Feminising the Economy: Metaphors,strategies, politics

Within contemporary feminism, common approaches to feminising the economy involve adding a sphere or sector or attributing a monetary value to women's unpaid labour. Each of these approaches is interested in creating an accurate representation of the real or 'whole' economy. But these representations are in the same lineage as mainstream economic conceptions; the economy remains a bounded entity that can be known by enumerating its parts. The 'adding on' and 'counting in' strategies employed by feminists complete the picture of what is needed to produce social well-being but do not necessarily help us think differently about how goods and services are or might be produced. In this article, the authors ask how feminist economic theory might contribute to envisioning or enacting alternative economies. They find answers to this question through reading feminist interventions for glimmers of a deconstructive project that opens 'the economy' to difference. Pursuing these glimmers, they attempt to insert the possibility of non-capitalist forms of economy, including economies of generosity, non-profit businesses, worker collectives and alternative capitalist enterprises impelled by a social or environmental ethic. In place of the view of the economy as a whole comprised of a pre-established number of parts or sectors, it can begin to be seen as a discursive construct that can be reconstructed to contribute to social transformation.     

‘What I Used to Do … On My Mother's Settee’: spatial and emotional aspects of heterosexuality in England

Using data from an ongoing project which investigates continuities and changes in the institution of heterosexuality across the twentieth century, this article brings a spatialised perspective to bear on the contradictions implicit within family‐based models of hegemonic heterosexuality. In this context we contribute to the growing focus by geographers on theorising the spatial and emotional aspects of heterosexuality. Via interviews with women and men from three generations in 20 families from East Yorkshire, England, we discover the difficulties experienced by individuals seeking to bring together their sexual and family lives. Focusing on two areas, the transmission of sexual knowledge between the members of different generations and between heterosexual partners and the use of space within the performance of gendered identities, the article shows how individuals both experience constraint and discover scope for agency in managing such contradictions. Via empirical data we therefore begin to identify the ways in which heterosexuality, as an institution, has provided an implicit organising principle through which materially‐grounded links between self, the emotions, other, body, home and the public sphere have been produced and/or negotiated over the last 80 years.     

Experiencing Waterholes in an Arid Environment,with Particular Reference to the Lake Eyre Basin,Australia: a Review

The distribution and permanence of waterholes have dictated human activity and settlement patterns in the arid zone for millennia. At a fundamental level, waterholes are vital to survival in a harsh climate. The recreational value and use of waterholes are widely recognised; however, the less tangible aspects of ‘waterhole experience’ have received scant attention. This review, written whilst compiling an inventory of permanent waterbodies across the Lake Eyre Basin of Queensland and South Australia, aimed to provide a deeper understanding of the interaction of humans with water in an arid land, primarily from a settler perspective. A large body of literature pertaining to waterholes was reviewed, including Aboriginal histories, explorer journals, accounts of early settlers, and numerous fictional and factual accounts of life in inland Australia. It becomes apparent that human appreciation of arid-zone waterholes runs deeper than the survival imperative, and can be enriched by considering landscape aesthetics and psychology. This attraction has spawned a rich mythology centred on waterholes – permanent features in an otherwise harsh and variable environment.     

Alternative Pathways to Community and Economic Development: The Latrobe Valley Community Partnering Project

Conventional approaches to development in areas that are experiencing economic decline invariably focus on business growth through interventions such as incentives, infrastructure development and job readiness training. This paper reports on a pilot project aimed at developing an alternative approach to community and economic development in the context of the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, a resource region that has experienced downsizing and privatisation of its major employer, the state‐owned power industry. The project was shaped by a poststructuralist concern with the effects of representation. It sought to challenge familiar understandings of disadvantaged areas, the economy, community and the research process in order to open up new ways of addressing social and economic issues. The resulting four‐stage research project was informed by the techniques of asset‐based community development and action research, as well as by discourses of the diverse economy and communities of difference. During the two‐year span of the project, four community enterprises were developed. The varying degrees of success they have met with in the four years since the project concluded highlight the critical role of local agencies such as the council in providing ongoing support for such endeavours.