cultivating the edge: an ethnography of first-generation women farmers in the American Midwest

In the US, an emergent cultural icon of resistant agriculture, the agrarian heroine, attests to growing popular interest in first-generation women farmers. Drawing on practice theory, historical geographical materialism, intersubjective ethnography and feminist scholarship, this ethnography focusses on three first-generation women farmers growing organic vegetable crops for the Chicago market, with critical attention to the body, the land and their uses. By applying permaculture’s theory of ‘the edge’ anthropologically, this study explores the work these women do to cultivate relational spaces that promote fluidity, diversity and solidarity in opposition to industrial agriculture and the homogenising forces of globalisation. The portraits that emerge problematise popular representations of first-generation women farmers.     

Transsexuality in Contemporary Iran: Legal and Social Misrecognition

Sex change surgery has been practised in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa in 1982. Therefore, a medical and judicial process of transition has been regulated accordingly. However, this has not resulted in either the legalization of sex change surgery, nor in the recognition of transsexual identity within Iranian substantive law. Sex change surgery is allowed through Islamic law, rather than substantive law, in response to the existing social facts and norms, on the one hand, and structural cooperation with medical system, on the other. In this article, I argue that the Iranian heteronormative law’s understanding of transsexuality has amounted to the misrecognition of trans persons’ status within law and society. Using semi structured interviews, intersectional content analysis, and feminist methodologies, the findings indicate that transsexual bodies have gained meaning through religious and medical discourses within a framework of power relations, and that Iranian transsexual persons have reconstructed and redefined gender and gender relations in a way that informs their understanding of gender and sexuality beyond the existing Islamic legal and social norms. Moreover, intersectional analysis of the interviews demonstrates how the legal misrecognition of transsexuality creates space for a discourse which in itself leads to the misrecognition of other gendered identities, such as homosexuals and transwomen.     

Legal Violence Against Syrian Female Refugees in Turkey

Turkey hosts the world’s largest community of Syrians displaced by the ongoing armed conflict. The object of this article is to explore the damaging effects of a hostile legal context on female Syrian refugees in Turkey. I base my analysis on scholarship that theorises immigration legislation as a system of legal violence and I argue that the Temporary Protection Regulation and the Law on Foreigners and International Protection that govern the legal status of refugees in Turkey inflict legal violence on Syrian female refugees. This legislation keeps them in the regime of temporary protection and prevents their access to international protection. The temporary protection regime serves furthermore as the main determinant for other forms of legal violence inflicted by various actors. I explore the effects of the Turkish government’s inaction in terms of preventing and sanctioning the abuse of Syrian female refugees as unpaid sex and household workers. I show that the extended legal limbo on the conditions of employment of Syrian refugees secures female Syrians as the most precarious workforce for Turkey’s various sectors. Finally I claim that the forced confinement of Syrian beggars in refugee camps is instrumentalised for their disciplinary regulation.     

Gender and Evidence in Family Law Reform: A Case Study of Quantification and Anecdote in Framing and Legitimising the ‘Problems’ with Child Support in Australia

Despite claims of ‘evidence based policy’, the place of empirical evidence in family law reform is ambiguous. There is ongoing socio-legal analysis of the differential value and uses of quantitative data and anecdote in detailing women’s experiences and advocating for change. In this paper, we engage with these issues through a focus on how data were constructed in a key government report, Every Picture Tells a Story, which was used to officially define the problem and outline recommendations in the controversial 2006-08 reform of the Australian Child Support Scheme. Our discussion focuses on two questions: what legitimacy is accorded to different kinds of evidence in family law reform processes?; and, how is this legitimacy gendered? We applied feminist critical discourse analysis to the type, source and claims of the data included in the child support chapter of the report. Our findings indicate that both quantitative data and anecdote were used to privilege fathers’ financial interests and autonomy; in contrast, women’s voices and interests were marginalised. Thus, we argue the legitimacy of data is ascribed through its relationship to the gendered definition of the ‘problems’ of child support, rather than the type of data per se.     

Gendered discourses of facilitation in a probation learning environment: challenging the heteronormative ideal

This article focuses on the cognitive behavioural rehabilitation programmes run by the probation service in the UK. Drawing on Judith Butler's assertion that both sex and gender are discursively produced and Becky Francis' notion of gender monoglossia and heteroglossia, the article seeks to analyse and problematise the gendered discourses of facilitation that were mobilised by policy-makers and practitioners in this setting. The dominant institutional model of heteronormative facilitation promoted the ideal of each programme being delivered by one female and one male facilitator in order to provide a gender ‘balance’. But underpinning this ideal lay the binarised and essentialist notion that ‘masculinity’ arose naturally from the male body and ‘femininity’ from the female body. Female facilitators were positioned as bringing a calming and non-threatening atmosphere to the group and as naturally possessing skills of ‘empathy’ and ‘warmth’. Male facilitators were highly valued by managers, but were also under pressure to perform masculinity in very specific ways that were linked to notions of intellectual, rational, ‘middle-class’ masculinity. Through an analysis of interviews with probation practitioners and session observations, the article highlights that despite these dominant institutional constructions, a variety of complex and contradictory performances of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ were mobilised in this environment.     

Vulnerability to Multidimensional Poverty: Findings from Households in Melanesia

This paper examines vulnerability in two Melanesian small island developing states: Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. With large proportions of the population living semi-subsistence lifestyles in rural areas, consumption poverty is notoriously difficult to measure. The paper therefore departs from the standard approach and assesses household vulnerability to multidimensional poverty. The paper employs cross-sectional data from a household survey. Results indicate that vulnerability is more widespread than poverty and that vulnerability stems more from excess volatility in expected wellbeing than a particularly low expected level of wellbeing, per se. Results point to a pressing need for formal social protection policies to be implemented.