States of distinction: gender,Japan and the international political economy

This article looks at the question of how to understand the link between the changing position of women and gender relations and the changes in the global political economy. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the authors argue that states compete for respectability and distinction on the world stage, and that they deploy particular material articulations of gender and class relations as forms of symbolic capital for the nation. The authors demonstrate this using Japan as an example, tracing changes in the condition and representation of women between 1856 and 1945, as Japan's position in the global hierarchy of nations moved from a subordinated through a resisting to a colonising country. The authors suggest that women and gender relations are central to understanding international relations, and they propose a conceptual framework for analysing the significance of women and gender in the global political economy     

active women and ideal refugees: dissecting gender,identity and discourse in the Sahrawi refugee camps

Since the Moroccan invasion in 1975, official reports on visits to Sahrawi refugee camps by international aid agencies and faith-based groups consistently reflect an overwhelming impression of gender equality in Sahrawi society. As a result, the space of the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and, by external association, Sahrawi society and Western Sahara as a nation-in-exile is constructed as ‘ideal’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2010, p. 67). I suggest that the ‘feminist nationalism’ of the Sahrawi nation-in-exile is one that is employed strategically by internal representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro (POLISARIO), the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW), and by external actors from international aid agencies and also the colonial Moroccan state. The international attention paid to the active role of certain women in Sahrawi refugee camps makes ‘Other’ Sahrawi invisible, such as children, young women, mothers, men, people of lower socio-economic statuses, (‘liberated’) slave classes and refugees who are not of Sahrawi background. According to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (ibid.), it also creates a discourse of ‘good’, ‘ideal’ refugees who are reluctant to complain, in contrast to ‘Other refugees’. This feminisation allows the international community not to take the Sahrawi call for independence seriously and reproduces the myth of Sahrawi refugees as naturally non-violent (read feminine) and therefore ‘ideal’. The myth of non-violence accompanied by claims of Sahrawi secularity is also used to distance Western Sahara from ‘African’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamic’, to reaffirm racialised and gendered discourses that associate Islam with terrorism and situate both in the Arab/Muslim East. These binaries make invisible the violence that Sahrawis experience as a result of the gendered constructions of both internal and external actors, and silence voices of dissent and frustration with the more than forty years of waiting to return home.     

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.     

unreal women: sex,gender, identity and the lived experience of vulvar pain

In this paper, I take up the lives of women with persistent vulvar pain for what they can reveal about the enmeshment of gender, (hetero)sexuality and bodily practices. Women with vulvodynia are unable to perform the central heterogendering act of penetrative intercourse with a male partner. They describe this inability as rendering them effectively ‘genderless’, described as being ‘not a real woman’ or a ‘fake woman’. I analyse their perceptions of gender and bodily performance in relation to feminist theorizing about gender and sexuality, and I argue for the centrality of the lived body to the epistemology of feminist efforts to theorize gender. This paper is based on in-person interviews with 20 women and web-based open-ended interactions with 70 women with vulvodynia.     

The cultural construction of gender

Bronwyn Davies, Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales. Preschool Children and Gender (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1989; E. Deidre Pribram (ed.), Female Spectators. Looking at Film and Television (Verso) London/New York, 1988; Derek Longhurst (ed.), Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure (Unwin Hyman) London, 1989.     

Performing sinners: The Asobi and the Buddhist discourse of Tsumi

This essay addresses how Oprah's book choices are inevitably affective but not necessarily feminist. By reading Oprah's book choices as highly individualistic, I analyze how her choices might be more aggressive and more complex, thereby offering a sense of community rather than the power of individuality to her huge audiences. My argument is based on a belief in Oprah's communicative power, and especially if her book choices were invested with more complications than individual resolutions.     

The social construction of gender in physical education

This paper presents some findings from a case study of the social reproduction of gender in one university physical education programme. It explores how knowledge about gender is organized in courses in the programme and examines students' interpretations of and reactions to this knowledge. The curriculum in this programme is organized around a distinction between biological and behavioural courses on the one hand and socio-cultural courses on the other. Each type of course provides students with alternative views of gender. When gender is taught in biological and behavioural courses it is examined as a personal attribute and the focus of attention is on how differences between males and females explain the gap in their performance levels. When gender is taught in socio-cultural courses it is viewed as a social issue, and the focus of attention is upon analyses of the ways in which play, games, and sport have been socially constructed to produce and legitimize male hegemony. Despite this diversity in the curriculum students' definitions of important knowledge lead them to view knowledge from biological and behavioural courses as “really useful” and knowledge from socio-cultural courses as peripheral. Students see biological and behavioural explanations of sex differences in performance capabilities as information they can use to improve performance. Information about the social construction of gender issues is seen as peripheral as it does not help them to function within the existing social frameworks.