Tourist,local, or other?: Greek Canadian women and the heritage fling in Greece

This article examines the romantic and sexual encounters between Greek men and Greek Canadian women vacationing in Greece and addresses how constructions of Greek Canadian female sexuality are related to foreign and local Greek conceptions of femininity during these ‘holiday flings’. Because of their Greek ancestry, Mediterranean ‘looks’, and familiarity with language and culture, Greek Canadian women exhibit ambiguous identities that uphold and cross boundaries between outsiders and insiders. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, I explore the conceptualizations of ancestral and national identity underpinning Greek women's erotic desires for Greek man who embody ethnic authenticity to them. Yet, Greek men thwart these desires when they subvert Canadian women's economic power through challenging their cultural literacy (such as a lack in language skills, etiquette, or sexual knowledge). This article addresses the question of how diasporic women's heterosexuality subjectivities – bound up with hybrid ethnic and national affiliations – take on different meanings across locales and times where transnational sex and romance are everyday occurrences.     

Femininities on transnational journeys and sexual health risk: experiences of Chinese immigrant women in Canada

Negotiations at work in a globalising China in regard to femininity, sexuality, and family relationships have been well documented from the 1990s. Nonetheless less is known about them in a transnational context, and femininities are far less explored than masculinities. Drawing on interview data from a larger research study of transnationalism and gendered HIV vulnerability, this article investigates the intersection of femininity, sexuality and sexual health risk through Chinese immigrant women’s narratives about their experiences in Canada. It examines to what extent these intimate negotiations within China are re-enacted through Chinese immigrant women’s transnational experiences in Canada. These women live ‘in-between’ China and Canada in terms of identity, space and time with their cross-cultural connections unveiling both virtual and actual relations. Gender norms and roles, intimate and sexual experience, and family relations are realigned in the transnational lives of these women and are impacted by both their home and host societies, as well as their past and present experience in China. Used in the article as a concept and an analytical lens, gender is acknowledged as a key organising principle in post-immigration individual and social experience.     

Bringing the ‘invisible farmer’ into sharper focus: gender relations and agricultural practices in the Peak District (UK)

Women's farm work and the gendered nature of the farm space and farm practices have been important intersecting themes within feminist enquiry over the last 30 years. Much research has tended to underplay the wider evolution of these gender relations – leaving under-explored the longer-term formation and contestation of the gendered activities, spaces and identities observed in the present. This article draws on research on 64 farms in the Peak District (UK) to take a wider temporal view of farm gender relations. Utilising a farm life history approach the article considers three key moments within farming histories to explore the active role(s) played by women in shaping farms and farming practices. In doing so the article adds complexity and nuance to understandings of both processes, such as the ‘masculinisation’ of agriculture, and to the gendered geographies of the farm space.     

From aisling to chora: female allegories of the nation in contemporary Irish women's poetry

Contemporary Irish women poets use female tropes of Irish nationalism as a potent site for revising traditional conceptions of femininity, maternity, and cultural identity. Arguably, female tropes of aisling poetry inhabit the same cultural location that anchors the societal role of motherhood as theorised by Julia Kristeva. Kristeva's work highlights mothers' important function in regulating the drives and preparing children for entrance into the symbolic order of society, in relation to which mothers remain structurally liminal. The Platonic chora, an amorphous receptacle from which forms emerge, symbolises this position at the threshold. This essay shows that Irish women poets revise female allegories of the nation either by aligning them with women's lived experience, as Eavan Boland has done, or by re-evaluating them from within their liminality, through stylistic experimentation or irony, which the analysis of poems by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Rita Ann Higgins demonstrates.     

The Iron Butterfly and the Political Warrior: mobilising models of femininity in the Australian Liberal Party

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott's Chief of Staff Peta Credlin have experienced very different political fortunes. Once the two most powerful women in the Australian Liberal Party, Credlin's political demise was mired in controversy, while Bishop continues to enjoy the support of her Party and the public. While there are many reasons for this, the article focuses on the gendered politics surrounding their experiences. Based on analysis of the media representations of Bishop and Credlin between 2011 and 2015, we argue that Bishop successfully negotiates gender politics by deploying the Iron Butterfly model of conservative femininity, while Credlin's fierce Political Warrior persona saw her pilloried.     

Resisting mothers,making gender: teenage girls in the United States and the articulation of femininity

Much of the feminist literature on teenage girls in the west has tended to polarize around the issues of girls' gendered agency and victimization. In contrast, this article explores the ambiguous relationship between gender resistance and compliance. I argue that while girls clearly articulate their own agency, they do so through a reliance on gendered and heterosexual norms, identities, and categories. The article draws on examples from my research with girls in South Carolina, USA, in particular girls' narratives about their mothers. I suggest that girls situate their gendered practices and evaluate femininity in part via evaluations of their mothers' gender, sexual and nurturing practices. Mothers often stand in as representatives of normative and traditional femininity for the girls; yet girls do not realize that they reproduce, rather than resist, aspects of femininity, even as they criticize generational differences and their mothers' versions of feminine and gendered behaviors.     

‘A real woman has to do it all – with the kids and in the office’: Doing femininity in the transcultural context of Russian-German migration

The au pair stay allows young women to experience the doing gender of family work and waged work in another cultural context than their own. This article investigates how Russian university graduates, who had been working as an au pair in Germany, developed transcultural strategies to balance work and family for their prospective future referring to these different experiences. It will be shown that interviewees rejected the Soviet family model of the fulltime ‘working mother’. Some women positively evaluated that in Germany the equality of gender has been better established than in Russia and aimed at sharing housework with their partner. Criticizing the outsourcing of childcare to an employee, in this family model femininity is not based on housework but on women's dedication to motherhood. Other women negatively evaluated that in Germany the family model of the ‘business woman’ characterized by women's role as the main breadwinner of the family and the primary provider of family work has developed. These women preferred to work part-time to be able to care for their families. In this family model the responsibility of breadwinning is ascribed solely to men, while women's waged work is constructed as time devoted to women's individual needs by offering an intellectual challenge and an individual income.     

Resisting popular feminisms: gender,sexuality and the lure of the modern

Abstract

This article tracks discursive and political use of gender and sexual equality in nationalist and popular accounts of feminism, focusing on the ways in which such discourses produce a particular linking of time and space in the articulation of ‘the Modern’ in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. It further explores the increasing popularity of feminism in some media and celebrity contexts that have historically been so hostile to it, asking for care in tracking how and under what conditions feminism is cited as ‘universally desirable’ in light of this history. I suggest that feminism is partly reframed in this way insofar as it is newly sutured to femininity rather than masculinity, but also to singular rather than multiple or intersectional understandings of women’s oppression. A related claim of this article is that this shift of affective association with feminism is only possible when that singular cause of gender oppression is firmly understood as sexual oppression. I will be suggesting that if feminism is understood primarily or even only a fight against sexual oppression by men then the oppositional gendered roles that allow for its tethering to nationalism remain intact yet simultaneously obscured. In conclusion the article calls for an appreciation of feminism as a minority pursuit attentive to multiple power relations and histories.     

Spatialising performance: masculinities and femininities in a ‘fragmented’ field

While there are many self-reflexive accounts of ‘field’ experience, few researchers have explicitly examined how different places within the field shape gender performances and subsequently the research process. This paper spatialises the notion of ‘performance’ by examining how male and female bodies in particular places of the field are perceived both by researchers and participants as markers of gender identity. The analysis is based on fieldwork in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi where the author and her research assistant conducted semi-structured interviews with the residents. The fieldwork highlighted how the embedded power structures in different places of the field created encounters between different gendered bodies and, in turn, how different relationships between researchers and participants shaped the field ‘experience’. I suggest that the ‘field’ should not be understood as a homogeneous terrain, but as a fragmented collection of places, each constructing multiple gender identities in research, and each telling its own research story.