US-Australia-Indonesia Trilateral Security? Conditions for Cooperation

Since the 1950s, US strategic architecture in the Indo-Pacific has been premised on its hubs-and-spokes model of bilateral alliances and security partnerships. Since the 2000s the US began working toward forging deeper interrelationships between its regional allies and partners. The emerging strategy ultimately aims to interlink long-standing allies like Japan and Australia, and also non-traditional partners in the development of a security network capable of maintaining the regional ‘rules-based order.’ In analysing the US-led triangular Indo-Pacific geometry, this article considers the prospects of an evolving and substantive US–Australia–Indonesia security trilateral. It does so by utilising Miller’s ‘conditions for cooperation framework’ to test the likelihood of greater cooperation between these three states. These conditions include cultural similarity, economic equality, habits of international association, the perception of common danger, and greater power pressure. It concludes that while there remain strict limitations on any formal alignment between the ANZUS partners and Indonesia, there are convergent interests in key sub-strategic areas in the maritime space and thus a viable path toward greater trilateral cooperation but not, as yet, formal arrangements.     

Negotiating gender,power, and spaces in masquerade performances in Nigeria

Egungun is a Yoruba ancestral masquerade ritual that has been practiced for centuries. Shifting coalitions of individuals and factions have vied for social and political influence through this practice. In the nineteenth century, when western missionaries, explorers, and colonial officials first documented this phenomenon, any individual who could sponsor an Egungun performance was a force to be reckoned with in Yoruba society. To this day, Egungun masquerades are understood as vehicles through which individuals and groups can assert influence in their communities. Western scholars have portrayed Egungun as a hegemonic masculine performance space through which men assert their dominance over women. In privileging the writings of English missionaries, explorers, and colonial officials, we have tended to neglect the oral traditions and histories of specific Egungun masquerades in which women feature prominently. I argue that scholars have oversimplified and misrepresented the complex ways in which these performances are gendered as well as the ways in which they offer women opportunities to shape the identities of the places they inhabit.     

Heterosexuality and migration in Asia

There have been few analyses of heterosexuality in the context of migration, particularly within Asia. As a corrective, in this themed issue we bring together four articles to contribute to debates on the fluidity of heterosexuality and how the performance of heterosexuality has particular spatialities within East and South-East Asia. Each article uses ethnographic methods to produce nuanced analyses of specific and spatially contingent performances of heterosexuality. A migration focus illuminates how spatial dislocation provides opportunities for both men and women to play out different heterosexual identities. At the same time, migrants come across challenges and obstacles to their performances of heterosexuality, such as the state regulation of the migrant body, economic necessity, and gendered and ethnicised behavioural norms.     

'Heart' and 'Wing', Nation and Diaspora: Gendered discourses in Singapore's regionalisation process

In this article the authors offer an analysis of Singapore's state-vaunted 'go-regional' policy as a case study to illustrate the argument that not only are the 'nation-state' and 'diaspora' structurally interdependent and embedded in the discursive frame of each other, but also that the way they interlock is shaped by particular gender ideologies and relations. In the same way as the state articulates nationalism by appealing to men and women as gendered subjects, the appropriation of transnational space as part of the regionalisation drive serves to extend and elaborate 'genderic modes of discourse'. Beyond state discourse, the authors examine individual and family strategies in straddling the gap between 'nation' and 'diaspora', between being at 'home' and 'away'. In arguing that the 'go-regional' policy is a pervasively masculine construction, the authors give specific attention to the way gender divisions of labour are transnationalised and further entrenched, the gendering of diasporic workplaces, and the construction of women-in-diaspora as 'moral wives'. The arguments are grounded mainly in research material garnered from in-depth interviews with Singaporean economic migrants (and non-migrants) to China.     

Silas Marner,Catalepsy, and Mid-Victorian Medicine: George Eliot's Ethics of Care

‘Silas Marner, Catalepsy, and Mid-Victorian Medicine’ reads Eliot's novel Silas Marner through the history of medicine, and particularly in the context of Marner's strange cataleptic trances which embody his alienation and suffering. Eliot, I argue, employs catalepsy in order to investigate ideas of illness and care, especially as that relates to professional medicine and to ideas of community. Focusing on cataleptic case histories and on Eliot's personal health concerns I show how issues of care become philosophical questions about ethical responsibility. It is through Silas Marner and his catalepsy, I conclude, that Victorian scholars can come to understand more about what that means within Eliot's canon and, more widely, in the mid-Victorian period. Overall, the article provides a unique reading of Silas Marner, drawing on significant new archival research on catalepsy and in Eliot's writing of illness narratives.     

Searching for safe space: the absent presence of childhood sexual abuse in human geography

In 1993, Julia Cream published an article deconstructing the politics surrounding the ‘cluster’ of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) diagnoses in Cleveland, UK. In 2014, in a viewpoint article in this journal, Dowler, Cuomo, and Laliberte called for a change in higher education governance, after the widely publicised Penn State CSA scandal. Within this 20-year period, these were two of only a handful of articles to be published in geography, focusing on CSA. Upwards of one in eight people in the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand are survivors of CSA. Other social science disciplines have established the impact CSA can have on mental health, relationships and life choices, all of which are lived out in space and place. CSA survivors are also over-represented amongst geographically marginalised groups. We argue that human geography's silence on CSA represents a significant oversight not only in terms of understandings people's relations to, use of and perceptions of space and place but also in terms of contributing to the silencing of survivors. We call for a recognition that this absent presence is associated with individual and social processes of dissociation and denial.     

Hospital contributory schemes and the NHS debates 1937-46: the rejection of social insurance in the British welfare state?

This article considers the discussion and rejection of social insurance model of funding for the British National Health Service. Specifically it asks why the hospital contributory scheme movement had so little impact on policy debates in the 1940s. We argue that at the start of the policy-making process serious consideration was given to the incorporation of this mode of funding, not least because the contributory schemes, with some ten million members, played a major role in financing existing voluntary hospital provision. Early sections describe the growth and nature of the schemes, noting that, despite their large working-class constituency and the presence of labour movement representatives amongst their leadership, they remained peripheral to discussion of reform in the interwar period. We then trace the emergence of the proposal for an insurance-based 'hotel-charge' in civil servants' discussions about hospital funding the Beveridge Report. Officials, however, remained sceptical about the contributory schemes' capacity to deliver a comprehensive and efficient funding mechanism, given their lack of uniformity, the gaps in their coverage, and the limited progress of reciprocal arrangements between them. Finally, we note the ineffectiveness of the British Hospital Contributory Schemes Association as a player in the policy community. Its leadership had no clear strategy for influencing events and was reluctant to deploy pressure group tactics such as lobbying through the press or parliament. Crucially, the movement was divided internally between those members who supported the voluntary system and others who welcomed a publicly funded health service.