Intimate Spaces Research Articles

A Proxemic Study of Waterfront Shophouses at the Hua Takhe Market, Bangkok, Thailand

Given that a physical environment is a manifestation of its socio-cultural context, this paper seeks to examine the development of the Hua Takhe settlement, the physical components of the community, the socio-spatial interconnection, and the spatial essences of the waterfront shophouses in relation to the ownership patterns. Based on field surveys, oral histories, and observations, the research employs Hall’s theory of space to extricate the anthropological aspects of the case studies. It is noted that different types of ownership, i.e. inherited and long-term rental, affect the physical and spatial transformations as well as the social proxemics of the shophouses. This paper concludes the intimate space, the intermediary space, the spaces in space, the dialogical space, and the communal space as the key components of the waterfront dwellings in the new context.

Home level bureaucracy: moving beyond the 'street' to uncover the ways that place shapes the ways that community public health nurses implement domestic abuse policy.

Street-level bureaucracy is an increasingly useful way to understand how strategic policy is implemented in day-to-day practice. This approach has uncovered the ways that individual health and social care practitioners work within institutional constraints to influence policy implementation at the micro-level. Nonetheless, despite the diversity of settings where these street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) work, little attention has been focused on the impact of place on policy delivery. This paper draws on empirical research to examine the ways that delivering government domestic abuse policy in the intimate space of the family home shapes the delivery of strategic policy in the everyday. Drawing on qualitative research with Health Visitors (HVs) in the UK in 2016, the study findings illuminate the ways that the material, socio-spatial and idealised boundaries of the family home shape the implementation of policy. Key themes in the HV's narratives emerged as they described themselves as both a danger and in danger in the family home. In challenging the ontological security of the home (Giddens 1990) - privacy, security and control are key concepts here - HVs described how they shape their actions to achieve policy outcomes while simultaneously managing threats to the home, to professional identity and to self.

Public Places, Intimate Spaces. The Modern Flâneuse in Rhys, Barnes, and Loos

While the clever, detached, and entitled flâneur freely made his way about town, women historically were limited in their urban mobility, which made them invisible as critics of urban modernity. The flâneuse was an unimaginable notion.By hypothesizing an embodied flâneuse, this study will examine modern novels whose characters engage in flânerie in ways that may be at once similar and distinctive regarding the tradition. Three authors who present compelling figures of the flâneuse are the British author Jean Rhys, and American authors Djuna Barnes, and Anita Loos. The protagonists in these select texts obviously do not embody the “traditional” flâneur figure; however, their participation expands the timbre of flânerie by examining the urban and social populous from an alternative point of view.

“Just” Stories or “Just Stories”?: Mixed Media Storytelling as a Prism for Environmental Justice and Decolonial Futures

Our lives and the lives of those we study are full of stories. Stories are never mere stories. Qualitative researchers who document, hear, and listen to participant lived-experiences encounter and witness the intimate spaces of people’s everyday lives. Researchers thus find themselves in the position of translator between diverse communities: those affected by policies, the academy and public officials. For academic-activists committed to listening to situated stories in order to improve public policy, several critical questions emerge: How do we do justice to these stories? What are the ethics of engagement involved in telling stories about those who share their knowledges and lived-experiences with us? Can storytelling bridge positivist and post-positivist research methods? Do policymakers listen to stories? How? What can researchers learn from Indigenous storytelling methods to envision decolonial, sustainable futures? To respond to these critical questions, this paper draws from literature in community-engaged research, critical policy studies, interpretive research methods, Indigenous research methods, political ethnography, visual methods and social justice research to argue that stories arenever simply or just stories, but in fact have the potential to be radical tools of change for social and environmental justice. As will be discussed with reference to three mixed media storytelling projects that involved the co-creation of digital stories with Indigenous communities in Canada, stories can intervene on dominant narratives, create space for counternarratives and in doing so challenge the settler-colonial status quo in pursuit of decolonial futures.

A Companion to the War Film ed. by Douglas Cunningham and John Nelson (review)

Reviewed by: A Companion to the War Film ed. by Douglas Cunningham and John Nelson J. Davis Winkie Cunningham, Douglas and Nelson, John, eds. A Companion to the War Film. Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2016. Considered as a whole, editors Douglas A. Cunningham and John C. Nelson's A Companion to the War Film does not have the same coherence of preceding edited volumes on the genre, such as Peter Rollins and John O'Connor's Why We Fought: America's Wars in Film and History. But this book's lack of a constraining theme (beyond "war") is arguably what allowed the editors to collect and curate path-breaking essays that foreshadow new directions for the study of war films. To be fair, Cunningham informally organizes the book into "five areas of interest" in a short introduction: "the war film and history; the historiography of the war film as a genre; race and gender issues in the war film; the war film outside the Anglophonic imagination; and the war film as experienced through alternative media and/or genres" (3-4). But this volume's contribution rests in the chaos–twenty-five excellent essays offering new approaches and new topics in a genre "largely mired in examinations of Hollywood [combat] films on World War II and the Vietnam War" (3). Some of the field's established scholars buttress the collection. Jeanine Basinger reexamines depictions of women in wartime WWII movies, arguing that the era's films "elevated women to the rank of 'female soldier'" and "showed them to behave in the new era," thus making them "equal to [men]" in the movies and real life on the home front (104). Robert Eberwein digs into the intertextuality presented by the use of classic war music with visual representations of war, describing the integrated experience as "the musical, auditory equivalent of a palimpsest" (6). But some of A Companion to the War Film's best contributions come from a diverse set of authors whose home institutions span the globe. Tanine Allison explains how the military's contemporary collaboration with Hollywood producers has helped sci-fi and superhero films supplant traditional war films as the moral heirs to the "good war" tradition. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet's essay, "Is There Such a Thing as an Anti-War Film?" deconstructs tropes of ostensibly anti-war films, concluding that even "the increased realism, cynicism, and critical dimension of recent war cinema has done little to disenchant and discredit war in our time" (418). Kaustav Bakshi and Ramit Samaddar demonstrate that "a blatant anti-Pakistan rhetoric started to infiltrate Bollywood dramas" following the 1999 Kargil War between the two nations (180), but only because of "the political environment and the demands of the market" (195). Other scholars in the volume break free of the feature film as their subject of analysis. Deborah Jaramillo writes about the HBO miniseries Generation Kill, explaining that it brought the day-to-day struggles of USMC grunts into the intimate spaces of economically privileged HBO subscribers. The miniseries thus "challenged the theretofore [mutually] simplistic conceptualizations of the people who went to war and the people who watched it on television" (306). Leah Shafer uses a viral video of Israeli soldiers dancing to a Ke$ha song to consciously challenge the feature film paradigm of studying war movies. After a visual frame-by-frame analysis of the IDF squad's dance, Shafer declares, "[S]elf-reflexive intertextuality has become the lens through which we are fed images of war as well as the lens that soldiers are using to show us how they are consumed by war themselves" (335). Both Jaramillo and Shafer illuminate a new path forward for war film studies that integrates new considerations of time, place, space, and intertextuality. [End Page 68] Thus this book has much to offer for scholars. As demonstrated, some of its essays offer new approaches for researchers. Others, such as John Garofolo's and John Nelson's respective contributions, would fit well on syllabi that explore the intersection of film and historical memory. Issues of organization notwithstanding, all scholars of war films & film history in general should consult its table of contents and consider...

Pissing On the Past: The Highland Clearances, Effigial Resistance and the Everyday Politics of the Urinal

When and where one can urinate is increasingly politicised around the globe. As an example of bio-political power, the provision, regulation and access to public toilets reflects larger structures in any given society. However, there is another side to micturition, that is the use of urine as a manifestation of bodily power over another/others. This article analyses the politics of the urinal through a close reading of the men’s toilet in The Lismore pub in Partick, Scotland, thus bringing together these two threads via the concept of everyday effigial resistance. In our interrogation of a politicised urinal that asks users to ‘piss’ on historical figures associated with the Highland Clearances, we aim to push International Relations to follow Enloe’s call for the study of ‘mundane practices… and the most intimate spaces’ by considering the most banal aspects of the human condition as part of its remit. Our case study serves as an explicit political intervention, one which through its geographic and geopolitical scales makes an argument for engaging with the mundane, vernacular and vulgar in everyday IR. Pisser sur le passé : les dédouanements des hautes terres, la résistance à l’effigie et la politique quotidienne de l’urinoir

Caravan Poetry: An Inquiry on Four Wheels

How can we create possibilities for a generative moment between the research participants and ourselves? In a study about (day)dreaming, we searched for ways of doing our research in which we could meet and jointly explore the becoming of life and important matters through our experiences of dreaming. Inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of dreaming and in particular his book The Poetics of Space, in which he emphasized the importance of small, intimate spaces for poetic moments to occur, we decided to buy a small countryside caravan. Through this inquiry into a new spatiotemporality for our research encounters, we experienced how the caravan offers a rupture from the mundane ongoingness enabling us to reconnect to the moment, the place, each other, and ourselves. This rupture awakens the verticality of time allowing us to be looking anew and making novel connections. What may be seen as self-evident, but it was not for us, is the recognition that in developing research practices for studying dreaming, we had to first start dreaming ourselves.

Disconnective intimacies through social media: practices of transnational family among overseas Chinese students in Australia

This article investigates Chinese international students’ everyday transnational family practices through the use of social media. Specifically, the article highlights the relevance of two interlinked forms of disconnection in these students’ daily negotiations of ambivalent cross-border family relations in an age of always-on connectivity. The first form involves their disconnection from the general public via their creation of intimate spaces on social media that are exclusive to their family members. The second form involves the students detaching themselves from such intimate spaces, often temporarily, to escape and resist familial control and surveillance. I conclude the article by developing the notion of ‘disconnective intimacy’ to conceptualise contemporary Chinese transnational families. This article contributes to the literature on the transnational family by providing an insight into the micro-politics of mediated co-presence through the trope of ‘disconnective practice’.

The Tyrannies of the In-Between: Liminality in Antonio Buero Vallejo’s Historia de una escalera

Scholars of Spanish theater have often interpreted Antonio Buero Vallejo’s Historia de una escalera (1949) as an allegory for the prison-like atmosphere of postwar Spain. This article expands that concept to present an interpretation of the play’s setting as a liminal space—closely tied to Michel Foucault’s concepts of the heterotopia and the panopticon—between the intimate space of the home and the exposed, public streets of Madrid. Within the liminal stairway, residents transgress the boundaries of privacy through communal vigilance and internalized surveillance, frequently referred to in Spain as “el qué dirán,” which reflect the social context of Francisco Franco’s Spain in the 1940s. The power structures that emerge within the stairway reveal how liminality can confine its subjects in a transitional state over several generations.

Reading and roaming the racial city: R. R. R. Dhlomo and <i>The Bantu World</i>

Scholarship on the literary inscription of urban space in early twentiethcentury South Africa has tended to focus on Sophiatown and the writers of the 1950s ‘Drum generation’. In this reading, the idea of Johannesburg as it emerges in Drum magazine is seen to contrast sharply with earlier literary renditions of the city as a place of vice and moral decay. In this article, I draw attention to an important but little-known precursor to this emergent tradition of writing and claiming the modern city, namely journalist and writer, R. R. R. Dhlomo. As the author of a moralising fable about the depredations of city life, An African Tragedy (1928), Dhlomo is conventionally positioned as one of those writers whose reading of the city would inevitably be surpassed. This perspective ignores the significance of his popular satirical column, “R. Roamer Esq.” which appeared in the commercial African weekly The Bantu World over a period of ten years. Concerned in particular with the urban and peri-urban environments of late 1930s Johannesburg, the column maps out a detailed urban topography. Using the first-person perspective of an observing and observant urban street-walker/roamer, it calls attention to particular sites of engagement and encounter such as the court room, the train station and the street as well as the more intimate spaces encoding black urban marginality such as the backyard servant’s room. In this paper I consider what forms of the metropolis emerge from Roamer’s verbal mapping as well as what kinds of city figures, topographies, movements and interactions are inscribed. I argue that the column grants particular significance to the experience, interpolation and movement of the black body in segregationist-era urban space, offering a striking early reading of the racial city as both a place of constraint and a zone of inventive resistance. The article makes a further claim for the importance of African print cultures as an index of urbanity, of African newspapers as significant but overlooked sites of city inscription and black urban life in which the boundaries between the ‘literary’ and the ‘journalistic’ are frequently breached.Keywords: R. R. R. Dhlomo, The Bantu World, city literature, satire, African print cultures, African literature, South African literature, spatiality

Domestic Geographies of Parental and Infant (Co-) Becomings: Home-Space, Nighttime Breastfeeding, and Parent–Infant Sleep

This article explores how understandings of parental and infant personhood are negotiated in and through the space of the home. We argue that through spatial practices of creating and using (and not using) nurseries, understandings of parental and infant personhood are both made and unmade. Analysis is based on a rich body of ethnographic research undertaken between 2006 and 2009 with eighteen middle-class breastfeeding families and their communities in the United States, which we analyze through lenses of new materialist and Deleuzian theory. We begin by considering some of the ways in which homes are modified by parents-to-be prior to birth, positing these changes as an effort to call forth both particular kinds of embodied interrelations between parents and babies, as well as infant subjects who possess the specific capacity to sleep independently from a young age. We then argue that lived nighttime practice postbirth often confounds planned bodily, affective, and somatic geographies, driven by agentic infants themselves who express their own strong preferences about staying near their parents’ bodies to both sleep and breastfeed. Our research reveals parents negotiating how and where they sleep in collaboration with their new infants, often settling on spatial arrangements that do not reflect either expert advice or their own prebirth plans. This work advances scholarship in and beyond geography by furthering understanding of the intimate spaces of early parenting (including nighttime domestic geographies) about which little is currently known, thus extending scholarship across fields of children’s geographies, geographies of parenting, geographies of the home, geographies of the night, and geographies of sleep. Key Words: breastfeeding, geographies of the home, infant sleep, materiality, nighttime, parenting.

Affecting migration: Public information campaigns and the intimate spatialities of border enforcement

A broad body of research has examined the shifting spatialities of contemporary border enforcement efforts, drawing particular attention to how border enforcement efforts increasingly take place away from the territorial edges of border enforcing states. However, existing research largely focuses on border enforcement efforts that mobilize strategies of militarization, securitization, and criminalization. In response, this paper draws on work in the fields of emotional and feminist geopolitics, to broaden understandings of the sites, modalities, and spatialities of border governance. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival research, and discourse analysis, this paper examines public information campaigns launched by US border enforcement agencies between 1990 and 2012. In doing so, I show how these campaigns aim to affect migrant decision-making and reduce unauthorized migration by circulating strategically crafted messages and images into the intimate spaces of everyday life where potential migrants and their loved ones live and socialize. Unlike the hard power strategies of militarized borders and migrant criminalization, public information campaigns work as soft-power tools of governance that target the emotional registers of viewers and both respond to and counter particular gender ideologies. As this analysis suggests, understanding the full complexity of contemporary border governance requires that we broaden the scope of analysis beyond the hard power strategies of militarization, securitization, and criminalization to examine the softer side of border governance, a project that the insights of feminist political geography are particularly well suited for.

Introducing ‘Intimate Civility’: Towards a New Concept for 21st-Century Relationships

Introducing ‘Intimate Civility’: Towards a New Concept for 21st-Century Relationships

“We are women and men now”: Intimate spaces and coping labour for Syrian women refugees in Jordan

War affects women from the bedroom to the battlefield, but for most women war is experienced within intimate spaces. Intimate spaces are rarely the focus of mainstream academic research or media reporting; thus women's experiences with war and displacement are often concealed. Building from literature in feminist geopolitics that helps focus our attention toward everyday and intimate geopolitics, I conducted in‐depth interviews with Syrian women refugees in Jordan in order to examine how they are coping. Of the many ways that they've learned to cope, these women asserted that earning an income and adjusting to altered gender performances and relations have been both dire and formative. Many Syrian women refugees have become income providers for the first time in their lives. Some women have become their families’ sole providers, and other women are now heads of households as well. Bringing literature from feminist geography, transnational and migration studies, and critical home studies together with feminist geopolitics, I offer the ideas of coping and coping labour as a framework to examine the intimate spaces of displacement. I highlight that paid work is understudied within feminist geopolitics, but such a focus renders important insights into how gender shapes experiences of displacement and how displacement is reshaping gendered relations. In this paper, I show that in the intimate spaces of displacement women have taken on traditionally masculine practices, but while their gendered performances shift, they are simultaneously entrenched as the ideals of appropriate feminine and masculine performances are recreated. Though these multiple gendered performances are creating numerous demands and challenges for Syrian women refugees, these women are also experiencing an increased sense of strength, confidence and respect as a result of their shifting performances.

Mujeres en la cocina de la mayordomía. Prestigio y costumbre en la mixteca de Oaxaca

In this article I explain how women are re-elaborating certain practices and social spaces tied to notions of “la costumbre” —custom—, as a way to gain access to communitarian prestige and recognition in light of changes to social, ritual and political organization in a municipality from the Oaxacan Mixtec region. Taking into account an old feminist anthropology concern about the gender system as a prestige system, I question the rigidity of the power and prestige structure conferred upon gender relationships within cargo systems and I show the relevance of what are considered to be “domestic” activities in the construction of intimate communitarian spaces that women have created via the reproduction of a relevant rituality in the construction of contemporary communities. I observed how women use the concept of “la costumbre” to claim a type of symbolic capital that helped them prepare for and participate in other communitarian decision-making spaces, such as village assemblies.

Pornographic Content and Real-Life Sexual Experiences: Findings From a Survey of German University Students

The aim of this study was to explore liked pornographic content and real-life experience with the depicted sexual activities in a nationwide sample of 1,197 German university students. The results indicate that there is a positive, content-specific association. Generally, the link was stronger for less conventional (less widespread) practices. However, a considerable proportion of participants had no interest to experience activities they liked in pornography and this was especially the case for the unconventional activities. This indicates that pornography use may constitute a distinct form of sexuality and may create an “intimate space” for sexual fantasies.

Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City ed. by Barbara E. Thornbury and Evelyn Schulz

Reviewed by: Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City ed. by Barbara E. Thornbury and Evelyn Schulz Michael P. Cronin (bio) Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City. Edited by Barbara E. Thornbury and Evelyn Schulz. Lexington Books, Lanham MD, 2018. xxii, 189 pages. $95.00, cloth; $90.00, E-book. Scholars and critics of Japanese literature were reading the textual city with a deep appreciation of space and place even before the "spatial turn" of the late 1980s. Maeda Ai, to cite only the most obvious example, grounded his criticism in a penetrating exploration of urban geography, and more recent scholars such as Miriam Silverberg, Seiji Lippit, and Jordan Sand have deepened our understanding of the cultural production of the city and its role in broad social developments. Much of this work has focused on Tokyo. The new collection Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City joins this ongoing scholarly discussion, drawing on both the spatial turn and another important development in critical theory dating back to the 1980s: the memory "boom." [End Page 125] Its eight collected essays offer close readings of recent works of literature (including fiction and nonfiction) and cinema, the earliest from the 1980s and most from this millennium. These essays consider the capital, its neighborhoods, and its more intimate spaces as "sites of memory" or lieux de mémoire, building on the work of Pierre Nora. They combine this historical approach, which primarily addresses such sites' symbolic dimension, with inquiry into the physical dimension, several citing in particular Jinnai Hidenobu's highly influential study Tōkyō no kūkan jinruigaku. All are worthwhile additions to the discussion, and the best are models of scholarship on the imagined city. Edited volumes are especially appealing when themes and images surface in multiple chapters, cross-pollinating in unexpected and interesting ways. The most sustained image here is the familiar one of Tokyo as palimpsest. Although the cycle of destruction, reconstruction, and renewal is hardly unique to Tokyo, writers and scholars of that city seem especially devoted to identifying traces of the past beneath the surface of the modern capital. Several essays employ the image of the palimpsest to productive effect. In chapter 3, Mark Pendleton produces a rereading of Hino Keizō's Yumenoshima (Isle of dreams, 1985), focused on memories of the yakeato, that is, the city in ruins after the fire-bombings of World War II. Adapting a figure that Hino himself employed, Pendleton argues that history and memory "intertwine" like the sides of a Moebius strip, set in motion by sites of memory and slowly decaying. This essay offers one of the most evocative discussions of memory in the collection and combines it with a thoughtful use of spatial analysis, explaining how "the city functions as a protagonist" (p. 55) in Hino's novel. Yakeato memories resurface in chapter 7, as Angela Yiu considers Nakajima Kyōko's novel FUTON (2003) and its intertexts. Yiu identifies allusions to postwar works by Sakaguchi Ango and Ishikawa Jun in Nakajima's description of a fictional Tokyo neighborhood. She riffs on the idea of the palimpsest by examining the accretion of Katai's classic 1907 novel, Nakajima's rewrite, and those allusions, with special attention to how the layers reveal themselves in language. Yiu's essay also calls back to chapter 2, in which Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt reads Fujita Yoshinaga's peripatetic novel Tenten (From here to there, 1999) together with its 2007 film adaptation, directed by Miki Satoshi. Iwata-Weickgenannt's analysis of the unreliability of memory, and of film adaptation itself as palimpsest, shifts intuitively between texts, much as the narrative in Tenten shifts between present and past as the main characters traverse the city. Among the many historical layers to this collection, the 1980s draws special attention. Several of the primary works discussed, including Hino's novel, appeared in that decade, and a few of the more recent works look back to it. In addition, Jinnai's study, cited in the introduction and four chapters, appeared in 1985, as the acceleration of Tokyo's redevelopment [End Page 126] lent urgency to the project of recording what was being lost. Chapter 4 addresses this among several historical moments. Evelyn...

Concert Hall Acoustics and the Sounding Heritage of the Interwar Period in America: The Coolidge Auditorium (Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 1925)

Starting in 1895 with the work of Wallace Clement Sabine (1868–1919), the science of architectural acoustics was born. Sabine's work on the materialization of sound influenced countless architects and physicists alike, including the famous New York City–based architect Charles A. Platt (1861–1933) and MIT physics instructor Clifford Melville Swan (1877–1951), a former student of Sabine. Both Platt and Swan collaborated on the design of the Coolidge Auditorium, housed in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Built in 1925, the five-hundred-plus seat chamber hall highlights the idealized listening environment of the interwar period in America, which was still reeling from the noise-filled horrors of World War I as it embarked on a progressive agenda to build the modern urban metropolis. In spite of the increased popularity at the time for large purpose-built halls to house films, big band jazz performances, and grand spectacle entertainment, the Coolidge Auditorium presented a small, intimate space with an explicit desire to reform music in America. In this article I explore this early twentieth-century listening environment and conclude by comparing the Coolidge Auditorium to the concert hall of today, which I argue is directly connected to the built environment of the early twentieth century, with its growing fascination with radio transmission and electronically reproduced music.

Conflict-Related Violence Against Women: Transforming Transition by Aisling Swaine

Reviewed by: Conflict-Related Violence Against Women: Transforming Transition by Aisling Swaine Jennifer Moore (bio) Aisling Swaine, Conflict-Related Violence Against Women: Transforming Transition ( Cambridge University Press, 2018), ISBN 9781107514195, 321 Pages. In 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on the subject of women, peace and security, calling "on all parties to armed conflict to take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence, particularly rape and other forms of sexual abuse, and all other forms of violence in situations of armed conflict."1 The phenomenon of the mass rape of women in wartime has become a subject of increasingly intensified concern over the past two decades, expressed in diplomatic initiatives and judicial developments, notably war crimes and crimes against humanity convictions for rape and forced marriage handed down by international criminal tribunals.2 The [End Page 763] understanding that the systematic rape of women is a core methodology of contemporary armed conflict has become part of the popular imagination, reflected in journalistic portrayals of sexual violence in wartime, reinforced in reporting by humanitarian organizations, and buttressed in academic analysis.3 Acknowledging that rape is sometimes utilized as a "weapon of war"—where one militant organization seeks to terrorize an ethnic or sociopolitical community associated with another warring faction through a pattern of sexual violations of numerous women of that community—represents an important development in humanitarian action and scholarly inquiry. The phenomenon of mass rape in conflict has been witnessed, analyzed, investigated, and prosecuted in recent conflicts from the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Colombia, among others.4 However, as Aisling Swaine instructs in her important book Conflict-Related Violence Against Women,5 "tactical" or "strategic rape" is but one important facet of the range of harms women experience in time of war, not to mention in peacetime. She cautions that the international community's concerted efforts to profile, prevent, and punish "conflict-time tactical sexualized violence"6 has had the unintended consequence of constructing a "monolithic rape identity"7 for women in wartime, with the result that "systemic public rape has been given more attention and credence than the violence that appears in women's everyday lives."8 Alongside her rejection of an impoverished encapsulation of women's wartime [End Page 764] identity as rape victims, Swaine points out a worrisome tendency among academics, the media, and others to promote "the 'othering' of violence in cultures which are perceived to have 'worse' or extraordinary violence," particularly in African countries, and including Liberia, a country she studies.9 Swaine points out that "the perception that one war is more barbaric than another may … have more to do with how wars are reported on and labeled than is readily admitted."10 With reference to her field research into recent conflicts in Europe, Africa, and Asia, Swaine highlights the connections between patriarchy, misogyny, the fear of women's power, and the multiple forms of violence that women experience across a great variety of cultures and societies. It is important, she notes, to address the more insidious forms of gender subordination that operate in a society, so that "despite the veneer of equality in a western democratic setting such as Northern Ireland, its patriarchy too is acknowledged."11 Swaine's treatment of "conflict-related violence against women" represents an important contribution to the canon of feminist scholarship on gender-based violence. Her insights emerge from qualitative research she conducted in three post-conflict countries encompassing Northern Ireland, Liberia, and TimorLeste. Wading into the fierce analytic currents of "public" versus "private" harms, she emphasizes the amorphous nature of the public and private realms through insights shared by the women she interviewed in her three field settings. Most significantly, she rejects the notion that so-called public violence against women in wartime should be our exclusive concern. Her research highlights that not all women who were sexually or otherwise assaulted in the conflicts she studies were attacked by unknown militants who used their vulnerable bodies as convenient mediums through which to repress their communities. Many women she interviewed were individually targeted and brutalized in intimate spaces by people they were related...

Spherical Memory: Shaping Immersive Narratives From Personal Media Collections

This spherical video project expands on visual themes and materials from the author’s dissertation project, In Camera: a Video Practice of Living, Learning and Connecting, that took the form of a feature length essay film composed specifically for exhibition in IMAX. That project mined and externalized a personal and professional video archive spanning 19-years and explored the relationship between mediation, body and memory. The architectural scale and nature of the giant screen IMAX experience lent itself to a visual composition marked by multichannel simultaneity and multi layered collage and nesting. The goal of this project is an experimental translation of that visual experience into the intimate yet expansive space of spherical, or VR, video. As immersive video authoring practices become more accessible, they present interesting opportunities for organizing, exploring, narrativizing and sharing personal media collections. The author aims to explore these new opportunities as they relate to mediated experiences of identity formation and the negotiation of personal and professional practices of knowledge creation. Immersive video experiences offer novel opportunities for personal reflection and processing. This piece includes audio recorded at UCLA in January 2018 as well as new material depicting experiences of a recent surgery, diagnosis and treatment.