Citizenship and social order: gender politics in twentieth-century Norway and Sweden

This article is about the dilemmas embedded in the economic status of married women which have caused some of the main controversies within twentieth-century feminism. In spite of the undoubted success of equal status politics, no final solution to the ambivalent economic position of married women has been found. Even in advanced liberal democracies women are not necessarily included fully in the basic civil right of economic liberty, while their position outside the market economy is either not recognised or is undervalued. These dilemmas are a feature of all industrialised democracies. Nonetheless, the way in which they have been conceived and managed during the twentieth century has differed a great deal between countries. This article uses the case of Norway and Sweden to explore some of these differences.     

Elspeth Huxley: gender,empire and narratives of nation, 1935-64

Abstract

This article explores the impact of empire on narratives of the British nation during a period of decline of British colonial rule through a study of Elspeth Huxley's successive reworkings of such narratives between 1935 and 1964. It sets Huxley's work in the context of post-1945 anxieties about national decline and their connections with the loss of imperial power, and looks at the difficulties surrounding the articulation of national identity as virile and masculine in post-imperial Britain. Although anxieties about masculinities were often addressed through a misogynistic discourse which showed women emasculating men, Huxley's work suggests the significance of a counter-theme. It indicates not only her own attachment to an imperial identity but also the ways in which this continued to be articulated in the midtwentieth century as an identity with a wide appeal to a metropolitan audience, and one through which women could be incorporated into the story of nation. In exploring the terms of this incorporation, the article considers the opportunities open to women to claim to embody exemplary national qualities through the figure of the doughty, intrepid, imperial female pioneer, and the particular resonance and appeal this figure acquired in the context of the end of empire.     

nature,nurture and nation: Nísia Floresta's engagement in the breast-feeding debate in Brazil and France

This article looks at the way the Brazilian writer and educator Nísia Floresta addresses issues of race and class within her construction of nationhood. This is achieved through a consideration of the specific subject of maternal breast-feeding as discussed by Floresta in two texts, written in Brazil and France, respectively. A comparison of these works reveals a very different engagement with race and class factors in determining women's claim to citizenship. Floresta, in common with early 19th-century European feminism, believed this claim to lie within the domestic sphere, primarily in the role of mother and educator. The article considers how, as a vital aspect of that role, she portrays maternal breast-feeding as both natural and patriotic. It also highlights the extent to which Floresta was influenced by the prevailing concerns of her contemporaries regarding the risks of wet nursing and the threat posed by household slaves, before going on to consider how this discourse leads Floresta to exclude black slave women from her vision of patriotic motherhood, while acknowledging the maternity of women of all classes in a European context. Patriotic concerns, shaped by racial prejudices, overshadow Floresta's feminism, prohibiting the kind of unifying discourse of motherhood, which she claimed to profess.     

troubling romance tourism: sex,gender and class inside the Argentinean tango clubs

This article aims to explore and make theoretical sense of a stream of tourism that blurs the boundaries between sex, romance and intimacy, and diffuses the line between affectionate and economic relations. The empirical scope is the expanding international tourism of tango dancing—meaning the increasing number of people from all over the world travelling to Buenos Aires to dance tango and engage with the local tango culture. In contrast to women's sex tourism on the beaches of Jamaica and Ghana, the relationships evolving in the Argentinean dance halls only occasionally lead to sexual affairs and temporary romances, but they are still part of a sensual geography made up of a transnational skin-to-skin intimacy. In addition, the relations between local dancers and tourists rarely result in economic transactions of sex for money; however, they engage with a growing market of intimate dance services and are part of the economic injustices and exotified projections of our post-colonial time. Hence, this article seeks to shed critical light over a broader area of transnational romance. The case of tango evokes new sets of critical queries regarding the trade of bodily intimacy and affection; the consequences of economic inequality in the area of heterosexual romance; and the production of class morals and racialised gender regimes. Through an exploration of these intimate practices, discourses and sets of emotions produced in this particular context, a complex landscape of market forces and close-embrace dancing unfolds.     

Shining a light on the grey zones of gender construction: breast surgery in France and Italy

This article analyses the areas of overlap between cosmetic surgery and reconstructive surgery, using the examples of both female and male breast surgery, and shows that these areas of overlap are sites of the construction of gendered bodies. The data are drawn from two pieces of research: the first based on 17 in-depth interviews with Italian cosmetic surgeons and the second based on 99 interviews with breast cancer patients and medical oncological professionals conducted in France and Italy. The primary data are supplemented by an analysis of the medical literature. ‘Too small’ female breasts (micromastia) and male gynecomastia (male fatty breast tissue) are pathologised by the surgeons and the medical literature, and a surgical intervention is presented as a way to heal this pathology. The pathologisation of healthy breasts goes along with the aestheticisation of oncological breast surgery. The interventions performed during a post-mastectomy breast reconstruction are guided by normative ideas of how a female body should be. The gender norms inscribed in this surgery practice can however be contested by patients: they can ask for a breast reconstruction while refusing all forms of ‘enhancement’.     

Narratives of race and nation in china: Women's suffrage in the early twentieth century

This paper explores the ways in which the Chinese women's suffrage movement used racializing narratives to alter the boundaries that had excluded women from full participation in politics in the first two decades of the 20th century. It extends existing work on the connection between narratives of race and women's suffrage in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA to explore how “race” was mobilized in China in the late-Qing and early Republican period. The article has three main areas of innovation. First, it explores the deployment of racializing narratives within the broader discourses of modernity circulating in China wherein modernization was premised on a racialized notion of national identity—that is “modernization as Han chauvinism.” Second, this article aims to participate in the process of extending the history of women's suffrage from primary reliance on class analysis and towards methods that explore the multiple categories of exclusion and inclusion. Third, this article aims to explore the manner in which narratives of race were invoked within a feminist political campaign that occurred in a nation without a history of European colonization. The article demonstrates that the multiplicity of possible gains sought under the banner of “race” makes it an unreliable category to invoke for struggles that are ultimately determined by “gendered” divisions.     

Perceptions of work by pious Muslim students: a comparison between the Netherlands and Turkey

There are widespread ideas about Muslim women being oriented to life at home and not participating in paid labour. This article explores notions of work in the groups of practicing Muslim, veiled Turkish-Dutch students of higher education in the Netherlands and Turkish veiled higher education students in Turkey, as the best-prepared group of women for a future in paid work. The primary objective of this article is to see how respondents think about their futures with regard to paid work. Their views are compared drawing on in-depth interviews analysed using grounded theory. The article shows that respondents in both settings have a keen interest in taking up paid work while also raising families. However, ideas of work differ in the two settings. As the Turkish-Dutch are faced with rather gendered expectations in their local community, for them paid work is perceived more along gendered lines taking into account one’s roles as wife and mother. Their choices of profession are rather gender-specific. However, Turkish respondents do not encounter gendered discourses of marriage and homemaking as strongly. Their choices of profession are less gender-specific; rather they choose their professions regarding perceptions of how much money they would make. The article shows that the different discourses regarding gender roles and work shape how they think about paid work differently in the two settings.     

Eleanor Roosevelt and radio in early Cold War France

ABSTRACT

The American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a prolific writer, public speaker and broadcaster. She appeared on her own radio programs in the 1930s, 40s and 50s and those of others, both in the US and abroad. In many of her daily newspaper columns over the years, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke of the importance of international radio and seemed to suggest there was a unique role for the medium as a way to reach ordinary men and women. Of the Voice of America, she said it played a vital role in spreading understanding of the American way of life and American democracy. This paper looks at American broadcasting to France in the early Cold War and considers two broadcasts Mrs. Roosevelt made while in France with the United Nations: a 1948 episode of the program Changement de Decors and a series of weekly talks about the UN for the French service in 1951–52.     

Destroyed by Love: nation,memory, and humanity in South Asia

Remembered experiences of violence, humiliation, and loss suffered in the 1971 war of Bangladesh offer a site for writing a new contemporary history in South Asia. Love, not for humanity but for nation, in survivors' memories was the site of violence in the war. The state's history-writing project cultivated hate against neighbors deemed enemies and encouraged violence against them. More than four decades later, the awareness of intersubjective relationships leads survivors—victims and perpetrators—to search for meaning beyond their national labels. The quest leads to the renewal of insāniyat, a South Asian concept of humanity, which survivors suggest is the site of human freedom from violence.     

gender,migration and the ambiguous enterprise of professionalizing domestic service: the case of vocational training for the unemployed in France

This article aims to contribute to current debates about international migration and the restructuring of the Welfare state in Europe, by highlighting the specificities of the French context. It draws on ethnographic research about the training of unemployed migrant women as domestic workers in Paris to address the ambiguities that underlie the enterprise of professionalizing domestic service. The qualitative data presented in the article show how essentialist ideologies operate within training practices of domestic workers. They reveal that the training practices challenge the association of the job with domesticity, but fail to acknowledge the racist organization of domestic service. Hence, they endorse essentialist constructions of cultural difference. Training practices are also consistent with current neoliberal policies and discourses on unemployment and ‘employability’, as they are framed by the normative reference to an entrepreneurial model of society. Finally, the data suggest that migrant women's experience of domestic service as a prospective job and their scepticism about the enterprise of professionalizing radically differ from the instructors’ views.     

Beyond division: Women,pilgrimage and nation building in South Asian Sufism

Unlike other religious movements, Sufi orders rarely preach ideologies of either nationalism or religious nationalism. Sufi annual pilgrimages and festivals are open and inclusive: they cut across provincial and even national borders. They gather followers traversing vast distances across the entire country to the order's centre. This feature of movement in and across space, and of gendered, ethnic, regional and caste mixing, the paper argues, creates networks of devotees criss-crossing Pakistan, connecting villages, workplaces and large organisations. Pilgrims come together in amity, and in doing so create the grounds for nation building. Women take an active part in these pilgrimages and celebrations, and visit the lodge as supplicants seeking help for a variety of afflictions. In connecting people and spaces across the whole of Pakistan, rich and poor, men and women, Punjabis, Sindhis, Pathans, Baluchis and Muhajirs, Sufi orders thus reach out beyond the local to create the performative and embodied experience of moral relations between strangers, arguably the essential pre-condition and grounds of nationhood, without explicitly articulating ideologies of nationalism or of a global ummah.     

Diversity in gender and visual representation: a commentary

Visual images deserve our critical attention more than ever. In this commentary, I draw together the papers in this Special Issue on Diversity in gender and visual representation. The collection here is ‘diverse’ in terms of the breadth of visual representations, and through the methodological interdisciplinary approach of its contributions. I consider the overlaps within this diversity, and identify the contribution that these articles make in opening up discussion of activism, the body, history and emotions. I conclude with particular attention to how this Special Issue highlights the importance of returning to the politics of visibility, and how collectively these articles ask us to question the costs, limitations and possibilities of being represented in today's visually mediated societies.