Showing papers in "Gender Place and Culture in 2011"

Where asylum-seekers wait: feminist counter-topographies of sites between states

Abstract: This article examines topographies and counter-topographies of power operating transnationally across a range of sites inhabited by asylum-seekers en route between nation-states. In locations such as tunnels, detention centers and islands, journeys across time and space are truncated in myriad ways. For asylum-seekers, temporality is often conceptualized as waiting, limbo or suspension. These temporal zones map onto corresponding spatial ambiguities theorized here as liminality, exception and threshold. A feminist counter-topography of sites along time–space trajectories between states addresses both the architecture of exclusionary enforcement practices that capture bodies, and the transgressive struggles to map, locate, counter and migrate through the time–space trajectories between states. In outlining such counter-topography, the analysis enters into conversation with transnational feminist scholarship on politics of location and differentiation in order to challenge the universal dimensions of Giorgi...

Waiting for what? The feminization of asylum in protracted situations

Abstract: Millions of refugees are stuck in camps and cities of the global South without permanent legal status. They wait in limbo, their status unresolved in what the United Nations (UN) calls ‘protracted refugee situations’ (PRS). The material conditions and depictions of such refugees as immobile and passive contributes to a feminization of asylum in such spaces. In contrast, refugees on the move to seek asylum in the global North are perceived as threats and coded as part of a masculinist geopolitical agenda that controls and securitizes their movement. Policies to externalize asylum and keep potential refugees away from the affluent nations of the global North, in which they may seek legal status, represent one strategy of exclusion. This article traces these divergent trajectories of im/mobility and demonstrates how humanitarian space for both groups is narrowing over time. For those seeking asylum in the global North, measures such as increased detention and rapid return to transit countries aim to deter mi...

Waiting: feminist perspectives on the spacings/timings of migrant (im)mobility

Abstract: Waiting is a banal and ubiquitous practice that is linked in myriad ways to mobility and (im)mobility in the contemporary era. Yet, to date, experiences of waiting have received scant conceptual and/or research attention among scholars. Introducing a themed section of Gender, Place and Culture, this article highlights how a focus on temporal and spatial encounters with waiting and (im)mobility among migrants extends established areas of interest among feminist geographers and related interdisciplinary scholars while also augmenting scholarship in mobility studies. Key themes are introduced. These include attention to the ways waiting is imbricated with regional and international geopolitics and analyses of waiting as an active practice that involves reflection, incorporation into, as well as resistance within, the everyday spaces that migrants encounter. With an emphasis on how contributions to this themed section speak from or to a range of feminist concerns, this introduction suggests that the intersect...

A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene

Abstract: At the core of J.K. Gibson-Graham's feminist political imaginary is the vision of a decentralized movement that connects globally dispersed subjects and places through webs of signification. We view these subjects and places both as sites of becoming and as opportunities for belonging. But no longer can we see subjects as simply human and places as human-centered. The ‘arrival’ of the Anthropocene has thrown us onto new terrain. Feminist critiques of hyper-separation are pushing us to move beyond the divisive binaries of human/nonhuman, subject/object, economy/ecology and thinking/acting. The reframing of our living worlds as vast uncontrolled experiments is inspiring us to reposition ourselves as learners, increasingly open to our interconnections with earth others and more willing to intervene in adventurous ways. In this article we begin to think about more-than-human regional development and regional research collectives that have the potential to perform resilient worlds. For us the project of belong...

‘I think a woman who travels a lot is befriending other men and that's why she travels’: mobility constraints and their implications for rural women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: This article is concerned with the implications of practices, politics and meanings of mobility for women and girl children in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa. Women and girls commonly face severe mobility constraints which affect their livelihoods and their life chances. The article reflects on their experiences in rural areas where patriarchal institutions (including the gender division of labour, which places great emphasis on female labour contributions to household production and reproduction), and a patriarchal discourse concerning linkages between women's mobility, vulnerability and sexual appetite, shape everyday social practices and material inequalities. This compounds the physical constraints imposed by poor accessibility (to services and markets) associated with poor roads and inadequate transport in both direct and more complex ways. The article draws on field research conducted in diverse socio-cultural and agro-ecological contexts in western and southern Africa (principally southern Ghana...

Introduction: feminist engagements with geopolitics

Abstract: Here, we introduce a themed set of articles that, using diverse feminist knowledges and practices, aims to expose the force relations that operate through and upon bodies, such that particular ‘geopolitical’ subjectivities are enhanced, constrained and put to work, and particular corporealities are violated, exploited and often abandoned. The substantive scope of these articles highlights the relevance of such feminist analysis, not as a universalising framework, but as a project of universal reach. The empirical depth of this work, founded upon (variously) a committed period of fieldwork, the careful gathering of lengthy, in situ interviews, participant observation, focus groups, visual methodology and months spent in the archives highlights a complex, feminist ethics of care. Taken as a collection, what we hope these articles make clear are the manifold struggles within feminist analysis in regard to ‘researching with’ embodiment, agency, passivity, vulnerability, emotion, praxis and care.

Nourishing women: toward a feminist political ecology of community supported agriculture in the United States

Abstract: This article examines the motivations of women farmers actively involved in community supported agriculture. Drawing from interviews with farmers situated in a metropolitan region of the USA, it argues that these women's motivations are expressive of an ethics of care that defines their work as centered upon nourishing themselves and others. Women came to this work as a conscious choice to change their life-work. These choices are shaped by the urban context of their farming practices and also by their race and middle class status. These motivations and choices express a care ethics centered in self-care. Drawing from Foucault's ethics of self-care, these motivations express a liberatory transformation of self that is also radically responsible to others and expressive of a post-capitalist politics. These ethically informed agricultural practices correspond to the development of a post-capitalist politics that challenges neoliberal subject formation in food production and consumption. Feminist care ethics...

Meanings of modesty and the hijab amongst Muslim women in Glasgow, Scotland

Abstract: Based on interviews with 30 Muslim women in Glasgow, Scotland, the study explores the meanings that the women attach to modesty and the hijab. Fifteen of the 30 participants wear the hijab. The article begins with an overview of the debate between traditional Muslim scholars and Muslim feminists about whether the hijab is an Islamic obligation. It illuminates the significance of space, as veiling practices are deeply enmeshed and embedded in the spatial practices shaped by the local Scottish context. The findings and analysis reveal differences as well as similarities between wearers and non-wearers of the hijab. While the former regard the hijab as an embodiment of modesty, virtue and respect, the latter consider it an unnecessary piece of clothing. However, despite their contrasting views on veiling, both groups of participants hold remarkably similar views on the importance of female modesty.

'The guys in there just expect to be laid': Embodied and gendered socio-spatial practices of a 'night out' in Wollongong, Australia

Abstract: This article investigates intersections of sexuality, sex, femininities, and alcohol. The concept of spatially-situated subjectivity is deployed to examine how women negotiate their femininities and sexualities in and through spaces of a ‘night out’. A mixed methods approach was deployed with young, single, white women in Wollongong, Australia. Drawing on narrative analysis, our research suggests the paradoxical qualities of pub spaces. We argue that where and why women drink is an outcome of negotiations, transgressions and accommodations as they reconcile a sense of self with(in) the gendered and heterosexed socio-spatial practice of particular pubs. In practical terms, corporeal femininities provide effective advice for ameliorating risks of regular intoxication.

Migrant work, precarious work–life balance: what the experiences of migrant workers in the service sector in Greater London tell us about the adult worker model

Abstract: In this article we connect migration for waged work in post-industrial economies and debates about work–life balance. Migrant workers undertake much of the service sector work which makes others' work–life balance possible and yet their own work–life balance negotiations are often neglected. We use the narratives of migrants working in London's healthcare and hospitality sector collected in semi-structured interviews to begin to address this omission. The workers we talked to engaged in diverse and complex negotiations and strategies to balance paid work and their caring responsibilities. We consider what these workers' experiences reveal about the adult worker model, which underpins contemporary workfare policy and framings of the appropriate balance between productive and reproductive work, arguing that it is left looking overly simplistic and morally wanting.

Dublin II and Eurodac: examining the (un)intended(?) consequences

Abstract: Although the numbers of asylum seekers in Europe is decreasing, the asylum policy of most European Union member states (EU MS) continues to be driven by a fear of a potential increase As a result, EU MS refuse to address the growing numbers of people caught between Eurodac and Dublin II These includes the many thousands who transit Greece and Spain, where in theory they should claim asylum, but where in reality they have little chance of being able to make a claim, and almost no chance of having it examined properly, much less being actually granted asylum This article argues that the concern of EU MS is actually to reduce the number of those able to apply for asylum to an absolute minimum, rather than ensuring access to this status to anyone who might need it Focusing on the ‘waiting’ of young Afghan men in Paris, this article seeks to show the daily suffering inflicted in pursuit of this policy goal

The geopolitics of vulnerability: children's legal subjectivity, immigrant family detention and US immigration law and enforcement policy

Abstract: In May 2006, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began detaining noncitizen families at the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, a former medium-security prison operated by the Corrections Corporation of America. In April 2007, a group of lawyers sued DHS, arguing that Hutto's conditions violated children's rights. This article first situates family detention in relation to two relatively separate literatures – immigration geopolitics and children's rights – and legal precedent. Second, it shows how noncitizen children are framed more as ‘child-objects’ in immigration law than agential, liberal subjects. Immigration law figures adults, however, as criminalized migrant-subjects, ineligible for the due process on which liberal legal regimes are based. The article then analyzes how the judge balanced ‘irreparable harm’ to detained children, the ‘public interest’, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) discretion to detain noncitizens. Relying upon ‘geostrategic discourses’ of extern...

Work–life (im)‘balance’ and its consequences for everyday learning and innovation in the New Economy: evidence from the Irish IT sector

Abstract: Over the last decade, the desirability and means of successfully integrating paid work with other meaningful parts of life has received widespread attention. Despite the profound moral and social significance of work–life balance (WLB), economistic ‘business case’ arguments claiming the benefit of WLB provision for firms' organisational performance continue to dominate the neoliberal policy agenda. However, there remains a paucity of empirical evidence to support the WLB business case. At the same time, conventional business case analyses sideline social equity concerns of workers and their families, and in their focus on revealed output measures of firm performance, say little about the underlying determinants of firms' competitive performance in the New Economy. In response, this article presents new qualitative evidence from Dublin's high-tech regional economy to develop an alternative socioeconomic analysis focused on: (i) gendered experiences of work–life conflict in the Irish IT industry; (ii) the a...

Creating a space for young women's voices: using ‘participatory video drama’ in Uganda

Abstract: This article draws upon research that explored the experiences of young women in relation to sexual health in Uganda with a view to enhancing gender-sensitive strategies. We have coined the phrase ‘participatory video drama’ to describe the exploratory methodology that the young women participants in our research used to present stories about their lives. The aim of this article is to suggest that ‘participatory video’ (PV) and ‘participatory video drama’ (PVD) are innovative methodological tools to utilise when working with participants who experience voicelessness in their everyday lives. We contribute to an emerging body of work around this methodology by suggesting that the process of PV provides a novel and engaging platform for participants to express their experiences. PVD further creates spaces for the performative exploration of embedded power relations and is therefore informative and has the potential to be transformatory and empowering.

Armored peacocks and proxy bodies: gender geopolitics in aid/development spaces of Afghanistan

Abstract: This article examines embodied geopolitics in Afghanistan by way of gender roles and relations among and between international workers and Afghan recipients of international information, aid, development and (in)security. My analysis is theoretically situated within critical feminist geographies and includes empirical data collected from qualitative surveys, interviews, focus groups and observations of Afghans and international workers in Kabul, Afghanistan (2006–2008). There is a significant and growing number of scholarly feminist critiques of and debates over the US-led international coalition's gendered approach to ‘saving’ Afghanistan from the Taliban. This article seeks to add to these studies by discussing these geopolitical encounters at the scale of bodily interactions. Specifically, it discusses how gendered freedom and savior fantasies illustrate spatial practices of othering through exclusion and intimacy, before turning to how these are enacted through representation, behavior, mobility and s...

‘She says herself, “I have no future”’: love, fate and territory in Leh District, India

Abstract: How and to what extent can love and desire be managed as factors in geopolitical strategy? This research expands the subject matter of geopolitical analysis and uses feminist tactics to highlight the contingent and embodied practices through which geopolitical strategies materialize in seemingly unlikely venues. In the Leh District of India's Jammu and Kashmir State, political conflict between Buddhists and Muslims has been articulated in part through women's bodies. Buddhists and Muslims are producing an embodied religious boundary through the prevention of inter-religious marriages. While in this case love has the potential to challenge political narratives, any transgressive force is blunted by the separation of intermarrying couples or their expulsion from the territory of Leh District. Drawing on interviews, survey data and participatory oral histories in Leh District, this article seeks to destabilize and complicate the global geopolitical gaze by bringing the corporeal, desiring and desired body to...

Becoming non-migrant: lives worth waiting for

Abstract: This article investigates the ways in which potential migrants in 1950s Ireland negotiated motility and in doing so it attempts to unsettle the workings of the modernity/tradition binary which tends to map easily onto the binaries of migrant/non-migrant and men/women. Focusing on the stage of young adulthood when many imagined potential homes elsewhere but in the event found themselves making homes for themselves in Ireland, this article considers the re-making of self and home in the absence of migrant family members and friends. Family, friendship and community relations have to be reappraised as those who stay wait in the mode of hope for a liveable outcome, or life plan. This is ‘waiting-as-event’ or ‘active waiting’; being alive to the world and the possibilities for making a future. Waiting here is a social norm or aspect of the established family and community relations which, in 1950s Ireland, involved negotiating over time who was to stay and who was to emigrate. The narratives constitute women a...

Scouting for girls? Gender and the Scout Movement in Britain

Abstract: This article brings a feminist geopolitics to bear upon an analysis of the Boy Scout Movement in Britain in order to illustrate how an emphasis upon seemingly banal, embodied practices such as dressing, writing and crafting can provide a counter-view to prevailing notions of the elite, organisational ‘scripting’ of individualised, geopolitical identities. Here, these practices undertaken by girls are understood not as subversive, or even transgressive, in the face of broader-scale constructions of the self and the collective body, but rather as related moments in the emergence of a complex, tension-ridden ‘movement’ that exceed specific attempts at fixity along the lines of gender. Using archival data, this article examines various embodied practices by ‘girl scouts’ that were made possible by such attempts at fixity but which also, in turn, opened up new spaces of engagement and negotiation. A cumulative shift from a determinedly masculine to a co-educational organisation over the course of the twentieth...

Security and gendered national identity in Uzbekistan

Abstract: Contributing to the growing literature on feminist geopolitics, this article addresses the security discourses employed by the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan's post-independence nation-building process. It examines the ways in which militarism and the ‘culture of war’ are productive of gendered national identities in Uzbekistan, focusing on how the ‘protector–protected’ relationship figures prominently in the Karimov regime's anti-terrorist rhetoric. It does so through a textual analysis of the Andijon uprising and the ‘Day of Memory and Honor’ holiday. It argues that the terrorist threat has been a driving factor in the pervasive militarization of society, but that official responses to state violence in Andijon obscure alternative security concerns of the general population in Uzbekistan – and more specifically those of women. It adds to existing feminist geopolitics literature by expanding it into a new empirical context, while rejecting the assertion that a ‘geopolitical’ analysis necessarily entails a ...

Gender, solidarity and the paradox of microfinance: reflections from Bolivia

Abstract: Microfinance seeks to create small communities of women borrowers who stand in solidarity with each other, providing the social capital necessary to create an economic safety net and to facilitate economic action among individual borrowers. However, because microfinance concurrently emphasizes the economic rationality of participants, it undermines the very sense of community it strives to create. Utilizing feminist geographic scholarship and drawing from examples of a women-only microfinance NGO in urban Bolivia, this article argues that within the practice of microfinance the reliance on romantic notions of community and the desire for organizational sustainability and efficiency weaken the social networks vital to the operation and sustainability of the practice and create an irreconcilable paradox. A feminist geographic approach to unpacking the practice of microfinance within my case study indicates how microfinance perpetuates systems of power and oppression, but also how a more nuanced understandin...

The training-to-work trajectory: pressures for and subversions to participation in the neoliberal learning market in the UK

Abstract: The UK government has emphasised the role of lifelong learning in eradicating social exclusion and improving productivity and the skills base. With a neoliberal rationale that normalises economic participation, the unemployed are being offered (re)training to enable a swift transition to paid employment and encourage ‘personal responsibility’. Taking a critical feminist approach framed by the social control model of lifelong learning and Foucault's governmentality, this article explores efforts made to ‘encourage’ mothers to take up training to precipitate a move into the labour market. Drawing on interviews with training providers and mothers, it highlights pressures mothers feel when they have to comply with current training and employment norms, and points to the gendering of official constructions of progression. But using de Certeau's ‘tactics’, it also offers a reading of evasion in mothers' training participation and progression: how mothers exert agency to ensure training better fits with needs, d...

Making visible the ‘space of betweenness’: understanding women's limited access to leadership in regional Australia

Abstract: In this article we proffer the metaphor of a ‘space of betweenness’ to explain women's limited access to leadership roles in Australian peak agricultural industry and regional governance boards. In reviewing the statistics around women's leadership roles in regional Australia, and women's own stories of their activities, we argue that despite women's contribution to their local communities through their diverse roles in paid work, it seems the triple jeopardy of their sex, their location and the nature of their businesses positions them in a ‘space of betweenness’, rendering them invisible and limiting their ability to access many formal leadership roles.

Women students’ perceptions of crime and safety: negotiating fear and risk in an English post-industrial landscape

Abstract: This article explores safety concerns and fear of crime amongst women students attending university in a large town in the north-east of England. It acknowledges that gender as a social category is problematic; however, the article is grounded in recognition of its significance in shaping experiences of fear, safety and space. The main aim is to explore how gender intersects with student identity(ies) in a specific local context. The article draws upon qualitative data from doctoral research that explored the crime and fear experiences of women students studying in a town bearing all the hallmarks of industrial decline. It evidences powerful representations of place with respondents drawing heavily on the town's working-class culture and de-industrialisation in their reading of the locale. In addition, respondents linked the town unequivocally to crime and disorder, and identified the criminal threat as originating from local people. In this way, fears were frequently locally focused, linking to a fear of...

‘One Pack = One Vaccine’ = one global motherhood? A feminist analysis of ethical consumption

Abstract: This article is inspired by a recent television commercial for Pampers (a brand of disposable diapers) which announces that by buying this brand of diapers ‘you can help the world's babies in need, because one pack of Pampers equals one life saving vaccine’. This commercial promotes the ‘One Pack = One Vaccine’ initiative between Pampers and UNICEF, a cause-related marketing (CRM) campaign that supplies a tetanus vaccine to a woman in the South with each purchase of Pampers in North America. This article critically examines the way that CRM (and the One Pack initiative in particular) links individual consumption choices to development while simultaneously delinking consumption from environmental degradation, health risks and global inequalities. Taking this argument further, it uses a feminist perspective to examine the ways in which the narratives of ‘first world women’ and ‘third world women’ are depicted and used in the One Pack initiative, to make certain North–South power dynamics invisible while hig...

Women and children in a neighborhood advocacy group: engaging community and refashioning citizenship at the United States–Mexico border

Abstract: This article looks at the community participation of recent Latina immigrant mothers and their children in a neighborhood advocacy group near the US–Mexico border. It documents the work that women and children do as they struggle to become involved in their new community and improve their quality of life – despite legal, social, economic and cultural obstacles. Local context, family and ethnic networks, gendered patterns of women's experiences as immigrants and children participation in ‘adult’ decision-making are hugely important in understanding their community engagement. The article reflects on the advocacy work that women and children perform through a neighborhood group to argue for a difference-centered perspective on citizenship that is inspired by feminist thinking. Such a perspective makes sense in light of the ironic tensions within neo-liberal policies that, on the one hand, burden people with more responsibilities while, on the other hand, legislating against their freedom to pursue those res...

Lesbian and gay parents' sexual citizenship: costs of civic acceptance in the United Kingdom

Abstract: This article draws upon research with 60 white lesbian and gay parents from working-class and middle-class backgrounds, to consider the significance of class in the struggle for sexual citizenship in the context of the UK Civil Partnership Act (2004). While parenting is distinct from issues of partnering they are clearly related, not least in the ways that such policies themselves materialise families, offering new possibilities for societal recognition, legal recourse and access to welfare services. The issue of economics is significant, resourcing – or denying – various possibilities; class and sexuality also intersect in the construction of ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’ citizens now ready for inclusion. Many interviewees experienced this shifting terrain ambivalently, though a consequential classing of this figures in the erosion or consolidation of ‘worth’, ‘normality’ and ‘entitlement’, through which claims are made, families are (un)done and citizens are materialised. Both working-class and middle-class inte...

Different geographies and experiences of ‘assisted’ types of migration: a gendered critique on the distinction between trafficking and smuggling

Abstract: This article presents three stories of female migrants who were assisted in their migration process from the Horn of Africa, Iraq and the former Soviet Union to the Netherlands. The stories are contextualized within the results of a wider research project on assisted migration involving 56 interviews and demonstrate the diverse practices and experiences of women's assisted migration. By ‘assisted’ is meant the assistance certain migrants need in order to be able to cross borders, given the lack of legal channels available to them – a process usually talked about as smuggling or trafficking. The article argues that the policy discourse surrounding these assisted types of migration is highly gendered, reproduces stereotypes and completely ignores the wider context in which these movements take place. The fact that for some women from certain parts of the world there are no other options than to travel in this particular way, and that the risks involved in migration can be relatively low compared to the risk...

‘In your experience’: research as gendered cultural translation

Abstract: Current debates on the use of interpreters in social research have seldom attended to the politics of translation in the production of knowledge Where the use of interpreters has been analysed, this has primarily been with a concern for the validity and accuracy of the translated text rather than a sustained analysis of how translation shapes meaning-making This article draws on an illustration from a research project on gender and violence in times of conflict to reflect on the dilemmas of working across languages for feminist anti-racist work Treating translation as an act that is necessarily cross-cultural and political, this article attends to the gendered and spatial-political consequences of the co-construction of meaning in the interview process It argues that a ‘transparent’ translation is neither possible nor desirable if we take seriously the ways that language produces meaning in research It considers the centrality of the translators and translation decisions in the production of all know

Women, work–life balance and quality of life: case studies from the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland

Abstract: In this editorial we introduce the key themes explored by the articles that make up this themed section on ‘Women, work–life balance and quality of life’. As a collection, the articles emphasise the complexity of trying to define what work–life balance means to different groups of men and women in three locales (Bristol, West London and Dublin), highlighting that trying to attribute meaning to this concept is at the very least problematic. They do, however, paint a picture of persistent gendered inequality. Within the context of neo-liberal economic policy ‘encouraging’ women to take up paid work and training, it is still women rather than men who continue to be responsible for the tasks of social reproduction. The concept of work–life balance ignores the often blurred and ultimately socially constructed nature of what counts as work and what does not and tends to mask the large amount of reproductive work performed by women in the private sphere. Moreover, the research presented here makes clear that con...