‘Queen of the Bristol Channel Ports’: the intersection of gender and civic identity in Cardiff,c.1880–1914

This article explores how civic identity could shape, and be shaped by, gender distinctions during the period of commercial and municipal development. It argues that women's relationship to the urban scene was more nuanced than theories of exclusion imply, gender and civic identity being mutually constitutive. Through the case study of Cardiff, the article advocates the need for deeper analysis of the way regional and national complexities permeated gendered civic sentiments. Notions of femininity in Wales had been defined in opposition to England ever since the 1847 ‘Treachery of the Blue Books’. However, Cardiff's relatively anglicised status and aspirations in the local and global urban hierarchy meant there was often a desire by civic leaders to emulate what was occurring elsewhere, or to develop their own definition of Welsh femininity. Consequently, these competing gender ideals underlined Cardiff's civic and national—Welsh and British—identity.     

‘A sort of Rathmines version of a Dior design’: Maeve Brennan,Self-Fashioning and the Uses of Style

This article explores the politics of style in the writing of Maeve Brennan. Brennan's concern with style, subjectivity and power is strikingly visible in her short stories and ‘Talk of the Town’ essays for the New Yorker. While in some of her short stories published in the New Yorker in the 1950s, Brennan seems to offer an extended critique of dandyism, elsewhere in her writing self-fashioning takes on an altogether more positive value and is steeped in the political as well as literary commitments of her work. The article argues that Brennan's interest in the politics of style, both personally and in her writing, is informed by the different strategies she deployed as an Irish woman writer establishing her place amongst a New York literary elite in the mid twentieth century.     

A bit of a dirty word: ‘feminism’ and female teachers identifying as feminist

Following the identification of a gap in the literature around reasons for contemporary women’s self-identification as ‘feminist’, this paper discusses an empirical study of an intergenerational group of contemporary Australian female teachers collaboratively designing English curriculum around girls’ media. The paper explores the group’s shared conversations around feminism, over a series of meetings, as we (teachers and researcher) plan curriculum and negotiate broader subject positions possible for girls and women. These contexts include the competing discourses of feminism and postfeminism and how these mediate texts chosen for study, our pedagogical approaches, and the ways we experience our own lives. In this study, we struggle to find a shared language, across generations, with which to work collaboratively in a community of practice committed to the critical study of media, but involving different individual orientations to ‘feminism’. This is a space in which impediments to the feminist study of girls’ media quickly emerge. The paper also serves as a reminder that feminist scholarship takes place in schools, as well as in the academy, and that the gender studies work teachers do in schools is potentially whole population work, worthy of keen attention in the gender studies academic mainstream.     

Dress and Distinction in Nursing, 1860–1939: ‘A corporate (as well as corporeal) armour of probity and purity’ 1

This article considers the uniform and uniform rules which formed an important part of the ‘reformed nurse’ in the latter years of the nineteenth century and remained central to the concept of the nurse in the twentieth. It will be shown that the rules and regulations of nurses’ garb continued long after the rules for women’s dress in general had relaxed. These dress codes were used by the reformers of nursing to provide a ‘space’ between the ‘new or reformed nurse’ and her morally suspect predecessor, the Sairey Gamp figure in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. The nurses’ garb was created to provide a common identity for the profession at a time of rapid social change. But within this context it also represented its distinctiveness; uniform was a metaphor for the class divisions and symbolic fractures within the profession.     

The Brazilian quilombo: ‘race’, community and land in space and time

More than a century after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, the term ‘quilombo’ continues to evolve new meanings, not all of them associated with its common definition as a runaway slave community. In this article, I discuss the significance of quilombo in its diverse social, political and historical contexts, demonstrating how changes in the uses and meanings of the term reveal broader trans-historical, juridical, political and metaphorical processes. I argue that quilombola communities should not be conceptualized as a racial category, but rather as a system of social organization and a right. Specifically, I show how the term quilombola is currently a way actors identify with Afro-descendants in order to achieve political recognition. I also describe how contemporary practices involving quilombos reveal historical tensions over land conflicts between historically marginalized rural black communities, private interests and governmental authority. I draw on evidence from field research in southern Brazil to illustrate my understanding of how quilombos work.     

‘inebriates’, ‘heathens’, templars and suffragists: Scotland and imperial feminism c. 1870-1914

This article examines the extent to which the British Empire was central to the women's suffrage debate within the Scottish Christian Union. This analysis follows two trends in the historiography of Britain and of women's suffrage: an integration of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘imperial’ in the historiography of Britain; and a recognition of internationalism within women's suffrage. This discussion points to regional diversity within Great Britain and to the influence of imperialism and evangelicalism on women's activism in the so-called Celtic fringe. In so doing, this article aims to contribute to a more complex representation of middle-class women's participation in Britain's temperance and women's suffrage movements.     

International Dimensions of Women's Suffrage: ‘at the crossroads of several interlocking identities’[1]

This article surveys recent suffrage histories in a range of countries across the world with a focus on the neglected period of the interwar years. It asks what the suffrage movement would look like if viewed through the eyes of women from outside Britain and North America and to what extent it was possible for women, despite their differences, to identify with other women both inside individual countries and across national boundaries. It is suggested here that a comparative approach encourages us to take a fresh look at key features of the suffrage movement and to question conventional wisdoms.     

Patterns of agrarian transformation in Ethiopia: State-mediated commercialisation and the ‘land grab’

Much of the literature on the ‘land grab’ has thus far focused on the international drivers of foreign agricultural investment, with far less attention paid to the roles of developing country states and domestic political economy in changing forms of agrarian production. This paper analyses how global and domestic processes combine to produce patterns of agrarian transformation in Ethiopia, one of the main targets of foreign agricultural investment. The paper presents a typology of changes in land use and examines in detail three case studies of investments in Ethiopia drawn from this typology. The paper concludes that the most dramatic changes are taking place in lowland, peripheral regions where large-scale, capital-intensive farms employing wage labour pose a serious risk to pastoralists whose ‘use’ of land is contested by the state. Although the government has been careful to avoid mass displacement of settled smallholders, there are also important changes taking place in highland areas, with the government encouraging investments that combine the resources of investors with the labour and land of smallholders. These investments have resulted in exposure to new forms of market risk.     

‘for Wales,see England?’ suffrage and the new woman in Wales [1]

With a few notable exceptions, Wales has generally been portrayed as an overtly patriarchal nation, the haven of anti-suffragists. The first part of this article reassesses this reputation. It is argued that national as well as local historical specificities must be taken into account in order to achieve a more accurate representation of suffrage history in Wales and Britain. The second part examines Welsh suffragism in the context of the nationalist Cymru Fydd movement of the 1890s as it appeared in the English language nationalist periodicals Young Wales, The Welsh Review and (the bilingual) Cymru Fydd.     

transgender identity,sexual versus gender ‘rights’ and the tools of the Indian state

Sexual and gender minorities in contemporary India are formed in the interstices between the neoliberal, Hindutva state; transnational discourses of liberal democracy and sexual ‘rights’; as well as cosmopolitan culture and global LGBT movements. As is evident in recent court judgments and legislation, particularly since 2014, postcolonial Hindu nationalism has created cultural conditions where forms of queer gender are permissible while queer sexuality is generally unacceptable. In recent years, significant developments have focused on transgender communities, complicating activism surrounding sexual and gender identities. By positing some identities as state-sanctioned acceptable citizens and others as not, certain ‘transgender’ individuals are conceptualised as bearers of rights while finding other facets of their identities discriminated against and maintained as illegal. The 2014 Supreme Court NALSA v. Union of India judgment and The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016 passed by the Lok Sabha, alongside further judgments and legislation affecting wider LGBT communities, have kept discourses fixed on sexual and gender identities and their relationship to Indian citizenship at the forefront of discussions of gender justices and injustices in India today. Focusing on recent judicial and legislative developments, this paper examines how transgender rights are being granted in the context of the neoliberal, Hindutva state and considers which forms of transgender identity are currently being conceptualised as legitimate and authentic in such discourses, which can serve to bolster larger right-wing visions and ideologies of the nation and its citizens. It contemplates the ways in which gender ‘justices’, framed in relation to both transnational LGBT rights discourses and right-wing agendas, are conceptualised and played out on the bodies of sexual and gender minorities.     

Keeping ‘our’ land: property,agriculture and tensions between Indigenous and settler visions of food sovereignty in Canada

ABSTRACT

This paper situates literature on food sovereignty and land reforms in relation to academic and popular writings about land issues in Canada. We argue that settler Canadian food sovereignty scholarship and activism has yet to sufficiently grapple with the implications of private property ownership in relation to ongoing processes of settler colonialism. We also argue that efforts to advance ecologically sustainable farming practices in Canada need to confront private property ownership in terms of its contribution to both capitalist and colonial violence.     

‘We go back to the land’: processes of re-peasantisation in Araponga,Brazil

This contribution draws on original data relating to a land settlement case in Araponga, an administrative area in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The settlement of the land and subsequent building of robust, more self-dependent, land-based livelihoods have followed a joint experimentation trajectory in which the agro-ecologicalisation of agrarian production practices to regenerate and enrich the resource base has been coupled with effective institutional reform and the creation of a favourable institutional setting. Key to this grassroots transformation process has been the enrolment of various strategic actors in a collaborative support network by a mediating change agent. The paper argues that the Araponga case represents a particular expression of re-peasantisation. The Araponga project has evolved without the involvement of landless peoples' social movements such as the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). This has been crucial to its character and impact.     

Gender,Culture and ‘the Spiritual Empire’: the Irish Protestant female missionary experience

This article offers an exploration of the intellectual woman worker in the inter-war years through reference to Rosamond Lehmann's novel, Dusty Answer, and Virginia Woolf's essays, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. These texts are read in relation to a number of theorists of the intellectual – Joan Riviere, Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said. The article recognises the validity of Sonya Andermahr, Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz's claim that ‘a systematic working through of theories of intellectuals in relation to gender has yet to be written’. As an initial response to that neglect, it investigates the multiple difficulties for the woman in constructing herself as ‘an intellectual’ and relates these problems to issues of class, gender and the cultural history of the intellectual. The article is framed by reference to two of David Lodge's novels of intellectual life, Nice Work and Thinks, in which the story of feminist literary critic, Robyn Penrose, indicates how problematic the position of the woman intellectual continues to be.     

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities,c. 1650–1838

Abstract

In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred ‘woman's culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are vital to understanding black women's self-defined (as opposed to white attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women's identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’ and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society. The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse how black women's relationship to the gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the development of colonial relations between black and white and the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European cultures for black women's gendered identities.     

‘Civilizing’ the pastoral frontier: land grabbing,dispossession and coercive agrarian development in Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes frontier dynamics of land dispossessions in Ethiopia’s pastoral lowland regions. Through a case study of two sedentarization schemes in South Omo Valley, we illustrate how politics of coercive sedentarization are legitimated in the ‘civilizing’ impetus of ‘improvement schemes’ for ‘backward’ pastoralists. We study sedentarization schemes that are implemented to evict pastoralist communities from grazing land to be appropriated by corporate investors. It is argued that frontier imaginations of pastoral lowlands legitimate coercive practices of ‘emptying’ the lowlands for investments. ‘Improvement schemes’ enroll private investors and enterprises affiliated with Ethiopia’s ruling party in the politics of ‘thickening’ state presence in the pastoral frontier. Agricultural extension packages serve to expand state control over sedentarized pastoralists and make lowland resources more extractable, for investors and for the ruling regime.     

Seeing land deals through the lens of the ‘land–water nexus’: the case of biofuel production in Piura,Peru

ABSTRACT

This contribution examines two large-scale land acquisitions on Peru’s northern coast, using a ‘land–water nexus’ approach. The establishment of large sugarcane monocultures resulted in a massive transfer of land and water rights from smallholders to biofuel companies. Using Ribot and Peluso’s theory of access, we demonstrate that this transfer of rights was enabled by the convergence of neoliberal land and water reforms and the presence of the two investors. This constellation (1) altered smallholders’ bundles of rights; and (2) created sharp imbalances that radically changed access to land and water, not only through changing bundles of rights, but also, and maybe more significantly, through widening the gaps between smallholders’ and biofuel companies’ bundles of powers. Using Hall et al.’s powers of exclusion approach, we identify the processes both underpinning and resulting out of the changing access relations analyzed in this study. Changes to Peru’s water governance may accentuate power asymmetries between investors and smallholders, constraining locals’ access to increasingly scarce water.     

A view of the observable: A positivist ‘understanding’ of Agrarian Society and political protest in colonial India 1

The great uprising of 1857 in India was once discussed predominantly in terms of the debate, military mutiny or war of independence. Twenty years ago S.B. Chaudhuri pointed to something of the complexity and range of the rising in his ‘Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies 1857–59’ (1957). Some recent writers have seen in the events of the period a classic example of a peasant war. Now, in a new book, ‘The Peasant and the Raj. Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India’ (Cambridge 1978), E. T. Stokes concludes that ‘1857, like 1848 in Europe, remains a date to conjure with’ (p. 139). Stokes's judgements on the rebellion and its context bid fair to becoming the new orthodoxy. Like all orthodoxies they have a good deal of force in them. At the same time they are loaded with implications, some of them perhaps not fully foreseen, that bear careful examination.     

Shifting rights,property and authority in the forest frontier: ‘stakes’ for local land users and citizens

Customary land and forests are more embedded in the global economy than ever. With globally significant supplies of land and raw materials and favorable terms for foreign investors, developing countries – particularly in Africa – have become increasingly attractive trade partners and destinations for investors. Increasing competition over land is placing new pressures on vast tracts of forest and woodland, areas often considered ‘under-utilized’ by national governments despite their critical role in supporting local livelihoods. While increased demand for primary agricultural, forest and mining commodities in the context of forest tenure reforms and decentralized decision-making could create unprecedented economic opportunities for forest-dependent communities, increased ‘stakes’ over forest resources and land will undoubtedly heighten governance challenges. This is in no small part due to the political dynamics of property, and to the role of the ‘recursive constitution of property rights and authority’ in the evolution of the modern nation-state. By identifying the social ‘stakes’ associated with different pathways through which sectoral and extra-sectoral commodities shape forests, this paper provides a conceptual framework for analyzing how shifting contours of rights, property and authority in the context of forest-related trade and investment shape human well-being for affected communities and the wider citizenry of host countries. It then illustrates the use of the framework through its application to two brief case studies from southern Africa: tobacco production in Malawi and copper mining in Zambia. It is hoped that this framework will provide a meaningful contribution to growing scholarship on the political dynamics of property, and implications for rights-based approaches to agricultural investment and large-scale land acquisitions.     

‘A Jazzed and Patchwork Modern’: ‘future’ girls and modern masculinities in the early popular romances of Berta Ruck

As a best‐selling writer of popular romances during the first half of the twentieth century, Berta Ruck (1878–1978) has been characterised as a producer of ‘omelettes of frivolity and sweetness’ whose appeal was confined to adolescent girls and the servant classes. Closer attention to some of the early novels and to her own evaluation of her work, however, reveals her attempts to confront and articulate the impact of societal change upon a generation whose world was being irrevocably altered by the Great War and its aftermath. Her almost forensic attention to local detail and her treatment of contemporary questions of gender identity make her a compelling chronicler of the period and lend credibility to her claims of a broader readership than that generally associated with the genre.