"跑警报":西南联合大学战时生活研究之一

抗日战争期间,日军曾数百次对昆明狂轰乱炸,造成了重大的人员和财产损失,给当地民众的战时生活秩序产生了严重的影响.在对昆明的大轰炸中,当时中国的最高学府--西南联合大学也屡次遭袭,造成多名教职工伤亡,大量校舍和图书、仪器损毁.然而,敌人的轰炸并没有从精神上吓倒联大师生,大家积极采取措施防范空袭,在"跑警报"的过程中,人们的心态逐渐乐观起来.     

From rural life to transnational wife: agrarian transition,gender mobility,and intimate globalization in transnational marriages in northeast Thailand

Popular and academic discourses of globalization are often gender biased, focusing on formal and impersonal realms of the market, politics, and technologies. This article explores an intimate dimension of globalization by analyzing the transnational marriage trend among women in northeast Thailand (Isan's) villages. The phua farang (foreign husband) phenomenon in Isan epitomizes the intimate link between the global political economy and individuals' desires, aspirations, and imagination in the private realm of personal and marital relationships. The phua farang phenomenon is embedded in a context of spatial and economic inequalities at the local, national, and global levels, and manifests classed and gendered strategies by which marginalized subjects attempt to transcend the limited opportunities for upward social mobility available to these women.     

社交媒体对广州饮食文化空间的建构与重塑

研究选取国内四大社交媒体——新浪博客、新浪微博、豆瓣网和土豆网作为研究案例,通过文本分析的方法,探讨了社交媒体对广州饮食文化空间的构建与重塑,得出以下结论:①社交媒体构建了广州饮食文化空间的结构以及全球地方特征。社交媒体将广州饮食文化空间结构塑造为承载饮食内容、饮食文化及其相关社会活动的物质和社会文化空间,具有全球化和本地化交融的特征;②基于网民对社交媒体空间的生产,及其之间的社会互动,社交媒体消解了广州饮食文化空间原有的社会文化意义,并将其重塑为一个承载多元社会文化、消费文化、权力和情感的空间,而且这些空间意义具有流动性。研究结论丰富了现有媒体和饮食文化空间地理研究成果,同时为广州饮食文化发展和地方品牌构建提供了参考。     

Straight subjectivities in homonormative spaces: moving towards a new, ‘dynamic’ heteronormativity?

Although scholars have explored geographies of heterosexuality for a relatively long time, experiences of heterosexual subjects have been under-researched. Contributing to the discussions around how homo/straight spaces are negotiated, this study analyses how heterosexuals experience and define both homonormative and heteronormative spaces in Seattle. Through a series of interviews and focus groups with self-identified heterosexuals, I explore how these subjects interact with spaces that they recognize as being either straight or gay, and how they negotiate their own identities in relation to those spaces. I also describe how, while refusing to reject heterosexuality, the vast majority of participants expressed discomfort at being defined as someone with a fixed, stable sexual identity, and how they assumed gayness to be non-transgressive and fixed. The results show a paradoxical, complex picture, in which gayness is described as stable and normative, and heterosexuality is depicted as fluid and dynamic. The study illustrates an instance in which homo/straight binaries still shape people’s imagination, while also offering an example of the messy interaction between homonormativity and heteronormativity. What is also suggested is that, experiencing homonormative spaces and performing ‘dynamic’ identities, the respondents renegotiate what being heterosexual means for them reinforcing, however, heterosexual dominance through the definition of a new ‘dynamic’ heteronormativity.     

Queering Beirut,the ‘Paris of the Middle East’: fractal Orientalism and essentialized masculinities in contemporary gay travelogues

In this article, I analyse discourses that have been circulating in a number of Euro-American journalistic articles, gay travelogues and an international gay tour guide since 2005, which present Beirut as a new gay tourist destination. Since representations in gay travelogues often trade in imagined ‘sexual utopias’, promise encounters and the ‘discovery’ of unfamiliar and ‘exotic’ settings with other non-heterosexual men, I explore how both Beirut and the Lebanese are represented and made intelligible. I argue that even though these representations depart from a binary distinction between East/West and Self/Other, they are still premised on Orientalist depictions of both place and people. However, these depictions are complex as they rely on and produce what I call ‘fractal Orientalism’, or ‘Orientalisms within the Orient’, and essentialized, yet relational, understandings of both ‘tourists’ and ‘locals’. Hybridity and liminality become central, whereby Beirut is presented as safe but dangerous, and glamorous but war-torn, and the non-heterosexual Lebanese are racialized and represented as sexually available (in private) but discreet (in public). These representations rely heavily on linear narratives of progress, where progress is assessed in terms of ‘tolerant’ attitudes towards homosexuality, the presence of a Western-constituted ‘gay identity’, gay-friendly spaces and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer organizations. Finally, I argue that these depictions, despite attempting to make Beirut and non-heterosexual Lebanese men intelligible, produce monolithic and essentialist understandings of both, which fail to take into account the complexities and intersections of gender, race, class and sexualities.