Gender Space Research Articles

The Production of a Gendered Space : Reading Women’s Landmarks in Anping, Taiwan

This study explores how Anping, one of the most significant cultural centers in Asia, has been transformed into a gendered space. To read Anping as a gendered space, this paper, based upon news reports and intensive interviews with participating agents in the community, will focus on the only two officially designated womens landmarks in the region as the subjects of textual analysis. I will show the process of the production and representation of Lin Mor Niang Park and the statues of Miss Jin as well as her mother. First, I will analyze how metaphors of gender inscribed in the landmarks are employed to reinforce dominant gender stereotypes. Next, I will explore how the womens landmarks have turned into the most desirable forms of contemporary cultural capital related to a growth in tourism and a shift towards an entrepreneurial form of urban governance. Indeed, gender is not only constitutive of, but virtually indispensable to, the configuration of the place. In contrast to the current masculine version of Anping’s map, which is full of military and colonial landmarks, this study seeks to enrich Anping’s outlook by identifying significant sites particularly associated with female representatives of their time. My purpose is to produce a new way to understand the city’s cultural landscape by locating women’s stories in the mapping of Anping’s history. By representing the new visual modalities such as Lin Mor Niang Park and Miss Jin’s statue into the current mapping, this study can contribute to what might be called a feminist politics of place construction.

Gendered water spaces: a study of the transition from wells to handpumps in Mozambique

In many parts of rural Africa, women and children spend a lot of time collecting water. In the development literature, the water collection task is portrayed as oppressive, arduous, and disliked by women. Eliminating this activity from women's lives is believed to empower them, yet there has been little research investigating what actually happens at the water source or how women themselves perceive the time spent there. This research is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in five rural communities in the northern province of Nampula, Mozambique. Over this year, handpumps were constructed in communities where people previously collected water from distant shallow wells and rivers. This article compares the social interactions and activities between the customary water sites and the handpump through the lens of gendered space. The customary water sites are controlled by women and highly valued for their social attributes. While clean water is more accessible at the handpumps, men often regulate access to the technology and social activities are limited. This article contributes to feminist geography and political ecology by showing how differences in the materiality of water spaces interact with local norms to shape social interactions and gendered subjectivities, and how, in turn, men and women contribute to the production and meaning of these spaces. I argue that the handpumps open up new spaces for men and women to negotiate gender roles and (re)define their associations with modernity and development.

KOSMOLOGI RUANG ADAT SEBAGAI IDENTITAS PEMUKIMAN KAMPUNG NAGA, TASIKMALAYA - JAWA BARAT

[Title: Traditional Cosmologycal Space as Kampung Naga Setlement Identity, Tasikmalaya - Jawa Barat] Located far from the city, an architectural masterpiece grows and developes in traditional settlement. The form and settlement identity merges with emotional’s people inside that not only creates an identity but also influences in the development of surrounding area . local wisdom is created from local identity and cultural that becomes soul and character of the settlement (Haryanto,2007:89). Place is created by experience memories in the past that makes the familiar space and indepth meaning (Tuan,2010:73). Kampung Naga is one of the Sundanesse traditional settlement in West Java that maintains the culture and local wisdom, nevertheless globalisation begin to influences the meaning of cultural space inside. Its has a cosmology cocept, proper behaviour and religion that is created naturally and transmitted orally from generation to generation.The research is to understand cultural themes in Kampung Naga as an identity of Naga’s people. Etnography metodology is used to describe the space indepth and connectivity of the meaning. Cultural spaces that is created from cosmologycal persception and traditional low are Pamali space, Sacred Space and Gender space, the elements of space inside give indepth meaning and create local identity of Sundanese people.

“Under the Skirt of Liberty”: Giannina Braschi Rewrites Empire

“‘Under the Skirt of Liberty’ : Giannina Braschi Rewrites Empire” traces the inscription of New York City in a tradition of male anti-imperial, subaltern, or divergently modern, broadly Latino discourses that identify the city as a space of gender and sexual dysfunction, and analyzes the work of contemporary New York Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi as representative of the ways that contemporary Latino authors have rewritten and redeployed this tradition since the 1980s. The essay identifies a representative evolution in Braschi’s oeuvre from a 1980s and 1990s performative poetics of inversion to a current rhyzomatic poetics of deterritorialization, singularity, and appositional, horizontal camaraderie “from below” that resonates with the work on resistance to empire of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and Zapatista political practice, as analyzed by Neil Harvey.

The liminal coastline in the life of a whale: Transition, identity, and food-production in the Eastern Caribbean

This paper examines ways in which a coastline, specifically the swash zone on a particular Caribbean beach, serves to inform our understanding of liminal spaces. At the precise place where the landscape transitions from sea to land with each wave’s ebb and flow, artisanal whalers from the island of St. Vincent unload their day’s catch and begin the process of turning animals into food products. The shoreline can be seen as a space to which the marine mammals are brought for the purpose of a multifaceted transition, in which their identities, physical forms, and even status as living organisms are changed. By examining the specific transitions that occur in this space, and by questioning why these transitions do not occur elsewhere, this paper sheds light on concepts of land and sea, life and death, and the gendering of space—all of which undergo a defined transition at the water’s edge on this particular coastline.

Picturing Pain and Pleasure in Annie Ernaux’s L’Usage de la photo

French writer Annie Ernaux has long foregrounded physical and emotional sensations as building blocks of her autobiographical writing. (1) However, it is in L'Usage de la photo (2005) where connection between body and subjectivity most powerfully emerges. Co-written by then lover Marc Marie, text is organized around fourteen photos of different rooms after a night of lovemaking and authors' reflections on images to offer a plurinarrative recounting of Ernaux's battle with breast cancer and her love affair with Marie. The text's visual imagery thus has an evident temporal function, since it situates author's battle with breast cancer and relationship with Marie between March 2003 and January 2004. Yet photos play out a second and more significant epistemological instance in that they represent limits of transforming corporeal experience into narrative. (2) Indeed, L'Usage's concerted juxtaposition of struggle to survive with a sensuous connection to her body brings new insight into an enduring feature of Ernaux's oeuvre: strained relationship to body as a source of knowledge formation, gendered identity, and empowerment. While book works within her traditional framework of sexual discovery, gender, and everyday life and showcases Ernaux's characteristic blend of autobiographical writing, journal in-time narratives, and episodic remembrance, (3) its primary thematic concerns of desire, health, and illness reconfigure relations between body and identity that have previously emerged in her work. Whereas dominant cultural markers such as marriage, education, and family relations underscore body as a driving force that enables her to assess intersections of self and society, role of body in transformational experiences of self-knowledge takes on a new urgency in light of Ernaux's diagnosis with breast cancer. Distilled to their most insistent forms of pleasure and pain, corporeal sensations in L'Usage de la photo become testing ground for her experiments in self-representation. Showing that her experiences of pleasure, pain, and illness are more than a solitary confrontation with her own mortality, Ernaux challenges depersonalized medical narrative of her body's vulnerability by imagining her physical self outside of binary configurations of health and sickness. Even as autobiographical portrayals of her diagnosis with cancer and sexual desire entail an unsurprising emphasis on singular body, then, they do so in such a way that prevents familiar categorizations of individual and collective identity. In so doing, she makes a compelling claim for physical sensations as proof of individuality and self-understanding, while testing limits of autobiographical writing as a resource of communal knowledge about living with pain. As recent volume Textual and Visual Selves; Photography, Film, and Comic Art in French Autobiography (2011) suggests, Ernaux's inclusion of images in L'Usage coincides with an increasing prevalence of hybrid autobiographical narratives within French literary production. Although some essays revisit well-trodden notions of multiple or fractured selves in women's autobiography, they also effectively highlight a feminist use of visual narratives for navigating gendered spaces of public and private and prohibitions on self-disclosure genre invokes. As such, they point to a feminist topography committed to dismantling sociocultural and political underpinnings of public and private spheres through acts of testimony. Many critical readings of L'Usage have convincingly argued how photography represents Ernaux's confrontation with death and will to survive a life-threatening disease within such discourses of public and private. (4) Her deployment of image and word certainly displaces boundaries of individual and social life without obscuring what Shirley Jordan identifies as the connection between women and intimacy and social proscriptions and taboos that have traditionally regulated women's association with private sphere (Chronicles of Intimacy 73). …

‘We are Always Thinking of our Community’: Bolivian Hometown Associations, Networks of Reciprocity, and Indigeneity in Washington D.C.

Using the case of Bolivian migrants in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, this article analyses the development of hometown associations and the construction of migrant communities at multiple scales. While research has largely focused on the role of hometown associations (HTAs) in promoting local development in sending countries, HTAs also facilitate civic engagement and shape identity formation in both sending and receiving contexts. The article explores the efforts of HTAs and other migrant organisations to construct unified Bolivian communities at local, regional, national and transnational scales, while demonstrating that HTAs are simultaneously contested and highly gendered spaces. It analyses soccer fields and folkloric dance performances as sites of cultural production that seek to transfer practices and identities to the 1.5 and second generations. The article also contributes to an emerging literature on indigenous migration by examining how Bolivians have transferred and adapted organisational practices and networks of reciprocity from rural Cochabamba to suburban Washington D.C. It argues that indigenous migrants are developing new ways of being native even as they move across borders and reside away from traditional lands for long periods of time.

Transexualidad y Transgénero: una perspectiva bioética

Transexuality as practice and medical category is a phenomenon crossed by bioethical questions since its very beginnings. Pathologising medical categories, such as “transexualism” or “transvestism”, work as mechanisms producing and regulating the ‘truth’ of gender. On the basis of a sociological study, I will examine few aspects of the social and legal frameworks of transgenderism that reveal the circularity of identification and diagnostic process, as well as the interaction of medical discourse and folk notions of masculinity and femininity. In contrast with the binary frame that locates transgender people in a marginal “third” gender space, the comparative empirical studies them as a source of data about gender norms ruling all society members, and locates them in its ideological, social and political contexts. My aim is to better understand the cultural milieu in which the legal and the medical frames operate, and de-pathologising demands take place. I conclude with some thoughts about a possible interdiscursive framework that considers the ethical challenges in order to generate a new social set up more inclusive and respectful with gender fluidity.

Личностные детерминанты формирования особенностей адаптации к болезни у пациентов с активной формой туберкулеза легких: сравнительный анализ с позиций гендерного подхода

We present the design and results of empirical research, facing the actual problem of integration of theoretical and methodological knowledge of different areas of psychology to solve actual applied problems of modern physical medicine. For the first time, we described the use of gender-based approach to the study of psychological structures of disease internal picture in men aged 25 to 49, suffering from various forms of active pulmonary tuberculosis no more than 3 years. The hypothesis that individual gender characteristics are personality determinants of formation specific adaptation to the disease is confirmed by the results of empirical research. The main conclusions of the work: 1) individual gender appearance is an important psychological factor in the development of a healthy personality; 2) internalization of certain personal characteristics in individual gender space affects the features of the formation of certain types of patients relationship to the disease. The study conclusions highlight the need to complement the complex biopsychosocial rehabilitation programs of somatic patients by methods of psychological intervention from the standpoint of gender mainstreaming, thereby having significant practice oriented focus.

Kitajski trgovci v Srbiji: priložnosti spolov, translokalne družinske strategije in transnacionalna mobilnost

Članek razpravlja o položaju kitajskih trgovcev v Srbiji, eni njihovih novejših destinacij v Evropi. Zasnovan je na v glavnem kvalitativnih/etnografskih podatkih, zbranih za pilotno študijo trgovskih migracij v Srbijo. Članek preiskuje intersekcijo med lokalnim in globalnim kontekstom oblikovanja položaja kitajskih trgovcev, ki kot spolno zaznamovani akterji ustvarjajo priložnosti zase in svoje družine v tranzicijski družbi, kakršna je Srbija. Trdi, da je nekaj teh priložnosti pomembno spolno zaznamovanih in povezanih z radikalnim zamikom v vzorcih spolnih vlog v skrbi za otroke in druge, ki so značilni za večino družb sprejema. Medtem ko je bilo v zadnjih desetletjih skrbstveno delo v imigrantskih družbah v glavnem vezano na delo imigrantov in še posebej imigrantk, tranzicijska družba, kot je srbska, kitajskim trgovkam omogoča, da skrb za otroke poverijo večinoma lokalnim ženskam srednjega razreda. Ta obrat vlog pri »delitvi dela« v skrbstveni sferi med imigrantkami in lokalnimi ženskami prevladuje v t. i. »privlačni« migrantskidestinaciji – kot demonstrira tudi razprava v pričujočem članku, je v prid tako kitajskim trgovkam in njihovim družinam kot tudi lokalnim ženskam in njihovim družinam. Ta premik je osrednji v razvoju spolno zaznamovanih translokalnih in transnacionalnih družinskih strategij kitajskih trgovcev v Srbiji.Razprava v pričujočem članku dokazuje, da so te spolno zaznamovane strategije pomembne za transnacionalne poti umeščanja kitajskih trgovcev, katerih cilj ni nekje se »namestiti« za vedno, ampak ostati mobilen za »na bolje«.

Gender and the Telephone: Voice and Emotions Shaping and Gendering Space

In the field of communication studies the topic of telephony and the gendering of space via voice and emotions have received limited attention. The focus of this article is on how telephone conversations are mediated by voice and emotions, which in turn shape and gender social space. The methodology is a collaborative autoethnographic design based on diary notes and memory work. Two central themes emerge from the findings, which explain how space becomes gendered when using the telephone. The first explores the voice and relations of power and the second examines the interstices between work, caring and the telephone. Our findings reveal the central role of work and caring and how these spaces are constantly being transgressed and transformed as the mobile phone becomes an important appendage for sensory perceptions of hearing/listening/voice. We argue that these themes point toward the crucial impact of emotions in the construction of multiple and gendered spatialities of telephony.

Seeing Sound: Perhaps Love, YouTube, and Hong Kong's Cultural Convergence

Here I explore the relations between aural production, visuality and being, as they connect to the new identities that are formed through Hong Kong's production of Mandarin Chinese-language music, films and music videos. To explore these issues I focus on the movie Perhaps Love (Ruguo Ai) [P. Chan 2005] and YouTube music videos relating to that film. Hong Kong has a long-standing historical symbiosis between its music and movie industries. Perhaps Love includes a range of cultural metaphors that include Buddhist allegory as well as the interplay of cultural understandings of gender and geographical space. Seeing Hong Kong productions is both a form of knowing and of creative appropriation—for the movie makers, for the audience, and for fans who create their own narratives with the new tools that are available to them.

Making the Desert American

Landscapes, as Heike Schaefer states clearly, do not simply exist; they arise from a process of cultural construction in which the personal experiences of the observer are blended, moulded, and shaped by a congeries of his own past experiences, the history embedded in the landscape, and a collection of cultural and social tropes about the land. The feelings a landscape evokes – love, revulsion, indifference – are, in part, the creation of this process. In their encounter with the New World, Europeans passed through a dizzying series of sometimes contradictory reactions to the land before them, all freighted with long familiarity with both the landforms and the metaphorical, even mythical, understandings of that land. To the Atlantic coast of what would later be the United States they applied especially metaphors of a gendered landscape, a female land ripe and ready, needing only men to bring it to its natural fertility. This way of understanding the landscape worked well until the Europeans, pushing west, passed into space more and more arid, until at last they encountered the desert Southwest. There the tender, female gendering of space, which had defined much of their emotional interaction with the young United States, collapsed. Groping for other metaphors, many travellers reached into the Bible, which offered a rich series of tropes

Representing spiritual and gendered space: Challenges in the audio-visual recording of Iranian Shi'a women’s rituals

Drawing on the experience of producing and screening the ethnographic film Standard-bearers of Hussein. Women commemorating Karbala , produced in 2003, the author/filmmaker addresses how to explore visually and represent subtle religious expressions and experiences embedded in objects and actions, and how to conduct audio-visual representation of women while managing local gendered aesthetics and ethics of representation. The author reflects on how to develop a skilled vision and put it into practice as a form of visual representation by creating ‘a point view’. Arguing that the editing process is embedded in the recording process, the concept of ‘reciprocal others' is introduced in order to discuss how the film-maker and interlocutors negotiate ways to proceed in the recording process. Visual media’s ability to express and convey emotions is also discussed. Viewers’ responses suggest that insight into religious sentiments and sensations can be advanced in two ways: through systematic questioning of and reflections on ethnographic information and through empathic involvements. Moreover, reciprocity is not limited to the production of the film. As the film has been transmitted back to its site of recording, it has motivated insiders to reflect on their ritual practices, belief and social environment.

Mapping women in Tehran's public spaces: a geo-visualization perspective

Functioning public spaces, as ‘public’ political, social, and cultural arenas of citizen discourse, affect not only the citizen's quality of life, but are also indispensable infrastructure in democratic societies. This article offers a nuanced understanding of Iranian women's usage, feelings, and preferences in public spaces in present-day Tehran by not simply importing Western theories that sustain distinctions between traditional and modern women, but instead by hearing women's stories. This article raises concerns related to the gender identities, the politics of space, and design of these places. Meidan-e-Tajrish, Sabz-e-Meidan, and Marvi Meidancheh in Tehran accommodate an ethnographic visualization of gendering space. The process by which Iranian women attach symbolic meanings to those public spaces offers insight into the mutual construction of gender identities and space politics. The contrasting urban locations, different design styles, and distinct social activities provide an excellent comparison between the selected public spaces. Findings suggest caution in using gender as an essential category in feminist geography research to better represent the diversity of experiences in public spaces. Binary categorization of modern versus traditional, secular versus religious, public versus private, and male versus female in urban studies should be carefully validated as Iranian women's lived experiences challenge the homogenizing Western theories, particularly the predominant critics of modern public spaces in North America. The research process also highlights the benefits of geo-visualization in understanding the complex interaction between gender identities and the built environment.

Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile

Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile

Women who DARE: driving attitudes and road experiences among ultraorthodox women in Israel

This study seeks to gain insight into a unique group, ultraorthodox women in Israel, and their views and attitudes on driving and road experiences. Ultraorthodox women are generally contending with spatial and mobility restrictions due to stringent gendered spaces and social norms in their communities. Specifically in Israel, throughout the ultraorthodox sector, women are strictly forbidden to drive. In this research, we put the emphasis on driving dilemmas that have received marginal attention both socially and empirically. A qualitative method was used, based on face-to-face in-depth interviews, with women from three major ultraorthodox communities. The findings reveal that the driving ban for ultraorthodox women in Israel generates ambivalence and conflict, and exacts a heavy social price. Moreover, in line with approaches of feminist geography, it raises issues of gender relations and cultural implications, such as restricting the space and the mobility of women in order to keep them in a subordinate position. The results are discussed in terms of gender roles, cultural exclusion, and spatiality, on both the practical and emotional levels. The study opens a window to a unique sector of the Israeli population, revealing unique dilemmas with which ultraorthodox women grapple daily in their community.

Domestic destinies: colonial spatialities, Australian film and feminist cultural memory work

Elsa and Charles Chauvel's 1955 film Jedda was the first Australian feature film to cast Aboriginal actors in lead roles. The film was also unusual in the context of Australian film of the time for its rural domestic setting. Because the film explored the experiences of its lead character – Jedda – as an Aboriginal child adopted by a white woman, it is also one of the few films of the period to deal with colonial legacies in its attention to policies and practices of assimilation. The twin processes of racialisation and gendering of space in Jedda have been responded to by Tracey Moffatt in her surrealist short film Night Cries. This article uses the notion of intimate geographies to examine the production of relationships of power within domestic space that both films explore. The temporal and spatial practices deployed by the female figures within each film make visible a set of possible transformations of, as well as continuities within, enduring colonial power relations. Moffatt's retelling and respatialising of the Jedda narrative, however, is ultimately understood as a specifically feminist practice of cultural memory work, suggesting that struggles over memory are also struggles over place.

Scoring the National Hym(e)n: Sexuality, Immigration, and Identity in Najat El Hachmi's L'últim patriarca

This essay examines how L'últim patriarca rewrites the story of Peninsular territory and identity, long rendered as a gendered space violated by African invaders. Drawing on Derrida's images of the hymn/ hymen as liminal sites, it explores the complexities of immigrant identity through a focus on language and the body in Amazigh and Catalan cultures in Morocco and Spain. El Hachmi's text undermines the binary structure of identity/difference in Spain/Africa, and problematizes the duality of the border itself by showing the border to multiply in many directions. The latter part of the analysis demonstrates how El Hachmi moves beyond the hymen as the fetish of cultural, gendered, and racial conquest to seek out the further taboo of the anus, the ultimate site of scoring. L'últim patriarca thus maps the back side of Spain as a way of rewriting the anthem of identity and its scoring of and on the female body.

“A Single Woman … Among So Many Men”: Negotiating Gendered Spaces in John Gregory Brown's Audubon's Watch

This paper examines the notion of gendered space in Audubon's Watch, the most recent work by New Orleans novelist John Gregory Brown. Focussing on Myra Richardson Gautreaux – perhaps Brown's most intriguing female protagonist – it explores, first, how Myra continuously employs “forbidden” language in order to problematize subjects like physical intimacy and sexual desire and, second, how her linguistic experimentation, combined with her solitary walks through the dark streets of nineteenth-century New Orleans, disrupts the dichotomy of public versus private. It also argues that Myra's consistent preoccupation with disciplines inaccessible to nineteenth-century women – like anatomy, the depiction of bodily functions in painting, or the importance of the artist's gaze – establishes a new notion of identity, which interrogates the acceptable limits of “the feminine” in the antebellum South. Ultimately, the paper shows that Audubon's Watch should be read not only as an interesting hybrid of southern gothic and fictional biography, but also as a multilayered work that attempts to redefine the gendered spaces of language, science, and art.