Property,boundary, exclusion: Making sense of hetero-violence in safer spaces

This paper focuses on research conducted over a period of thirty months as part of a wider ESRC-funded initiative on violence. It focuses on the sustainability of safer gay space. This paper shows how the generation of the fear of the 'heterosexual other' functions to enable certain claims to be made on the space from a proprietorial aspect which includes recourse to purity, danger and respectability. This shows how property relations become articulated as a property of the person, demonstrating how entitlement to space is formed. It also explores how boundaries are being constructed and maintained in different (and often novel) ways and shows how different intelligibilities are constructed for understanding one's place through concepts of property and propriety that relate to forms of investment and movement through space. It thus challenges traditional ideas on boundary formation and maintenance. Ultimately it foregrounds how these understandings of bodies in space influence current articulations of citizenship and poltical participation. Cet article analyse des recherches effectuées au cours d'une période de trente mois dans le cadre d'une étude plus large sur la violence, subventionnée par ESRC. Le thème principal est celui de la viabilité des espaces sans risque. Nous démontrons comment le maintien d'une peur de 'l'autre hétérosexuel' sert à fonder certains droits envers ces espaces, droits qui sont reliés à un sens de la propriété faisant appel à des notions de pureté, danger et respectabilité. Notre analyse indique comment ces relations de propriété sont exprimées en fonction de la personne, démontrant ainsi comment se formule l'accès à l'espace. Elle démontre aussi les divers modes de construction et maintien des frontières, et comment ceux-ci élaborent des cadres de perception permettant de comprendre la place de l'individu au sein des concepts de 'rectitude' et 'propriété' qui sont liés à des formes d'interaction avec l'espace. Finalement, notre étude questionne les idées traditionnelles quant à la formation et au maintien des frontières, signalant ainsi comment l'analyse des corps dans l'espace ouvre de nouvelles voies d'étude ayant trait à la citoyennetéet àl'exercise de droits politiques. El enfoque de este papel es una investigación elaborada durante un período de 30 meses como parte de una iniciativa más amplia sobre la violencia fundada por ESRC. El enfoque es sobre la sotenibilidad de sitios más seguros para gays. Este papel demuestra como la generación de miedo del 'Otro heterosexual' facilita ciertas reclamaciones sobre un espacio. Estas reclamaciones incluyen nociones de pureza, peligro y respetabildad y demuestran la manera en que las relaciones propietarias llegan a ser articuladas como propiedad de la persona y de ahí, cómo es formado el derecho a un espacio. También examina como límites están siendo construidos y mantenidos de diferentes maneras (muchas veces nuevas) y indica como uno construye diferentes inteligibilidades para mejor entender su lugar a través de conceptos de propiedad y tenencia vinculados a formas de inversión y movimiento en un espacio. Así desafía las ideas tradicionales de la formación y mantenimiento de límites. Por último destaca la manera en que este entendimiento de 'cuerpos en un espacio' influye en las ideas actuales de ciudadanía y participación política.     

The Efficacies of Heritage: Syndromes,Magics, and Possessional Acts

In this paper I present critical insights into the efficacies of heritage. I take the phenomenon of the Jerusalem Syndrome (JS) as my point of departure and recast it as Heritage Syndrome (HS). I do this to better understand how such efficacies are experienced and materialized in ritual possessional acts. As a framework, the JS reveals the power and potency that reside in experiences of collapse. Such disembedding events activate subsequent ritual dramas (whether malign/benign or successful/failed) of world-making, redemption, repair, and renewal. Heritage quests as ritual ‘sacred dramas’ and ‘practical magics’ are I argue, similarly experienced in the collapse of known categories: imagined/real, extraordinary/mundane, possessing/being possessed, and crucially what heritage is versus what heritage does. Writ large, heritage efficacies are bound-up in the breakdown and blurring of boundaries — and thus the non-distinction — between heritage in the conventional sense and other dynamics such as magic, prophecy, and well-being/ill-being. These reveal alternative pathways, potentialities, and patterns of behaviour that demonstrate that dominant, elite, rationalized approaches to heritage banalize heritage efficacies and can thus be termed a failed project. I argue that conceiving of heritage as a syndrome — and critically as a movement away from medical pathologization and towards a recasting of heritages as diverse constellations of cultural-spiritual-magical-emotional experiences and engagements — better reflects the deeply felt complex and transformative practices at play. These heritage rites distinguished at points by those who wish their lives were more dramatic and those who wish their lives were less traumatic better describe how the vast majority of global actors engage with heritage, notably at popular, grass-roots level and in contexts of extremis, yet its significance goes largely unrecognized and unvalued.     

Women Rule? Globalization and the feminization of managerial and professional workspaces in the Caribbean.: ¿Las mujeres mandan? Globalización y la Feminización de los espacios gerenciales y profesionales en el Caribe

The visibility of Caribbean women in occupational positions and workspaces once reserved for men and for people of European descent in the Caribbean raises new challenges to the theorization of the transforming relationship between gender and global capitalism. To what extent are these changes in the professional and managerial recruitment practices of the finance and banking industry constitutive of a new relationship between capitalism and patriarchy? Does the increased number of women in organizational positions that they were once excluded from indicate a challenge to forms of gender inequality in the region? This article argues that in the Caribbean, the particularities of race, class and gender relations have been such that educated women have become significant beneficiaries of the economic transformations in these countries. While it is clear that education has allowed women to challenge patriarchal structures in both the workplace and the home, these achievements have not been sufficient to challenge the gender inequalities that continue to subordinate women in this region. The article concludes that in order to truly empower all women, the very structures of income and class inequality that have facilitated the feminization managerial and professional workspaces must be challenged.

La visibilidad de las mujeres del Caribe que ocupan posiciones y espacios laborales tradicionalmente reservados para los hombres y personas de ascendencia europea en el Caribe produce nuevos desafíos en la conceptualización de la relación siempre variable entre género y capitalismo global. ¿En qué medida son estos cambios en las prácticas de reclutamiento profesional y gerencial en la industria financias y bancarias indicativas de una nueva relación entre el capitalismo y el patriarcado? ¿Son las cifras crecientes de mujeres en posiciones organizacionales, de las tradicionalmente fueron excluidos, un desafío a las formas de desigualdad de género en el Caribe? Este artículo propone que en el Caribe anglófono las particularidades de las relaciones entre raza, clase y género han sido de tal manera que las mujeres educadas se hicieron beneficiarias importantes de las transformaciones económicas en estos países. Aunque está claro que la educación ha permitido que las mujeres como individuas desafíen las estructuras patriarcales en el trabajo y en el hogar, estos logros no han sido suficientes a desafiar las desigualdades de género que continúan subordinando las mujeres en esta región. Este artículo concluye que para empoderar a todas las mujeres, las mismas estructuras de desigualdad de ingreso y de clase que han facilitado la feminización de los espacios laborales gerenciales y profesionales, debe ser desafiado.     

Governmentality,Diaspora Assemblages and the Ongoing Challenge of “Development”

Abstract: Drawing on governmentality debates, I argue that skilled members of the Jamaican diaspora are becoming important actors in an ongoing development strategy to extend the rationality of the market into everyday social relations and institutions. Diaspora members are imagined by states and development institutions to be ideal development partners because of their access to potentially lucrative business, knowledge and capital networks, and their desire to direct them towards socially transformative ends. But, as I shall demonstrate, efforts to incorporate skilled émigrés into national development plans raise important questions about the entanglements between diaspora strategies, state power and enduring local patterns of uneven development. Rather than a space of social transformation, diaspora can also function as a space of stasis that reproduces rather than transforms such patterns. By examining Jamaica's emerging diaspora strategy, I examine not only the governmental role that diaspora groups are increasingly beginning to play, but also their potential to support or disrupt the class, gender and racial asymmetries that have historically governed flows of wealth, opportunity and power across the island.