Outsourcing Patriarchy To and Within India: Intersectional and Decolonial Gender Politics Across Scales

Young caste-class privileged gender justice workers in Delhi navigate several relations of power—with Euro-American feminisms, and with less privileged feminisms and recipients of development work within India. Their experiences reveal that decolonial politics in India cannot be conceptualised without consideration of other axes of inequality including caste and religion. There is thus a need to broaden decolonial and intersectional analyses to include multiple spatial scales, from the transnational to the most granular interpretations of the local. By bringing intersectional analyses into greater dialogue with postcolonial feminist theory, this paper demonstrates that patterns of “outsourcing patriarchy” are observable at many scales, and that these patterns at different scales are co-produced, each in turn shaping the other. Such a framework also explains how young caste-class privileged gender justice workers outsource patriarchy and reproduce “mainstream” feminisms even as they seek to avoid doing so.     

Intersectionality in feminist geographies

This paper introduces a special themed section that arose from an International Conference on Feminist Geographies and Intersectionality: Places, Identities and Knowledges, held in 2016 at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Six scholars of Canada, France, Greece, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States seek to deal in five short papers with the intersectional dynamics of power structures and the central role of place within them. Here we situate the developments of intersectionality in feminist geographies in relation to the role of place and space in constituting intersectional relations, the relevance of context for the development of intersectionality and the use of different methodologies for research on it.     

Geopolicing Race,Gender, and Class: How the Police Immobilise Urban Allochthones

City landscapes are ever-changing stages for the protagonists that pass through it. For police officers they serve as canvasses to positively and negatively code subjects. As such, geography matters to the body. Rather than taking geographic locations, crime statistics, predictive maps and human bodies as objective truths, I focus on the work of police officers, not in terms of an instrumental-rational “meeting of policy targets” or attempts to reduce crime, but the work required to make raced, gendered and classed geographical differentiations. This process culminates in geopolicing: the spatial imaginations and practices of police officers as to who, what and where to police and, of course, why. Geopolicing includes the aesthetic re-ordering and cleansing of urban “matter out of place”. Police officers perceive exclusionary territories in which landscapes racialised as white and identified as affluent are threatened by urban allochthones identified by class, race, gender, age and residential status. The findings are based on my ethnography among police officers in the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, between 2007 and 2011.     

When ‘Angelino’ squirrels don’t eat nuts: a feminist posthumanist politics of consumption across southern California

Eastern fox squirrels (Sciurus niger), reddish-brown tree squirrels native to the eastern and southeastern United States, were introduced to and now thrive in suburban/urban California. As a result, many residents in the greater Los Angeles region are grappling with living amongst tree squirrels, particularly because the state’s native western gray squirrel (Sciurus griseus) is less tolerant of human beings and, as a result, has historically been absent from most sections of the greater Los Angeles area. ‘Easties,’ as they are colloquially referred to in the popular press, are willing to feed on trash and have an ‘appetite for everything.’ Given that the shift in tree squirrel demographics is a relatively recent phenomenon, this case presents a unique opportunity to question and re-theorize the ontological given of ‘otherness’ that manifests, in part, through a politics whereby animal food choices ‘[come] to stand in for both compliance and resistance to the dominant forces in [human] culture’. I, therefore, juxtapose feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies scholarship to demonstrate how eastern fox squirrels are subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking in the popular news media as a result of their feeding/eating practices, their unique and unfixed spatial arrangements in the greater Los Angeles region, and the western, modernist human frame through which humans interpret these actions. I conclude by drawing out the implications of this research for the fields of animal geography and feminist geography.     

Negotiating Difference through Everyday Encounters: The Case of Sexual Orientation and Religion and Belief

Abstract: This paper argues for geographers to be more attentive to the potentially competing values, interests, and rights of the equality strands (race, gender, disability, religion and belief, sexual orientation, age). We focus on two that are most commonly assumed to experience tensions: religion/belief and sexual orientation. Drawing on focus groups with heterosexual Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus and lesbian and gay people of faith we explore the attitudes of heterosexual people of faith towards homosexuality. These findings suggest that tensions should be emerging between these groups in public space. However, we then demonstrate that these anticipated conflicts are not emerging because of the strategies people employ for separating their beliefs from their everyday conduct. In such ways, our findings demonstrate how the “what is” (ie personal experience) for both heterosexual and lesbian and gay people of faith is prioritised over theological or institutional perspectives of “what ought to be”.     

The friend,the loner and the independent traveller: Norwegian midlife single women's social identities when on holiday

This article explores the social identities available to Norwegian midlife single women when on holiday. As inherent in their habitus, the social identity of a friend is a way of tackling tourism spaces that accommodate bonding. With friends women feel socially included as tourists and seldom disempowered by the surveillance of the tourist gaze. However, the sustenance of friendships is also about discerning what matters; bonding in holiday spaces contributes to maintaining interpersonal relationships in everyday life. Nevertheless, this social identity also requires that women disidentify with being midlife singles, a strategy which is sometimes problematic. The social identity of the loner is linked to fears of solo holidays. This fear is associated with social exclusion, especially when eating out alone in a resort of an evening. In such spaces women dislike being midlife singles; they feel somehow suppressed by the tourist gaze and become aware of their lack of bonding. The social identity of the independent traveller, however, is about enjoyable solo holidays. It is their way of resisting, contesting and negotiating tourism as about sociability with significant others, thereby transforming habitus and manoeuvring the tourist gaze in public holiday spaces, such as restaurants. It is additionally about positive identification with being a midlife single woman.     

Talking class,talking race: language,class, and race in the call center industry in South Africa

Against a backdrop of declining manufacturing employment, this article uses a study of the call center industry to argue that English language proficiency is central to new service jobs in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on research in Durban, we in this study show that access to call center work—especially the highest paid niches—is heavily mediated by English language skills generally attainable only at the most elite high schools. In doing so, we argue that access to English-medium education can challenge racial disadvantage, but simultaneously that English can help to consolidate white privilege through the continued association of a ‘prestigious’ accent with whiteness. The study accordingly reveals the importance of language in the changing intersectionality of race and class and, in doing so, underlines the value of social and cultural perspectives in labor geography.     

Reception and use of intersectionality. A reading from French perspective

This text seeks to provide an overview of the concept of intersectionality as it was introduced and disseminated in French social and cultural geography. To understand this reception and use, I will recall the place occupied by each matrix of domination that constitutes intersectionality – gender, race and class. First it is important to remember that the notion of intersectionality has been introduced in a French academic context in which research on gender is still disputed. Second, it is worse in the case of race because it is a blind spot in French republican ideology (one nation, one people). Third, class has always had a central dimension in the analysis because of the weight of the Marxian heritage in the social sciences. The introduction of the notion of intersectionality thus marked a return of the class and materialist perspective in analysis. After this review of the context, I highlight to the work accomplished as intersectinalists outside the category of intersectionality and explain why the notion of intersectionality may be easier and better accepted in this light. I conclude with two examples of work on intersectionality.     

Feminist geographies and intersectionality

In this intervention, I raise questions for feminist geographers who use intersectionality in their work. First, I invite feminist geographers to consider their expertise in relation to the significance of locality and the role of social context as a crucial factor in intersectional analyses. Second, I query the focus on multiple axes of difference and question the need to focus on specific axes over others and how this may be resolved. Finally, the issue of methods in research about intersectionality is explored and I reflect upon research with ethnic and religious minority young people that adopted an approach informed by intersectionality in order to provide a focus for this discussion.