Complicating hetero-normative spaces at school formals in New Zealand

The school formal in New Zealand constitutes a rich site of analysis for researchers interested in gender and sexuality performances. As a social space, the formal both shapes bodies and is shaped by them. In this article, we explore the school formals of three different types of schools: a single sex girls’, a single sex boys’ and a co-ed. high school, all from an urban centre. Using the theoretical tools provided by poststructuralism and queer theory, we conducted a discourse analysis of observations conducted by the first author at two school formals, interviews with staff and students and interviews with peer researchers. We demonstrate how same-sex practices do not necessarily map onto queer bodies, masculinity onto ‘male’ bodies or femininity onto ‘female’ bodies. Such fluidity challenges the rigid heterosexual/homosexual and masculine/feminine binaries so that schools are more inclusive of gender and sexual diversity.     

Hyper or hypo-masculine? Re-conceptualizing ‘hyper-masculinity’ through Seattle’s gay,leather community

This article offers a critique of the concept of hyper-masculinity and a more nuanced, place contingent, critical way to think about masculinity. I use the concept of hyper-masculinity to highlight a conceptual problem between essentialist and de-essentialized notions of gender. Constructionist notions of masculinity (and gender) do not escape the essentialist problem; however, by critiquing and offering a placed conceptualization of hyper-masculinity based on Seattle’s gay leather community, I push the boundaries of masculinity and gender to arrive at a more nuanced, embodied, place-based and contingent understanding of hyper-masculinity thereby side-stepping debates that essentialist/constructionist. Through participant-observations and ethnographic interviews with men who practice hyper-masculinity within the gay leather community in Seattle, USA, I interrogate hyper-masculinity within the community to demonstrate how it reinforces and subverts heterosexual gender roles and homonormativity.     

Maʻagan Mikhael B,Israel: a preliminary report of a Late Byzantine–Early Islamic period shipwreck

The Ma?agan Mikhael B shipwreck was found in 1.5m of water, beneath 1.5m of sand, 70m off the Mediterranean coast of Israel. The hull remains are in a good state of preservation, comprising the endposts, aprons, framing timbers, hull planks, stringers, and bulkheads. The finds comprise rigging elements, wooden artefacts, organic finds, animal bones, glassware, coins, bricks, stones, ceramic sherds, and complete amphoras. The shipwreck was dated to the 7th–8th centuries AD; which makes it an exceptional source of information regarding various aspects of ship construction, seamanship, and seafaring in the area in Late Antiquity.     

Discrimination is what ethnic groups make of it: subjective perceptions of peripherality among the Mohajirs of Pakistan

The article attends to the dynamic of subjective interpretation of socio‐economic conditions by ethnic elites in ways that convince co‐ethnics of their relative deprivation and discrimination. The article asserts that it is essential to move beyond structuralist explanations relative to economic deprivation and discrimination for they stand to essentialise social and economic conditions as defined by ethnic entrepreneurs themselves. In studying the crystallisation of Mohajir ethnicity in the 1970s and 1980s, the article seeks to (re) present alternative interpretations relative to political, economic and social facts of discrimination as subjectively presented by the Mohajir ethnic elite. The article locates peripherality not in the political system that disadvantaged the Mohajirs but in the discourse of discrimination propagated by the new Mohajir ethnopolitical elite. It is in this sense that discrimination becomes what ethnic groups make of it.     

Biomechanics of coaching maximal instep soccer kick for practitioners

Kicking in soccer has been the subject of scientific research for more than 40 years yet review articles summarizing the biomechanical fundamentals of kick optimization as a guide to coaching are scarcely to be found. The current review article aims to bridge the gap between scientific research into the maximal instep kick (including studies employing 3D motion capture and full-body biomechanical modelling) and the application of such research in coaching. It does so by supplying a scientifically founded, coaching-friendly article explaining identifiable characteristics and motor control sequencing that define this skill. Relevant biomechanical factors are identified in a way that should help coaches better develop training programmes and, at the same time, foster better understanding of the skill among athletes. Such information will contribute to both accelerated skill acquisition and, by concomitant gains in skill efficiency, the development of programmes that minimize risk of injury to athletes during training.     

UNION DISCUSSIONS OF GENDER EQUALITY IN THE SWEDISH TRADE UNION NEWSPAPER JOURNALISTEN, 1961–1989

Sweden is arguably one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, and the historical development of that equality has been studied in detail. However, less is known about how the idea of gender equality was adopted in different professional spheres. In this article, I focus on this topic by using one profession, journalism, to analyse how gender equality was placed on the trade union agenda and negotiated in Sweden between 1961 and 1989. Drawing on a framing analysis of the discussion of gender equality in the trade union newspaper Journalisten, I argue that the Swedish Union of Journalists and its members took a somewhat moderate position in the struggle for gender equality, which, during the decades in question, was mostly framed as a women’s question. For the most active advocates of gender equality, it was nevertheless a deeply felt issue, and their work can be defined as trade union feminism.     

Equality of Women's Economic Status? A Major Bone of Contention in the International Gender Politics Emerging During the Interwar Period*

This study brings together the often disparate scholarship on the League of Nations and the ILO. It follows the interactions between the League, women internationalists, and the ILO, which evolved around the question of woman-specific labor legislation and the equality of women's status. These interactions resulted in a broadening mandate of international gender policies while deepening the institutional and legal distinction between women's ‘political and civil’ as opposed to their ‘economic’ status. The ILO insisted on certain forms of women-specific labor regulation as a means of conjoining progressive gender and class politics, and was anxious to ensure its competence in all matters concerning women's economic status. The gender equality doctrine gaining ground in the League was rooted in a liberal-feminist paradigm which rejected the association of gender politics with such class concerns, and indeed aimed to force back the ILO's politics of gender-specific international labor standards. As a result of the widening divide between the women's policies of the League and the ILO, the international networks of labor women reduced their engagement with women's activism at the League. The developments of the 1930s deepened the tension between liberal feminism and feminisms engaging with class inequalities, and would have problematic long-term consequences for international gender politics.     

Precarious masculinities and gender as pedagogy: aesthetic advice-encounters for the Dutch urban economy

In the context of precarious post-Fordist urban labour markets, Dress for Success in the Netherlands, a non-profit working in the context of the welfare state, provides dress advice to a majority of men. Dress advice consists of moments in which demands for immaterial labour find material translations into items of clothing. Building on ethnographic observations, I argue that dress advice-encounters should be seen as exercises in adaptability to new and ever changing economic circumstances. In these pedagogies, gender is a key instrument. Rather than a straightforward feminization of the economy, what is at stake is a performance of openness towards becoming adaptable to future labour market demands. Asking men to depart their attachments to Fordist working class masculinities and its material translations is an exercise toward becoming pliable enough for post-Fordist precarious labour markets.     

“Our life is a struggle”: Respectable Gender Norms and Black Resistance to Policing

This paper investigates the role of women in anti‐racist campaigns against policing in post‐2011 England. It argues that imperial discourses about gender norms and respectability have helped to shape how race and crime are constituted in the contemporary period. Women's resistance to police racism has received scholarly attention from black feminists in North America; such attention has been less in Britain, particularly since the 1990s. While influential analyses of policing in Britain have deployed a post‐colonial lens, gender and women's resistance are rarely the primary focus. This paper significantly develops debates on gender, race and policing, by arguing that the colonial roots of race and gender norms are fundamental to conceptualising one of the key findings of the field research which informs this paper: that women lead almost every campaign against a black death in police custody in post‐2011 England. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with activists, ethnographic observations at protests and scholar‐activist participation in campaigns against black deaths in custody, this paper demonstrates how 18^th and 19^th century imperial discourses on respectability and nation do not simply contextualise racialised policing in the contemporary period, but expose the racialised and gendered norms that legitimise racist policing in modern Britain.     

Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea: Place,Personhood and Exchange

In Papua New Guinea (PNG) more rural people, and especially rural women, earn cash from selling in marketplaces than from any other source. PNG's marketplaces are critical for food security, and for the redistribution of wealth. They are also important meeting places where people gather to see friends, hear the latest news, attend court cases, play cards and be entertained. This introduction to this special issue on ‘Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea’ reviews the history of PNG marketplaces and their contemporary forms. It charts their transformation from introduced colonial spaces into dynamic Melanesian places, which, as places to buy, sell and socialise, have become pervasive institutions in the lives of both urban and rural Papua New Guineans, and places where people interact with both known and unknown others. From this, marketplaces emerge as important spaces of moral evaluation and contestation in relation to what constitutes morally acceptable exchange and what practices are acceptable in these places. The paper demonstrates that exchange in the marketplace should not be reduced to commodity transactions, and questions assumptions about the types of people marketplaces create. It argues that the country's marketplaces are productive sites to consider ideas of exchange, social relations and social personhood, and that there is a critical need to understand the concrete details of what takes place in contemporary marketplaces.