‘The Tent’s Big Enough for Everyone’: online slash fiction as a site for activism and change

This article draws on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research (n = 429) that examines how women who write and read male/male erotica feel their involvement with the genre has affected their views on gender and sexuality and their political engagement with gay rights issues. Previous work has looked at how online slashfic communities might provide a safe space for exploring gender performance and sexuality, while other researchers have observed a tension between those who identify as queer themselves and those who only ‘play at queerness’ exclusively within the online environment. However, much of this work has examined the theoretical positioning of such forums as transgressive and/or political. Far fewer pieces have attempted to engage with the women who frequent such sites to ask them about whether their involvement in these online spaces has affected their attitudes and behaviours. This study looks not only at the ways in which online m/m fandoms can act as a safe space for women to explore their sexualities and gender identities, but whether and how these insights connect to women’s real-world lives. Data presented here shows a strong consensus among participants that involvement with explicit slash communities has had a positive effect on their lives, as well as contributing to beneficial changes in their knowledge, attitudes, and practices with regards to LGBTQ+ issues. Overall, slash is seen as a medium which can create better allies, encourage cross-identification, and bring about positive personal changes. To this extent, I argue that explicit online slash sites can act as heterotopias.     

International Solidarity in reproductive justice: surrogacy and gender-inclusive polymaternalism

Reproductive justice and gestational surrogacy are often implicitly treated as antonyms. Yet the former represents a theoretic approach that enables the long and racialised history of surrogacy (far from a new or ‘exceptional’ practice) to be appreciated as part of a struggle for ‘radical kinship’ and gender-inclusive polymaternalism. Recasting surrogacy as a dynamic contradiction in itself, full of latent possibilities relevant to early Reproductive Justice militants’ family-abolitionist aims, this article invites scholars in human geography and cognate disciplines to re-think the boundaries of surrogacy politics. As ethnographies of formal gestational workplaces, accounts of gestational workers’ self-organised resistance, and readings of the attendant public media scandals show (taking examples from India, Thailand, and New Jersey), there is no good reason to place these new economies of ‘third-party reproductive assistance’ in a ‘realm apart’ from conversations about social reproduction more generally. Surrogacy, I argue, potentially names a practice of commoning at the same time as it names a new wave of accumulation in which clinicians are capitalising on the contemporary – biogenetic-propertarian, white-supremacist – logic of kinmaking in the Global North. Ongoing experiments in the redistribution of mothering labour (‘othermothering’ in the Black feminist tradition) suggest that ‘another surrogacy is possible’, animated by what Kathi Weeks and the 1970s intervention ‘Wages Against Housework’ conceive as anti-work politics. In making this argument, the article revives the concept ‘gestational labour’ as a means of keeping the process of ‘literal’ reproduction open to transformation.     

‘Lived bodies’ and the neoliberal city – a case study of vulnerability in London

This article explores the ‘more-than-work’ aspects of the lives of vulnerable women who street-sex work. Particularly, we are interested in the differences between the women’s experiences, within the broader context of power structures as manifested in neoliberal cities. Few studies have explored this aspect of street-sex workers’ lives and theorisations of the co-creation of environments tend to elide the experiences of the most vulnerable people. Specifically, we explore the relationships that these women have with two environments: the quotidian (where they undertake routine everyday activities), and the gentrified (relating to changes in the spaces in which they live and work). We find that their experiences are extremely local, and heavily contingent on the services made available to them (or not) by the statutory and third sectors, and the emotional contacts they make, particularly in third sector support services. This challenges some of the literature which suggests a separation of ‘home’ and ‘work’, and which finds close associations between women who street-sex work. While places designed by the third sector are more responsive to these women, they are also more vulnerable to closure through lack of funding. This contributes to a significant degree of ontological non-linearity and ontological insecurity in these women’s lives.     

Borders and belongings in Nordic feminisms and beyond

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with feminist grassroots groups and women’s organizations in a Nordic context, this article aims to explore how feminist enactments shape multiple layers of spatiality and belonging. I analyse autoethnographic reflections from two feminist events, both taking place in Malmö in June 2014. Rather than understanding Nordic feminisms as a stable object, I follow in this article the initiative of decolonial scholars to analyze how feminist communities are shaped by affects, enactments and inhabitations which both ‘speak back’ to located conditions and transgress beyond them. I use phenomenology in my engagement with the material and employ a palimpsestic reading mode to trace the multi-layered constructions of spatiality and belonging in feminist performances, identifications and affiliations. As affective value shaped the effects of surfaces or borders of bodies and spaces, theorizations on affect helped me to grasp how complex forms of belonging became entwined with particular performances of geography and history.     

Single female tenants in South Delhi – gender,class and morality in a globalizing city

Based on ethnographic data gathered over 12 months of fieldwork with unmarried women living alone or in flat-shares in different middle class South Delhi localities, this article traces the way shifting gendered norms – often epitomized by growing numbers of single women households – are negotiated within class specific and highly localized contexts of the residential neighborhood. Despite growing economic opportunities for middle class and elite women, cultural anxieties surrounding the notion of ‘delayed’ marriage and women living outside of the familial or marital home persist and obstruct attempts at establishing independent households. Single women experience difficulties finding apartments to rent; have to contend with hostile intrusions from neighbors; or feel obliged to self-monitor their behavior within their neighborhoods. As South Delhi’s liberalised urban landscape has become home to an increasingly globalized, consumerist middle class, disciplinary measures such as curfews, regulations over houseguests and increased surveillance simultaneously indicate a middle class recalibrating its gendered social coordinates by proving its commitment to values of female propriety. While popular discourses draw juxtaposed imaginaries of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ in their depictions of increasing individualism and a loosening of ‘traditional’ role expectations, this article demonstrates the need to consider the different structural conditions and local inflections in which struggles over women’s agency take place. Looking beyond the supposedly universalizing forces of globalized consumer modernity, the residential neighborhood hereby provides a view into the lived experiences of – at times incongruous – mechanisms at play in societies undergoing social change.     

William Scott Owen, 1853–1920: an English-born land agent in mid Wales

William Scott Owen figured prominently in Montgomeryshire history by being deeply involved with the lives of working people and active in local politics. He was an incomer from the south of England and a stalwart of the Anglican faith and the Tory party. He spent the whole of his working life in Montgomeryshire and came to be deeply respected in a part of Britain noted for its Nonconformity and Liberalism. Scott Owen was agent on the Gregynog Estate, which lies in the south east of the county, much of it now belonging to the University of Wales. This study of his life provides a vivid picture of the county in the late Victorian and Edwardian period and discusses why he became so well regarded.     

The wealthier inhabitants of Croydon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

This article examines the wealthier inhabitants of Croydon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, focusing on differences in wealth, ownership of property and social relationships. Using wills and subsidy lists, four broad categories of people were identified: gentlemen, yeomen, tradesmen and craftsmen and widows. There was no simple gradation of wealth between these groups; although gentlemen were generally among the richest subsidy payers, yeomen and tradesmen could also figure. In terms of social relationships and the ownership of property, there were differences. Gentlemen tended to marry within their own social group, appoint other gentlemen as overseers in their wills and were more likely to own land outside Croydon. The social relationships of yeomen and tradesmen/craftsmen were more focused on the town itself, as were their land purchases. Two groups of individuals can therefore be seen, not one homogenous entity as some scholars have argued.     

Introducing inclusive tourism

ABSTACT

Tourism is often understood and experienced as an exclusive activity. In supporting the concept of inclusive tourism, this volume seeks to counter that tendency by seeking out ways in which those who are typically marginalized by, or excluded from tourism can be brought into the industry in ways that directly benefit them, or that they can gain more control over tourism. This introduction to the special issue first presents a conceptual article that defines the concept of inclusive tourism and discusses seven different elements, which may constitute lines of inquiry in investigations of tourism's inclusiveness. It then presents five empirical articles that illustrate some of the ways in which an inclusive tourism approach might inform discussion of the potentials and limitations for tourism to generate wider social and economic benefits. The examples provided are from a wide range of geographical contexts, from Cambodia to Australia, Sweden, Turkey and Spain. Inclusive tourism is offered here as both an analytical concept and an aspirational ideal. We do not ever envisage minimum standards for inclusive tourism. We rather hope that there will be a restless quest to find ways to include new actors and new places in tourism on terms that are equitable and sustainable.     

Defining dreams: young mothers’ agency in constructions of space

Understanding young mothers’ emic, or insiders’, spatial experiences is critical to realizing how their agency manifests in constructing and producing spaces, as opposed to common images of them as passive, vulnerable women living in deprived neighbourhoods. Set in the shrinking region of Parkstad Limburg in the Netherlands, this article draws on in-depth interviews and long-term participant observation in order to explore which modalities of agency emerge from young mothers’ spatial engagements with their neighbourhoods and homes. This article contributes to greater diversity and more agentic representations of young mothers than commonly perceived, and to a nuanced understanding of agency. The findings reveal that these women are continually navigating the social, physical and economic–political dimensions of space, from which four modalities of agency emerge: (1) ‘adhering to norms’, (2) ‘defining dreams’, (3) ‘challenging rules’ and (4) ‘considering options’. Contrary to understandings within a dominant independence-oriented discourse of agency as taking subversive action, this article shows that agency occurs in tacit, routine spatial practices, whilst navigating through individual circumstances and sociospatial structures and norms.     

Rural youth and urban-based vocational training: gender,space and aspiring to ‘become someone’

ABSTRACT

The policy phrase Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is rapidly gaining ground across Southeast Asia (and beyond). Despite numerous policy reports, little is known about how vocational training and education work as sites of practice. This is especially true for informal household-based apprenticeships and privately organized, commercial classroom-based training. Yet, these latter arrangements are numerous, an integral part of the widespread informal economy, and reflecting the fact that homes have retained their productive character in much of the Global South. Combining a village-based perspective (Laos) with an urban-based perspective (Cambodia), we analyse how these informal and privately organized training spaces are situated in rural youth’s gendered lives and shaped by, but also generative of, aspirations of ‘becoming someone’. In addition, comparing informal apprenticeships with classroom-based training leads us to raise some important questions about the implications of the (global) policy emphasis on the standardization and formalization of TVET.