New visual methods for teaching intersectionality from a spatial perspective in a geography and gender course

Intersectionality is a complex concept to deal with when doing research but also when teaching the interrelationships between space and social relations. Here we present “Relief Maps” as a visual tool for teaching intersectionality and its spatial dimension in higher education courses. “Relief Maps” are a model developed for research and applied in a Geography and Gender course at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) with the aim of promoting student reflection on the relationships between power structures, places and lived experiences, starting from their everyday lives.     

Too Soon for Post-Feminism: The Ongoing Life of Patriarchy in Neoliberal America

In this paper, I seek to bring “patriarchy” back into focus in ways that make sense to a twenty-first century American audience. In the first part of the paper, I discuss the ways in which “feminism” has fallen, or is being pushed, off the contemporary political agenda, leaving a political vacuum with respect to, among other things, patriarchy as a system of power. In the second part of the paper, I use a number of films as texts to show how patriarchy in this sense persists quite vigorously and often brutally in contemporary society, not only as a thing in itself, but also as a form of power that intersects with, and organizes, major institutions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism: the industrial production site, the military, and the corporation. Finally, I reflect on the films not only as cultural texts, but also as political interventions that at least partially counter the post-feminist tendencies discussed in the first part of the paper.     

Vikings in Brazil: the Iceland Brazil Association shaping Icelandic heritage

Abstract

The Iceland Brazil Association (AISBRA) was established in 1996 by a group of Brazilians of Icelandic descent, more than 100 years after the first generation of immigrants settled in Brazil in the nineteenth century. The association was the first organisation in Brazil to collectively emphasise and celebrate Icelandic heritage. The association caters to a disparate group of people that had, in many cases, little knowledge about their historical links to Iceland. In spite of the fragmented activities of AISBRA since its establishment, the number of participants has increased, reflecting their growing interest in their Icelandic past. This paper examines how the members of Iceland Brazil Association produce their heritage independently, outside the state recognised heritage, within the Brazilian national context. We analyse how identities are re/shaped in new ways to engage with the past and how values from the past are extracted and turned into contemporary economic, social, and political values. This paper stresses heritage-making as a social imaginary used to define collective identity, which, while based on ancestry, also intersects with ideas of race and class. Representations of their Icelandic heritage allow the members of the Brazil Iceland Association to emphasise their ‘Europeanness’ and thus their associations with whiteness in contemporary post-colonial Brazil.     

Intersectionality and water: how social relations intersect with ecological difference

A cornerstone of feminist scholarship, intersectionality theory and method explore how gender intersects with other forms of social difference such as race and class. However, in light of the entangled relationships between nature and society, this article argues that human experience cannot be understood through social analysis alone, as offered by intersectionality. This article interrogates how materialities in the physical world might be incorporated within intersectionality. Drawing on gender and water research, the article explores how intersectionality complicates the social dimensions of water access, use, and control. Yet, applying intersectional thinking to water, scholars show how ecological processes of differentiation are also at play. Case studies from Sudan and Bangladesh exemplify how spatial and temporal aspects of water distribution intersect with the social complexities of water access. The article then returns to examine how intersectionality works to explore a framework for including these spatial and temporal dimensions. Four mechanisms – simultaneity, situated specificity, relationality, and fluidity – are elaborated for facilitating the study of eco-social relations within intersectionality theory. The article concludes that the materiality of water offers theoretical insight for developing intersectionality theory, with implications for gender and water research.     

Informal sovereignties and multiple Muslim feminisms: Feminist geo-legality in Sri Lanka

This paper argues that Muslim feminisms emerge as spatially differentiated strategies and tactics to accommodate local varieties of Muslim “informal sovereignties”. These informal sovereignties are exercised by Muslim judges, scholars and lawyers regulating Muslim marriages and divorces, based on diverse readings of the Muslim Personal Law and situated in the context of different forms of violence, such as Islamophobia and ethno-religious communalism. Comparing two districts in Sri Lanka - Puttalam and Batticaloa - the paper shows how Muslim feminist activists navigate spatially diverse forms of informal sovereignties exercised by Muslim movements and institutions, in response to locally specific political, social and economic challenges that Muslims face in the aftermath of Sri Lanka's decades-long civil war. The struggles over implementing and reforming the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act (MMDA), the Muslim Personal Law in Sri Lanka, focus on Muslim women's bodies and spaces as main sites of politics. The paper thereby contributes to debates in feminist geo-legality and Muslim femininity by pointing to the need to understand the contextuality of Muslim Personal Law within Sri Lanka's varieties of lived Islam.