Indian Ocean

ABSTRACT

The ongoing contention between Mauritius and the UK over the sovereignty of the Diego Garcia presents a difficult challenge for Indian foreign policy-makers. New Delhi's principled opposition to colonialism and its historical relationship with Port Louis has made it steadfastly support the Mauritian claim. However, such principled foreign policy militates against India's quest to balance the growing Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean. Insofar, Diego Garcia allows the US Navy to maintain an active presence in the Indian Ocean, thereby keeping the Chinese naval power at bay. Balance of power considerations notwithstanding, the expanding trajectory of the Indo-US strategic partnership also demands New Delhi to weigh the burden of its policies on Diego Garcia carefully. This article juxtaposes India's historical record on Diego Garcia during the Cold War with its contemporary approach to the issue. In doing so, it sheds further light on India's strategic decision-making in the Indian Ocean, its dilemmas in confronting a genuinely hostile maritime power in the region, and deliberates on potential options for dispute resolution which can not only satisfy Mauritian demands but also ensure a healthy balance of power in the Indian Ocean.     

Men at home,men and home in two Anglophone novels by Indian women writers

Postcolonial Indian women novelists writing in English have been deeply concerned with addressing the ways in which ‘home’ in patriarchal societies is an ambiguous space, characterized by unequal gender relationships that make it a terrain rife with violence, and feelings of alienation and discontent for women. Through the lens of two contemporary Anglophone novels by Indian women writers, Arundhati Roy’s (1997) The God of Small Things and Manju Kapur’s (2006) Home, this article evaluates the significance of the relationship between male identities, politics and domestic spaces in India. Focusing primarily on two bourgeois male characters, Estha and Vicky, the article examines, in depth, their painful coming-of-age in terms of the complex intersection of gender, class and age hierarchies in the domestic arena and demonstrates the centrality of the concept of home to their sense of self and space.     

‘It’s a very isolating world’: the journey to HIV care for women living with HIV in British Columbia,Canada

HIV health services research conventionally defines place in terms of proximity to care. However, understandings of place must also include the social spaces that women living with HIV (WLWH) occupy which shape their experience of health and access to care. Drawing on focus group data from the Canadian HIV Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Cohort Study, we explored how 28 WLWH navigate geographic place and social space in attempting to access HIV-related healthcare within and across a range of urban to rural localities in British Columbia (BC), Canada. We describe how existing services, even if physically close, can be socially marginalizing as women confront HIV stigma, racism, and classism, which operate to exclude women from the places and spaces they must access for care. We also emphasize how women enact ‘geographies of resistance’ and succeed in carving out their own safe options for care and support. Finally, we share recommendations identified by women themselves towards developing local and community-driven ‘geographies of change’ that support the health and healing of diverse communities of WLWH. Our findings stress the urgent need to acknowledge and redress socio-spatial barriers to care and to work with WLWH to co-create a therapeutic landscape that reflects women’s diverse identities, localities, emotions, and experiences.     

Feminist Perspectives on the Internationalization of The State

Abstract: The state is often described in transition: public spaces are rearranged by private companies, national social welfare is being privatized to some extent, and supranational institutions have more influence on national policies. “A view from the kitchen” (Diane Elson) is helpful for understanding the changing dynamics of states and societies because different women are affected by these policies in different and often ambiguous ways: women of the globalized South migrate to the North, creating global care chains, while women in Western industrialized countries are confronted with changing welfare regimes, leaving mainly highly educated women to profit from this situation. This article contributes to feminist debates on economic globalization and state internationalization. Our feminist materialist perspective allows a critical view on dominance and power in “governance”. Thus, the article adds to feminist debates on globalization from the perspective of state transformation and to debates on governance from the perspective of state transformation grounded in gendered social relations.