From ‘Dearest Mama’ to ‘Dear Mother’: changing styles in early twentieth-century letters from daughters to mothers

In this article, the author looks at two sets of letters sent home to mothers by travelling daughters in the early twentieth century. Both sets of letters come from the Strachey family: one from Philippa Strachey written during the visit she made to India in 1901, the other from her niece, Elinor Rendel, during the period she spent with the Scottish Women's Hospital on the Eastern Front in the First World War. But the letters come from two different generations of women and there are very marked differences between them in style and in content. Both women used their letters as ways to express and to negotiate independent lives while still remaining close to their families, and the author suggests that the differences in their epistolary style serves as much to reflect contrasting approaches to expressions of sentiment and to the appropriate style for writing letters as they do to suggest different relationships between them and their mothers.     

Positive Developmental Changes after Transition to High School: Is Retrospective Growth Correlated with Measured Changes in Current Status of Personal Growth?

The transition to high school is generally considered as a stressful turning point in adolescent development, but some students experience personal growth (i.e., positive developmental changes) through that experience. It is important to examine the mechanism behind such positive changes to understand various developmental patterns of adolescents during the transition. However, the concept of growth in this research area remains unexplored. Some researchers have questioned whether retrospective, self-reported growth reflects actual positive changes in the perception of personal growth. We elaborated on the concept of growth after high school transition by examining whether retrospective appraisal of personal growth after transition to high school is correlated with measured change in growth. Two hundred and sixty-two Japanese adolescents (aged 14–16 years, 50% girls) participated in surveys right before and right after transition. We assessed five domains of growth, including improved relating to others, identification of new possibilities, increased sense of personal strength, spiritual growth, and greater appreciation of life. The results showed that retrospective assessment of growth and measured change during transition were positively associated, provided the adolescents reported the transition as an important turning point in their lives. Adolescents who experienced salient positive changes across the transition were more likely to engage in intrusive and deliberate rumination and social support than adolescents who reported fewer changes. In summary, retrospective growth covaried with measured change only when adolescents perceived the transition as impactful in their lives.     

‘De-pastoralisation’ in Uganda's Northeast: from livelihoods diversification to social differentiation

ABSTRACT

Over the past two generations, livestock loss and hunger, caused by violent conflict and drought, have driven many transhumant agro-pastoralists living in central Karamoja to resettle in unpopulated areas more suitable for agricultural production. These areas, mostly located in the southern and western parts of the region, were historically used by herders as dry season grazing rangelands, while they presently house permanent settlements populated by now sedentarised ‘marginal farmers’, town-based workers and patriarchal elites. In this article, I advance the concept of ‘de-pastoralisation’ to explain the process of dispossession of the major means of social reproduction, which causes an increase in livelihoods diversification and in social differentiation. Through the concept of de-pastoralisation, this article aims to investigate the historical dissolution of pastoralism and its socio-economic consequences, characterised by exploitative inter and intra household relations of production, leading to processes of general proletarianisation and male elite accumulation that reproduce inequality over time.     

Ironies of Emancipation: Changing Configurations of ‘Women's Work’ in the ‘Mission of Sisterhood’ to Indian Women

On her arrival in Travancore in 1819 Mrs Mault, as wife of the new missionary, immediately set about establishing a school for convert girls and a ‘lace industry’ to employ convert women. Her actions reflect that pattern of activism and organization historians of gender and imperialism have identified as the ‘mission of domesticity’ conducted by European and North American Christian missionary women to their non-Christian ‘sisters’ in the colonial empires being established by their respective nation-states throughout the nineteenth century. Mrs Mault was herself among the first generation of missionary women to pioneer this specifically female branch of colonizing endeavour, designed to ‘emancipate’ Indian women in terms of the norms of metropolitan ideologies of femininity and womanhood.Drawing on a case study of the London Missionary Society's activities in South Travancore, South India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I argue that this ‘mission of domesticity’ was not a straightforward transfer of conventions of marriage and motherhood to the colonial context. On the contrary, the project was from the start caught in a complex and contradictory web of agency and discourse which ‘remade’ not only convert women but missionary women as well. Central to this process of refiguring femininity on the imperial fulcrum were changes to the meanings of ‘work’ in relation to both ‘home’ and womanhood, articulated through a religious idiom and framework of action. The consequences of these processes, the article argues, were somewhat contrary. On the one hand, the Indian Christian woman is reconstructed as a wife, mother and worker, while on the other, the missionary women are bifurcated: the missionary wife increasingly viewed as an amateur appendage to her husband, firmly secured in the domestic sphere, while the single woman attains a new status as a professional worker.     

Doing homebirth like a man? Constructions of masculinity in South African men’s narratives of homebirth

The intersections between homebirth and masculine identities have not been widely explored. In this paper, we focus on the construction/contestation of masculinity in South African men’s narratives of planning and experiencing homebirth. Drawing on 20 interviews conducted with a sample of 5 men and couples in 2013–2014, a narrative analysis found men constructed ideal masculinities and ways of being a man in relation to homebirth. The paper focuses on the multiple representations of masculinity constructed in men’s talk about homebirth and traces their efforts to articulate a masculine perspective of birth. Men grappled with the meanings of ‘being there’ as a man during labour/birth and articulated alternative modes of being a man that valued and accommodated relationality, passivity and containment. Men thus articulated ways of being present and passive during homebirth that challenged normative constructions of masculinity. The notion of selfless masculinity emerged as a key masculine ideal in which giving and service during birth was constructed as integral to being a good father and man. However, competing forms of normative masculinity constructed in men’s narratives meant gender tensions remained in the continued salience of traditional masculine meta-narratives, such as being the ‘breadwinner’.     

Visualising the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’: emotion work and the representation of orgasm in pornography and everyday sexual interactions

Visual representations of orgasm – whether in the flesh or mediated through a screen – are produced in a context of intense uncertainty about whether what is being seen represents an authentically experienced bodily event. Despite detailed scientific scrutiny and close attention to bodily signs, the authenticity of women's orgasm remains a site of cultural anxiety and contested gender politics. This uncertainty is exacerbated by the construction of female orgasm as inherently invisible or un-see-able, and ‘faking’ orgasm as a prevalent social practice. Drawing on existing literature from psychology, sociology and porn studies, this theoretical paper explores the problem of visually representing orgasm in the context of these uncertainties, and examines how the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ is structured by discourses of authenticity. Pornography and everyday sexual interactions provide ideal contexts for exploring the practices of producing and consuming visual representations of embodied experience because both necessitate a see-able orgasm which consumers/lovers can read as ‘real’. This paper demonstrates that considerable interpretative work is necessary to read the female body as authentically orgasmic in the context of cultural uncertainty, and that distinctions between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ are continually reworked. Drawing on the contrast between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ acting (Hochschild, 1983), I argue that the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ cannot be established by recourse to unmediated bodily experience, and instead, researchers should consider how and when this distinction has traction in the world and the implications of this for gendered power relations, subjectivities and practices.     

The ‘Ins’ and ‘Outs’ of Women’s/Gender Studies: a response to reports of its demise in 2008

In the spring of 2008, fuelled by the impending demise of the undergraduate Women’s/Gender Studies programme at London Metropolitan University, a series of public statements proclaimed the death of Women’s/Gender Studies. This article constitutes a response to these statements. Taking a broadly European view of the state of Women’s/Gender Studies, it argues that the discipline has established a research infrastructure, mainstreamed its undergraduate curricula and its pedagogical underpinnings, and continues to attract research funding and significant numbers of postgraduate students. It finally suggests that the ‘fate’ of disciplines is not teleological but iterative.     

Why Insanity Is Not Subversive in Hanan Al-Shaykh's Short Story ‘Season of Madness’

Dalya Abudi maintains that in many female Arab texts ‘madness serves as a metaphor for female victimisation on the one hand and for female resistance on the other’. This paper contends that the representation of women as insane in Hanan Al-Shaykh's ‘Season of Madness’ is not subversive. I draw on Camineor-Santangelo's approach to feminist criticism, which argues that a madwoman cannot speak. Camineor-Santangelo explains that madness is complicit with de Lauretis’ technologies of gender because it gives the illusion of power but at the same time the mad (non)-subject is located outside any ‘sphere where power can be exerted’. I illustrate how in this story female madness is mainly represented as witchcraft and evil, stigma, a female malady, a denied subjectivity, social control, illusional power, self-sabotage and a final surrender.     

‘Sentimental Follies’ or ‘Instruments of Tremendous Uplift’? reconsidering women's same-sex relationships in interwar Britain

In 1985 Sheila Jeffreys alleged that the rise of sexological discourse concerning female inversion in the early twentieth century obliged women of the interwar period in the UK to reject female affection for fear of being labelled lesbian. Several historians have demonstrated that sexological ideas gained very little general currency before Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). Research on specific women suggests that such fears were less prevalent than surmised. An influential discourse invoking tropes of emotional femininity, rather than inversion, was embodied in Clemence Dane's Regiment of Women (1917), presenting female same-sex relationships as mired in morbid emotions and parasitic manipulation. It had significant cultural resonance for well over a decade. A counter-discourse argued that emotionally healthy, reciprocal female friendship might form a sustaining element for women unable to marry. Stress, however, was laid on the need for self-knowledge and psychological understanding.     

‘Lovers of liberty’?Prostitution and the Politics of Choice in Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin

This article explores the way in which Emma Donoghue’s novel Slammerkin (2000) reflects long-standing feminist debates surrounding prostitution. We argue that not only does Donoghue’s portrayal of prostitution resist the pro versus anti dichotomy in which feminist perspectives on sex work are so often narrowly situated, but Slammerkin also foregrounds the complexity with which the politics of choice intersects with women’s decision to sell their bodies.     

Contested paradigms of ‘viability’ in redistributive land reform: perspectives from southern Africa

This article reviews some of the salient aspects of the controversy over capitalism and the fate of Russian peasantry, among the Russian Marxists and the narodniks immediately prior to and after the Bolshevik revolution. At issue was the characterization of peasant economies. The narodniks believed that neither marginalism nor Marxism fully captured the nuances of peasant agriculture and the economic system/systems that evolved out of it; neither the market model nor class analysis adequately described the allocative and distributive processes in such economies. While nineteenth-century narodniks stressed the role of institutions based in the village community, Chayanov's twentieth-century populism stressed the organizational dynamic of peasant households within an institutional framework. Accordingly, the economics of the Chayanovian interpretation are examined from an institutional and organizational perspective. Such an exercise, it is argued, lends more credibility not only to the narodnik agenda, but also to the peasantist model of development.     

‘I’m about to get my tamp on.’ Framing tampons in We Media promotion posts targeting Chinese females

With much silence around menstruation, certain superstitions and beliefs still prevail in Confucian East Asian cultures such as China. As a result, domestic tampon brands did not appear until 2016. This study examines the promotion posts of tampons that are new to Chinese females on We Media channels. Specifically, a content analysis was conducted on the frames used in these promotion posts composed by different types of public accounts, guided by the intersectional perspective. Besides the commonly used generic frames, the issue-specific frames reflected how public accounts symbolized the use of the product. More than half of the promotion posts focused on the health benefits of tampons, and about a quarter portrayed them as being trendy. Despite their relative small amounts, the care and independence frames were also worth further attention, considering that contemporary Chinese society is increasingly normalizing gender equality and females’ economic independence. While a spectrum of values and ideas co-exist, these posts reflect the gender equality wave of the current kaleidoscopic Chinese society.     

Who is poor in China? A comparison of alternative approaches to poverty assessment in Rural Yunnan

Despite widespread recognition of the multidimensionality of poverty among social scientists and policymakers, the monetary approach still dominates poverty assessment. However, it is possible that different poverty assessment methodologies identify dissimilar households as poor, leading to disparate policies for poverty reduction. This empirical research applies four approaches to poverty identification to the same population of rural households in Wuding County, Yunnan Province, PRC. These approaches include China's official poverty identification method, participatory poverty assessment (PPA), the monetary approach to poverty assessment, and use of multidimensional poverty indicators (MDI). This study discovered that these four approaches generate different aggregate poverty incidences, identifying different households with distinctly different characteristics as poor. Each approach evaluates different aspects and dimensions, highlighting some characteristics while concealing others. There is very little overlap among the poor households identified by each methodology. This has implications at the conceptual, methodological, and policy levels. The conceptual understanding of poverty should be broadened to include multidimensional and multidisciplinary socioeconomic indicators. Multiple approaches must be applied in order to avoid marginalising some aspects of poverty. Poverty reduction strategies should shift from promoting short-term income-generating activities to a broader combination of strategies that address the inter-linked structural causes of poverty.     

‘Where am I in this story?’ – listening to activist women writers*

This study discusses the dynamic roles of activist women in militarized societies. It offers an analysis of the perspectives of Israeli activist women regarding their roles as women activists and writers. In their non-fiction writings, these activist women voice their resistance and document both their everyday lives and political perspectives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and their socio-political activism and resistance to the Israeli occupation. These women were interviewed regarding their perspectives and struggles. The interviews were analysed by applying narrative analysis – the ‘Listening Guide’ methodology – to explore their various voices and narratives. By using this methodology, this study sought to uncover additional knowledge regarding women’s forms of resistance in militarized societies. We emphasize the importance of women citizens’ voices, narratives and points of view by presenting activist women’s critical insights on activism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and literature. Their curiosity, agency, critical perspectives, and resistance can be viewed as counter-narratives that de-centre Israeli hegemonic masculinity and demand a critique of the national and militarized ideology. Our article seeks to demonstrate the importance of women’s perspectives, everyday life experiences, dilemmas and struggles in a reality of conflict and war.     

‘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.     

‘The salvation of them’: emigration to North America from the nineteenth-century Irish women's convict prison

ABSTRACT

The systematic transportation of criminals from Ireland to the colonies ceased in 1853 and was officially abolished by the Penal Servitude Act of 1857. Yet this did not end the international movement of Irish women from the convict prison. Using the gratuity earned through their industry, and with the assistance of the prison department, religious men and women, philanthropic societies, or family members and friends, women departed Ireland from the convict prison. Assistance took the form of passage tickets, money, clothing or provisions for the trip, accommodation before or after the journey, as well as contacts in the new world. This article, based on the overseas movement of discharged female prisoners in the wake of transportation, argues that emigration from prison was not an attempt to export Ireland's serial offenders. While the Irish authorities might have wished to rid Ireland of women with criminal records, increasingly rigid immigration regulations prevented this practice from developing on a large scale.     

‘i pray for the factory to continue earning money’: the familial factory regime of the ‘Sun’ food factory in Turkey

This paper explores the factory regime in the ‘Sun’ food processing factory in Turkey, drawing on participant observation in the factory, informal interviews with women workers and in-depth interviews with the managers of the factory’s ‘gherkin department’ in which I worked. This paper argues that the ‘Sun’ bottling and canning factory is best understood through my concept of the ‘familial factory regime’. By ‘familial factory regime’ I mean a factory regime in which the features of the extended patriarchal family are used to manage the labour force by obtaining women workers’ consent. Indeed, the paper suggests that there is a tendency for patriarchy to be reconstituted in the workplace through the presence of a familial factory regime.     

working-class whiteness from within and without: an auto-ethnographic response to Avtar Brah's ‘the scent of memory’

Inspired by and responding to Avtar Brah's ‘The Scent of Memory’, this piece attempts to reinscribe race into an auto-ethnographic narrative where previously whiteness was unmarked. It explores the dynamics of gender, race and class through the author's personal history as a white English woman and class migrant, and through discussion of the broader political and historical context of that trajectory. The discussion includes analysis of the impact of British Conservative politician Enoch Powell's infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 on the author's white English working-class culture of origin in Wolverhampton, where Powell was a Member of Parliament. The article considers the speech's continuing ramifications in the twenty-first century and in more middle-class contexts, as evidenced by the recent evocation of the speech by historian David Starkey in discussion of the ‘riots’ of August 2011 in British cities. The personal history is reconstructed through a series of memory scenes that trace and retrace the author's experience and understanding of race and its intersections with class and gender; this is attempted in full cognisance of the constructed nature of memory, and of the performance of identity that autobiography entails. The piece draws on the work of the class migrant white French writer Annie Ernaux, with whom the author has been in dialogue since 1997.