The Room and the Street: Gwen John’s and Jean Rhys’s Insider/Outsider Modernism

The modernist city is commonly thought of as a city of exteriors; we envision the ‘spaces of modernity’ as sites of industry or leisure, and apply the very notion of the ‘urban’—urban planning, urban studies—to the way we approach public spaces. But by reading together the paintings of Gwen John (1876–1939) and the writings of Jean Rhys (1890–1979), we discern a different modernist story than we are used to hearing—one that collapses divisions between the room and the street, the private and the public. By focusing on tropes of rooms in their works, the author seeks to nuance our understanding of John’s and Rhys’s relationship to community from within the supposed safety or isolation of their interior rooms, and argues more broadly for a women’s modernism of the city that collapses divisions between the room and the street, the private and the public. These two figures, who are usually read as ‘outsiders’ to mainstream modernist culture, produce a distinct ‘insider/outsider’ aesthetic which reveals them to be working not outside, but at the very heart of modernist experimentation.     

Rural women migrant returnees in contemporary China

This essay focuses on the experiences of female returnees in rural–urban migration in contemporary China. Based on in-depth interviews with women migrants, returnees, their family members, friends and fellow villagers in both sending and receiving areas, the research examines rural migrant women's return migration process. It investigates rural migrant women's decision-making in the process, the ways women returnees construct their lives in the countryside, their identity negotiation as returnees and the impact of patriarchy on women's experiences of the return and resettlement process. The author argues that despite women's active involvement in migration and the ‘empowerment and agency’ gained through migration, the patriarchal power relations within rural households remain intact and continue to shape rural female returnees' life in their villages.     

Rural-urban migration in Vietnam and China: gendered householding,production of space and the state

The transition from state socialism to market socialism in Vietnam and China has been characterized by unprecedented rural-urban migration. We argue that this migration is integral rather than incidental to the gendered reproduction of state and society. A review of the emerging literature on trans-local householding explores the process whereby the reflexive engagement of the state and the household remakes rural-urban differentiation in ways that are deeply gendered and classed. As such, state regulation and control of migrants are part of a process of reconfiguring state-society relations in which the production of space and the symbolic valuation of ruralness and urbanness have become a central trope.     

other mothers: encountering in/visible femininities in migration and urban contexts

Whereas much has been written about migrants’ visibility, the multiple and complex layers of migrants’ invisibility invite further exploration. Migrants’ in/visibility is not clear-cut: it differs across various locations and, as such, demands a comparative, intersectional analysis. This paper seeks to explore it by investigating how recent migrants make sense of their own appearance, as well as those of others they encounter in their new places of residence. Specifically, I inquire into the notion of femininity as it is performed and perceived by Polish migrant mothers living in German and British cities. I discuss whose performances of femininity are visible and whose femininity is rendered invisible in the eyes of my research participants, and what implications this may carry for urban and migration research. Strikingly, the women I interviewed only seem to recognise white British and German women’s performances of femininity for what they are. Non-white and Muslim femininities remain, at best, invisible or, in the not infrequent cases of racism and Islamophobia, are stripped not only of their unique gendered features, but of humanity altogether. As seemingly peaceful interactions in urban space do not exclude privately harboured racial, ethnic, religious and class prejudice, a feminist revision of encounters with diversity provides valuable insight into the structure of such metropolitan paradoxes, yielding new understandings of how racism, classism and sexism persist alongside ostensibly inclusive urban cultures.     

queer sex in the metropolis? place,subjectivity and the Second World War

The strong links between cities and queer culture and its expression have occupied numerous scholars, including Henning Bech and Matt Houlbrook. Indeed, London has been viewed as a focal point of British queer urban culture for over 200 years and, as this article demonstrates, the advent of the Second World War did not preclude this centrality but ensured that the city became a focal point for service personnel on leave. Yet, the emphasis placed on the metropolises in analysing space and queer expression has rendered invisible the use of more transient spaces outside of the city. This article seeks to examine these ‘alternative’ or opportunistic sites of expression, using oral testimony from queer men who served with the British Armed Forces during the Second World War. The memories of these servicemen and the significance they place on space/locations demonstrate the need to engage with subjective sites or ‘geographies’ of queerness both inside and outside of the city between 1939 and 1945.     

Immigration and the politics of space allocation in rural Spain: The case of Andalusia

The incorporation of southern European countries into the European Union has transformed the relationship between peasants, the state and the international labour market. In order to illustrate the nature of this change as its affects southern Spain, examined here is its current impact on rural labour and the construction of interethnic ‘difference’ in Andalusia. It is argued that, in order to establish control over migration inland, the Spanish state has allocated to Andalusian peasants a ‘frontline’ role in forging a European identity in opposition to the migrant ‘other’, although this involves what is essentially a class struggle between peasants who – themselves migrants once – are now ‘insiders’ and rural employers, and migrants who are their agricultural workers and the new ‘outsiders’. In the Andalusian village context this takes a specific ideological form: namely, disputes between peasant insider and migrant outsider over such things as their respective occupation of and rights to space in the locality.     

‘door bitches of club feminism’?: academia and feminist competency

After years of invisibility, the position of migrant women from Islamic countries now forms the core of the Dutch discourse on integration and emancipation. This article presents the downside of this visibility by showing that it is situated within a growing culturalist discourse. In addition to being culturalist, this discourse focuses on the shortcomings of migrants and is flavoured with a touch of new realism in its argument that it is a right to break the taboos of migrants. More visibility for migrant women will not help their empowerment if the basic assumptions of the dominant discourse are not challenged. Through presenting a case study, this article shows how this visibility can even strengthen the border between the Dutch as ‘emancipated self’ and Islamic migrants as the ‘unemancipated other’. In so doing it reinforces boundaries instead of alliances, isolation instead of empowerment, and suppression instead of emancipation.     

Expropriated from the hereafter: The fate of the landless in the Southern Highlands of Madagascar

During the period following the abolition of slavery by the French colonial government in 1896, the Southern Highlands of Madagascar was settled by ex-slaves. These early settlers constructed a foundation myth of themselves as tompon-tany, or ‘masters of the land’, a discourse not only equating land with tombs, kinship and ancestors, but also coupled with a skilful deployment of ‘Malagasy customs’. In order to exclude later migrants who also wanted to settle, the ‘masters of the land’ attempted to establish control over holdings in the area. To this end, and to reinforce their own legitimacy as landholders, the tompon-tany labelled subsequent migrants andevo (‘slave’ or of ‘slave descent’) who – as a tombless people – have no rights to land. Because they have neither tombs nor ancestors, the landless andevo are socially ostracised and economically marginalised. As an ‘impure people’, they are not entitled to a place in the hereafter.     

A farewell to urban/rural bias: peripheral finance capitalism in Mexico

Based on a discussion of the structural transformation of the Mexican economy, this paper investigates the impact of financialization on agriculture’s role in capitalist development. It argues that the peripheral financialized economy is a rural–urban economy. On the one hand, agriculture and industry are bifurcated into a growing export sector and a stagnating local economy, and there are no functional ‘developmental’ links between capitalist agriculture and industry. On the other hand, the economic structures have resulted in the consolidation of a huge mass of rural–urban ‘classes of labour’. Capitalist agriculture and industry are linked through and dependent on cheap labour sustaining the export economy. I argue that the current economic formation is not due to ‘urban bias’, ‘rural bias’ or any misallocation of resources among economic sectors. Rather, it can be explained in relation to ‘finance bias’: the taking over of debt relations as the key driving force of economic activities. A major contradiction in peripheral finance capitalism arises from the financing of cheap labour through debt. This is likely to result in new financial crisis, when the contradictions between increasing levels of (private and public) debt, a stagnating domestic economy, and below-subsistence level wages become too large.     

Wounding and Healing: dealing with difference in Christian narratives of migrant women in East London since the 1980s

Setting oral histories conducted with a group of female Christian migrants to East London from various backgrounds and different stages in the life cycle alongside interviews with male migrants and non-migrant women, this article seeks to explore the relationship between gender, mainstream religious affiliation and the negotiation of the migratory experience. Informed by mimetic and feminist theory on religious subjectivities, the article focuses on the preoccupation with sacrifice and healing which emerges from these life stories and highlights the ways in which the emotional realities of pain, separation and suffering also give rise to powerfully reconceptualised, individual faith resources and creative strategies for claiming agency within familial, vocational and religious settings. Through a focus on domestic life, work and church leadership within ‘mainstream’ Christian churches, this article complicates assumptions about the nature and historical trajectory of ‘traditional’ religious organisations, and interweaves migrant women's experience closely with that of other members of their church communities. Through these ‘moving stories’, gender forms an integral part of these women's spiritual narratives and is constitutive of their articulation and negotiation of their faith, migration and inculturation.     

Rationalizing pay inequity: women engineers,pervasive patriarchy and the neoliberal chimera

This article argues that neoliberalism with its pervasive patriarchy and co-option of feminism, renders women tacitly complicit in gendered pay inequalities. We show that in New Zealand, one of the world’s most neoliberal nations, women who might precisely be best equipped to argue for equal pay – engineers – do not do so because neoliberalism makes many feel responsible for, and accepting of, their lower salaries. In interviews and focus groups, many women engineers talk of deserving less pay than men because of their ‘choices’, their ‘personality’ and their lack of ‘responsibility’. In a disempowering environment, some women show agency by disavowing gender as a reason for the pay gap. Such narratives of individualized shortcomings reduce hope of collective action that might uncover and dismantle the systemic causes of pay inequity, which are not due to a woman’s choice or personality but rather what we frame as the neoliberal chimera.     

‘ah famous citie’: women,writing, and early modern London

This article explores aspects of the textual relationship between women and early modern London by examining three verbal ‘snapshots’ of the city in works either written by women or focusing on women in their urban environment. The first text, Isabella Whitney's ‘Wyll and Testament’ (1573), addresses London from a rural perspective, treating the city as a fickle male to whom she wants to hand back all his treasures. The poem constructs a vivid and ironic social topography, giving a glimpse of the roles of men and women in the Tudor city. The second text is by Mary Carleton, the roguish Restoration figure who defended her apparently ‘counterfeit’ life in the prose of The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663). Carleton's London is a place of unwanted seduction and sexual intimidation, highlighting a gendered moral geography even while the memoir itself titillates the reader with the account of her bizarre experiences. Finally, in a coda to the discussions of Whitney and Carleton, early eighteenth-century London is viewed through Jonathan Swift's satirical mock-pastorals of squalid urban life, in which female identity, like the city itself, is a site of violence, disgust and deception. Together, these textual representations of women and early modern London indicate the complex interactions of gender, literature and the early modern city. The analysis of the texts also suggests the significance of the ironic voice as a quintessentially urban literary mode, the prevalence of the idea of woman as a commodified topographical site, and the function of metaphors of courtship or marriage as indicators of the paradoxical attractions of the city.     

(Re)creating gender hierarchies within northern landscapes: a study of stories about nature and gender

This article examines how gender hierarchies are (re)created within the context of northern landscapes. We analyse data from fieldwork and interviews with middle-class female Russians having settled in a small town in northernmost Norway, most of them as marriage migrants. Inspired by the phenomenology of the body, feminist phenomenology and gender theory, the analysis shows how the participants talk about nature as ‘recreation’ and ‘poetry’, but also as a venue that is vital for (re)shaping their gendered identities. In particular, the Russian women talk about their strong, skilful outdoors Norwegian husbands as ‘experts’ in nature, and about themselves as ‘novices’. This ‘expert–novice’ relationship creates a hierarchical distinction between the Norwegian man and the Russian woman, but also attributes additional value to the equality-oriented, but in several cases neither highly educated nor highly paid, Norwegian husband. Through this ‘re-masculinisation’ of their Norwegian partners, the Russian women create a complementary, but subordinate space for themselves. The analysis reveals that our participants situate themselves in contrast to the Norwegian equality ideal while creating a room of their own where they can form a separate and unique Russian femininity. This illustrates how constructions of gender are interwoven in translocal ‘minoritising’ and ‘majoritising’ processes.     

Rural poverty and impoverished theory: Cultural populism,ecofeminism, and global justice

The ‘left’ populist argument of ‘culturally-perceived’ poverty, proposed by subsistence ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, is gaining increasing currency in the contemporary ‘Anti-Globalization’ Movement. This article maintains that, instead of challenging neoliberalism, however, this notion lends itself to complicity with it and, moreover, with fundamentalist and reactionary currents that are on the rise worldwide. In order to make this case, it examines four main political currents influencing Shiva: Gandhism, Western maternal feminism, the post-development framework of Gustavo Esteva, and the New Age eco-spirituality of Rudolph Bahro. Also considered are some of the theoretical overlaps with the Right in which Shiva and these mentoring currents have become implicated.     

Power,politics and policy in the appropriation of urban wetlands: the critical case of Sri Lanka

Little is known about the drivers and governance strategies of appropriation of urban nature in the global south. We compare urban land-grabbing in the city of Colombo, Sri Lanka, with broader understanding of rural land-grabbing in the developing world. We show that the colonial legacy of appropriation and alteration of urban wetlands in Colombo has attained new heights in the neo-liberal period. This cyclical process has caused acute irreversible damage to the wetland ecosystem and a vast majority of the urban poor, with the marginalised continuing to suffer dispossession and environmental hazard. In recognition of the inherent limitations of ‘uncontrollable’ hybrid ecologies, potent social struggles have emerged to resist the continued appropriation agenda. As this cycle is perpetuated, broader social struggles for democratic urban governance have overtaken the pursuit of narrow political-economic goals and internal policy reform.     

crisis,austerity and gendered governance: a feminist perspective

Feminist scholars have been highly attentive to the ways that crises have become an everyday technique of global governance. They are particularly sensitive to the mechanisms through which ‘crisis management’ entrenches the power of particular economic orders and constrains the possibilities, and space, for contestation and critique. This paper seeks to contribute to but also to extend existing feminist research on financial crisis by arguing that, over the course of what has commonly been labelled the ‘global financial crisis’, the emergence of ‘crisis governance feminism’ has enabled existing structures and mechanisms of gendered privilege, such as the global financial industry, to suppress calls for their overhaul and to re-entrench their power in the global political economy. Adopting a discursive approach to gender and governance that situates gender centrally in understanding governance discourses and their reproduction of common sense (about what people do, how they labour, where they invest and so on), this paper argues that the governance of crisis in the contemporary era, in particular the various actors, institutions, policies and ideas that have sought to describe and ‘contain’ the global financial crisis, are gendered. Gender has become, in the contemporary global political economy, a technique of governance, and with deleterious effects. Despite inciting more discussion of ‘gender’ in economic systems than ever before (particularly in terms of discussions of ‘economic competitiveness’), this paper argues that the ‘global financial crisis’ has precipitated and continues to reproduce techniques of governance that trivialise feminist concerns while further embedding a masculinised, white and elitist culture of global financial privilege.     

外来人口自雇创业的城镇医疗保障效应 —— 基于广州外来人口的实证分析

随着城市外来人口的不断增加,自雇创业成为外来人口重要的就业形式,而关于自雇与受雇两种就业形式的比较研究也越来越为重要。基于2015年全国流动人口动态监测调查广州数据,本文采用倾向得分匹配中的卡尺匹配,在消除自雇者样本选择性偏差问题的基础上,比较研究了外来人口受雇就业与自雇创业者间的城镇医疗保障差异。结果表明,在其他条件相同的情况下,外来人口自雇创业者在城镇医疗保障参与度方面明显低于受雇者,自雇就业形式对于外来人口的城镇医疗保障具有负向效应。     

From Non-consensual Pornography to Image-based Sexual Abuse: Charting the Course of a Problem with Many Names

ABSTRACT

Every day, people’s most intimate moments are recorded, uploaded and circulated online without their consent. This gross invasion of privacy – commonly known as ‘revenge pornography’ – has become part of the scenery in cyberspace. But the name ‘revenge pornography’ fails to communicate the scope and severity of this harm. It is a victim blaming term that risks misdirecting government policy and misinforming the public. So, in order to mobilise against ‘revenge porn’, activists have begun renaming it. ‘Non-consensual pornography’, ‘image-based sexual abuse’, and ‘digital rape’ are just a few of their new coinages. This research seeks to understand how ‘revenge pornography’ is being renamed and reframed in different contexts. To do so, it draws on interviews with thirty activists, experts, and scholars from twelve countries and seven professions. The article begins by comparing their alternative terminologies, bringing to light points of similarity and difference. It then looks forward, identifying new developments in activists’ thought and action. Despite their different vocabularies, this research finds among respondents a shared understanding upon which they could build an enduring coalition.     

Pitirim Sorokin’s contribution to rural sociology: Russian,European and American milestones of a scientific career

ABSTRACT

The whole of Pitirim Sorokin’s fascinating and difficult scientific life led to his fundamental works on urban–rural relationships being expressed in the terms ‘rural–urban continuum’ and ‘rurbanism’. However, only a few special studies have been devoted to different aspects of his biography and scientific interests. The legacy of Sorokin as a rural sociologist has not yet become a subject of special studies in Russian social science. This contribution considers the key stages of Sorokin’s scientific career as contributing to the development and institutionalization of rural sociology as a discipline closely connected with urban sociology.     

DAMNED IF YOU DO AND DAMNED IF YOU DON'T

In contemporary Western societies women are often thought to have overcome inequality, become autonomous and resistant to social pressures, and in so doing gained the freedoms to make their own choices. However, this ‘post-feminist sensibility’ can arguably be seen as a double-bind as some types of ‘choices’ cannot always be recognised as freely chosen if they are taken as an indication of failing to resist social (appearance) pressures. We argue that one such example is the ‘choice’ to have cosmetic breast surgery, a practice that has received both criticism and celebration from different feminist angles. In this paper we analyse how women who have had breast augmentation are constructed by readers of an internet blog in which they are largely vilified and pathologised for not valuing their ‘natural’ (yet ‘deficient’) breasts. We demonstrate how the same discursive constructions that appear to value women's ‘natural’ bodies simultaneously (re)produce the conditions in which women may feel the need to have breast augmentation.