Doing gender and development: understanding empowerment and local gender relations

A major dilemma in Gender and Development (GAD) work is why it is that sometimes women may feel better off colluding with gendered structures that ensure their continued subordination rather than seeking approaches that will allow them to break free of this. Kandiyoti (1988 Gender and Society 2 274–90) has identified this apparent collusion as 'patriarchal bargains', which offer women greater advantages than they perceive can be achieved by challenging the prevailing order. Such women are therefore reluctant to engage in empowering activities that may challenge their gendered bargain. This paper explains this dilemma in the context of GAD work undertaken with Bedouin women in Southern Egypt.     

Queerly situated? Exploring negotiations of trans queer subjectivities at work and within community spaces in the UK

While traditional perspectives on transgender from some strands of feminism and within medical/psychoanalytical discourse have argued that transgender people conform to and reproduce gender stereotypes, queer theory has celebrated transgender as a site that highlights the social and cultural construction of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and, moreover, as a symbol of transgressive gender possibility. Both of these readings ignore the complexities of lived trans experiences and identifications. By evaluating a queer reading of trans through recent empirical research into transgender identities, I suggest that while trans identifications certainly queer binary models of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, such transgressions are materially, culturally, socially and spatially contingent. The article draws on empirical research to explore the ways in which access to queer subjectivities is constrained by, and negotiated alongside, the locales of the workplace and community spaces.     

The tyranny of gendered spaces – reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy

This article argues critically that the consequences of a binary system of gender norms is experienced as a kind of gender tyranny both for those who transgress gender in their daily lives, but also for those whose lives are lived within such constraints. Feminist geographers and urban theorists have argued that space is gendered and that gendering has profound consequences for women. This article extends this analysis and shows how rigid categorizations of gender fail to include the intersexed and transgendered populations, a small and highly marginalized segment of the wider population. This article uses autoethnographic methods to illustrate the ways that those who transgress gender norms experience a tyranny of gender that shapes nearly every aspect of their public and private lives. The nature of these consequences is explored using citations from the transgender and queer literature as well as the lived experience of this tyranny by the author in a continuum of public to private spaces, including: parking lots, public restrooms, shopping malls, the workplace and the home.     

Introduction: the feminist politics of refugee migration

The interdisciplinary field of refugee studies includes gender analyses, but feminism is not its forte. Scholarship in the field has neglected the development of feminist frameworks to trace the power relations that shape the gender and other politics of forced migration. Specifically, the underplayed concept of ‘refugee transnationalism’ is elaborated as a form of globalization where the social and political intersect in particular ways.     

Manoeuvring men: masculinity as spatially defined readability at the grandes manoeuvres of the Belgian army, 1882–1883

This article uses the case study of the Belgian grandes manoeuvres of 1882 and 1883 to explore the ways in which self-defined ‘all male’ spaces can contribute to the study and deconstruction of historical masculinities. Using the manoeuvres of the Belgian army at the end of the nineteenth century as a theatre of (military as well as civilian) corporeal and discursive practices, the simultaneous enactment of masculinity and nation is analysed. The material spaces in which these military exercises took place are understood as contingent creators instead of passive containers of masculinity: that is, rather than as a passive background to soldiers' movements, the champ de manoeuvres appears as an active stage, aiding the construction of a gendered military identity, but also challenging dichotomous understandings of gender. Likewise, the gaze upon both landscape and soldiers by different audiences plays an active part in the story of the construction of masculinity and nation: the act of recognition, performed by male and female civilians, during and after the manoeuvres was crucial for the continuous repetition of the discourse that created and upheld notions of ‘man’ and of ‘Belgium’.     

The Construction of Gender in Modern Chinese Law: Discrepant Gender Meanings in the Republican Civil Code

This article examines the intersection of law, gender, and modernity during the transitional Republican era (1912–49). It approaches the topic through a critical reading of the Republican Civil Code of 1929–30, and related commentary on the code by Chinese legal experts. By analyzing the gender assumptions embodied in several newly emergent categories of legal regulation, including legal personhood, minimum marriage age, consent, domicile, surnames, marital property, and child custody, the article’s line of questioning reveals how gender meanings helped to shape modern concepts like universality, equality, and freedom. The findings illustrate the ways in which Republican civil law broke with late imperial legal and gender norms tied to Confucian patrilineal ideology and in addition established new legal and gender meanings that helped to consolidate Chinese politics on a republican basis and to reconfigure modern gender difference on a conjugal basis.     

Exploring Spatial Relationships between Material Culture and Language in the Upper Sepik and Central New Guinea

ABSTRACT New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Over 1,000 languages are found there. Unsurprisingly, controversy exists concerning the degree to which this diversity has been shaped by migration or interaction. At the centre of this controversy is the putative origin and migration path of Austronesian speakers. The advent of Lapita ceramic ware in Melanesia around 3,000 years ago is seen by some as important evidence for their arrival; nevertheless the validity of using Lapita as a marker for Austronesian populations remains in question. The Upper Sepik is one of New Guinea's most linguistically heterogeneous regions. Because it is not marked by far‐reaching exchange systems the region's language and material culture distributions provide potential for exploring such issues. This paper discusses these in the context of an analysis of important ethnographic collections from the region. It is shown that when material culture is assessed technologically and stylistically it is easier to determine an effect for important variables such as language and distance. Additionally, it is demonstrated that as men and women often have different levels of mobility and sociality, classes of material culture belonging to each may differentially reflect important socio‐historical processes.     

Gender and emergent water governance: comparative overview of neoliberalized natures and gender dimensions of privatization,devolution and marketization

This article provides a critical reading of some of the gendered dimensions of emergent water governance regimes, specifically those related to the privatization, marketization and devolution of water resources management. After first providing an overview of recent nature–society contributions related to neoliberalization processes, the article comparatively evaluates insights with respect to the gender dimensions of recent shifts in water governance. I make several arguments at the intersection of relevant literatures. First, there is a need for gender theorists interested in water resources and nature–society debates to engage more with issues, theories and processes associated with neoliberalization. Second, there is a need for more attention to gender, feminist theory and approaches to inequality and socio-spatial difference in discussions of neoliberalized natures. Third, reading these literatures together reveals that there is a need to be self-reflexive and critical of elements of the gender and water literature that implicitly endorse foundational elements of the neoliberal turn in resource governance. Finally, there are particularities with respect to gender theory and politics, and water materialities that hold importance for understanding recent water governance shifts in the broader context of political and economic changes associated with neoliberalization.     

Producing liminal space: gender,age and class in northern Ontario's tree planting industry

Drawing upon qualitative data, this article examines how tree planters in northern Ontario, Canada engage with liminality in terms of gender, class, age and space. In doing so, it provides insight into concepts of gender liminality and the variegated experiences of males and females in liminal space. The article focuses on four aspects of the liminal engagement. First, the spaces of tree planting are liminal as they are marked by homelife and worklife, but dominated by neither. Second, gender performances are liminal, as males perform masculinities seldom necessary or appropriate – yet often valorized – in their permanent communities, while females (who make up nearly half of the workforce) are offered opportunities to work and succeed in a traditionally male industry. However, success often requires that they adopt certain masculine traits. Third, most tree planters are in the interstitial age of ‘youth’, somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. Finally, tree planters are generally members of affluent urban middle-classes, yet the work they perform is more readily associated with rural or peripheral working-classes.