Craniofacial trauma in the Prehispanic Canary Islands

The current project is a study of craniofacial trauma in a large sample (n = 896) of Prehispanic Canary Islanders (PCIs). The possible causes and social implications of the trauma found are considered, with reference to archaeological and historical data. Variables include the island, period and ecology, the sex and age of the individuals, the distribution of lesions across the skull (by side and by individual bone) and ante‐mortem tooth loss. The results show a fairly high trauma rate (16%), a low prevalence of peri‐mortem trauma (3.8% of all lesions), higher prevalence of trauma in males than in females (25% vs. 13% of all individuals), more cranial than facial lesions (8.9% vs. 3.5% of all elements) and more lesions on the left side of the skull (6.7% vs. 4.5% of all elements) which suggests that the lesions were sustained through intentional rather than accidental agency. There was no correspondence between trauma prevalence and ecology. The archaeological and historical data support the assertion that the lesions may be the result of skirmishing between groups, using weapons such as slingshots, stones and staves. The presence of edged‐weapon lesions on some individuals suggests that these may have been the victims of contact‐period European groups. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A brief and improper geography of queerspaces and sexpublics in Austin,Texas

This article offers ethnographic and autoethnographic vignettes from my research on cultures of public sex in Austin, Texas. It also tracks some of the ways my own racialization as a black queer man shaped the research project. My approach, which includes an experimental – ‘reparative’ – textual style, offers several interlocking registers of analysis. I bring together my informants' nostalgic remembrances of public sex in Austin; the legal and media circulation of queer sex in general, and public sex in particular, as specifically ‘public’ problems requiring surveillance, administration, and management; the impacts of HIV/AIDS; and the rise of the Internet as a means to connect. In this way, I not only aim to archive sites of desire and their transformation, but to also archive the everyday and intimate affects that animate, make sense of, and give meaning to queerspaces and sexpublics in Austin as elsewhere. In its eclectic mixes of voices and styles, as well as reality and fiction, my ethnography does not simply describe material geographies (men have sex in parks and hook up online) or linear timelines (first there was public sex and then there was AIDS), rather, gesturing as it does toward a psychic geography of intensities, remembrances, and longings, it tries to conjure an expansive affective archive into brief life.     

Αge‐associated Variation and Sexual Dimorphism in Adult Cranial Morphology: Implications in Anthropological Studies

The current paper explores the impact of age and sex on adult cranial shape and size variation in the documented collections from St Bride's and Spitalfields. The scope is to assess the extent to which it is valid to pool age and sex groups in inter‐population comparisons that use cranial data. For this purpose, age and sex differences in cranial shape and size were explored using multivariate analysis of variance, Discriminant analysis and Mann–Whitney tests. The results suggest a clear change in cranial shape with increasing age; however, this change is not statistically significant. Therefore, it is justifiable to pool different age groups in bioarchaeological analyses. Increasing age also has a minimal impact on cranial size among females, whereas among males, its impact is small but statistically significant. Finally, cranial shape and size are significantly different between males and females, irrespective of their age. This dimorphism can be used for the assessment of sex, although attention should be given to over‐classification problems when using discriminant analysis. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Digitalising sex commerce and sex work: a comparative analysis of French,Greek and Slovenian websites

The aim of this article is to explore the complexity of the online sex trade and work by analysing sexuality-related commercial websites, with reference to three European states, France, Greece and Slovenia. The article compares websites in each specific sociocultural context, in order to provide insights into the various types of networks and services that emerge, and to explore how they operate, how they communicate and how sex is being merchandised. We have conducted a two-tier analysis: The first part discusses results of a quantitative macro-analysis exploring 149 websites, while the second part is a micro-analysis analysing the visualisation of egocentric network of three selected websites. The focus is on understanding how gender relations develop in digital environment and how within cyberspace sectorial and national divides are dealt with. While there is evidence to suggest that in some sectors the Internet has opened avenues for sex workers to work independently of the control networks, there are also many forms of exploitation that arise from new media. We observe that sex commerce online is not particularly attentive to the agency of sex workers but is, to the contrary, oriented to provide opportunities and a forum for businessmen and clients.     

Plastic fantastic? Problematising post-feminism in erotic retailing in England

Sex shops in England have traditionally been perceived as masculinised consumption spaces, located at the margins of both the city and the clock (in decaying urban zones, hidden from view and frequented under the cover of darkness). Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of fashion conscious and female-orientated ‘erotic boutiques’, keen to disassociate themselves away from negative stereotypical representations of sex shops, through marketing themselves as stylish, fun, acceptable and safe, and, above all, empowering spaces for women to explore their sexuality. This article considers how erotic boutiques offer a post-feminist sexual address to women through claims of female empowerment, an embrace of traditional femininity and an endorsement of the aestheticisation of the female body. More specifically, I explore the post-feminist tensions between female sexual subjectivity and objectivity, by unpacking, and reflecting on, the relations between erotic boutiques and the space of the body. This is achieved by an analysis of how the products and services (and how they are marketed and displayed) promote idealised representations of female bodily sexual pleasure, adornment and knowledge that can apparently be obtained by the consumption of specific products and commodified sexual knowledges. The article consequently considers and questions a seeming inextricable entwinement of post-feminist sexual empowerment with sexual consumerism.     

CIVIL WAR,MARRIAGE BAN AND SEX RATIO

The civil war in mainland China during 1945–1949 resulted in an enormous influx of immigrants to Taiwan, the majority of whom were single male soldiers in their twenties or thirties. In addition, a military marriage ban prevented most of the immigrant soldiers from getting married until 1959. These two factors have profound, but distinct, influences on the effective prime-age sex ratio in the marriage market in post-war Taiwan. Unfortunately, the official population data in Taiwan excluded the military and thus did not reveal the true male population until the late 1960s. This paper proposes a method to impute the effective prime-age sex ratio. The imputation result shows that the effective prime-age sex ratio first rose in the 1950s, peaked in the 1960s, and then declined in the 1970s. At its peak, as many as 120 men were competing for only 100 women in the marriage market.     

The space between: globalization,liminal spaces and personal relations in rural Costa Rica

Globalization facilitates the movement of people, goods, ideologies and even diseases across borders and into local communities. This article explores the liminal space created by tourism in the rural Costa Rican community of Monteverde as a site where the movement of people, especially Western women (women from the global North), intersects, contests and even reinforces existing heteropatriarchal ideologies. Theories from feminist geography and anthropology provide a lens for understanding and interpreting how Western women and local residents (both male and female) perceive, construct and interact with each other. We argue that ‘liminality’ or the sense of being ‘betwixt and between’ – physically, socially and ideologically – allows Western women a space to both challenge the hegemony of heteropatriarchal ideology and reconstitute it in their sexual relationships with local men. We also explore the implications that sexual relationships between Western women and local men have for local women. We stress the urgency to understand and articulate the nature of these sexual relationships in light of the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic.     

A VENGEFUL EDUCATION? URBAN REVANCHISM,SEX WORK AND THE PENAL POLITICS OF JOHN SCHOOLS

This article considers how useful the urban revanchism thesis is in helping us understand the John School, a “mobile” educational programme that has been rolled out in the United States, Canada, the UK and South Korea which teaches those arrested for soliciting for the purposes of buying sex the negative consequences of their actions. The article begins by unpacking the urban revanchism thesis and bringing it into dialogue with ideas on punishment. It then draws on a case study of one English John School in the anonymized town of Redtown. It demonstrates that the operations and rationales of the Redtown John School have traces of revanchism and that they are also infused by ideas and practices of care. As a result it argues that the urban revanchism thesis illuminates some important aspects of the Redtown John School while silencing or misreading others. The article concludes therefore by calling for future research to think more broadly about punishment (rather than revanchism) in the city and its entanglements with care.     

‘Shades of grey’: spaces in and beyond trafficking for Thai Women involved in commercial sexual labour in Sydney and Singapore

In this article I explore the migration trajectories of some Thai women trafficked internationally for commercial sexual exploitation, suggesting that many figuratively ‘cross the border’ between coerced and consensual existence in volatile migrant sex industries during the course of their migration experiences, thus complicating debates around the notion of choice in ‘sex’ trafficking. In exploring these women's transitions I seek to understand why women who had either never previously been sex workers or who were sex workers operating without duress, but who were then trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation remain in, or re-enter volatile forms of migrant sex work at a later point under voluntary arrangements. In answering this question I focus on the temporal and spatial aspects of individual women's experiences in migrant sex industries drawing in detail on the narratives of two Thai women trafficked to Sydney, Australia and Singapore. I make some suggestions about methodologies used in trafficking research that can assist in bringing to light some of these complex time–space dimensions of women's experiences through their shifting positions in commercial sexual labour. The article also reflects on the implications of these women's trajectories for the ‘prostitution debate’ as it relates to trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation by suggesting that many trafficked women occupy ambiguous or in-between positions in migrant sex industries, neither easily distinguishable by the label of victim of trafficking or migrant sex worker.     

‘You just have to be smart’: spatial practices and subjectivity among women in sex work in London,Ontario

Social science research on the relationship between space and sex work, specifically among women in street-based settings, demonstrates the spatialized nature of risk and how different forms of civic and legal governance contribute to their socio-economic marginalization. However, these studies rarely consider the women’s spatial practices and gendered subjectivities beyond the sex trade, which is problematic because sex work is not their singular life activity or the only impetus for their spatial movements through the urban landscape. Using social mapping and interview data from 33 women in sex work in London, Ontario, this article explores how our participants navigate the spaces where they work and live alongside those regarding health care, social services, violence and places they avoid. Findings reveal that the women traverse diverse spaces as they access health services, especially for crisis issues that necessitate travel to hospitals located beyond the inner city. The spaces used to access social services and those they avoid (i.e. to not be emotionally triggered or under police surveillance) overlap significantly, which presents unique challenges for our participants who depend upon these services for their socio-economic survival. The theoretical contributions these data make to the feminist geography literature on gender and space are discussed, particularly with respect to the issues of nomadic subjectivity and the relationality between city spaces and marginalized bodies.