Knowledge and class

Cultural scholars are paying increasing attention to the ways in which choice has become a cultural obligation deeply ingrained in neoliberal, post-feminist, therapeutic and consumerist norms. Drawing insights from this literature, this paper first charts the changing discourse on choice, and then goes on to both examine and challenge the centrality of the rhetoric of choice in contemporary discourses of singlehood and single women. In my analysis, the idea of choice is posited as a multivalent signifier dependent on changing social contexts and denoting shifting aspects of feminine subjectivity and personal relations. It is my aim thereby to problematize notions of choice and singlehood, as well as to question the cultural processes that produce them. To do so, I probe the discursive relations that produce distinctive clusters of meanings, as well as the tensions and contradictions that emerge around them. Such a reading emerges from a content-based analysis of readers' comments and responses to an online Internet column depicting the various advantages of being ‘single-by-choice’. The findings show that while choice can be a discursive force that enables single women to resist traditional family forms and establish their chosen subjectivities, the centrality of choice in the construction of intimate relations today also casts in doubt and paradoxically delegitimizes single women's option of autonomy and individuality. Some of the social interpretations of choice denote that single women are endowed with a partial and incomplete subjectivity, while according to other stances the choice of singlehood signifies a radical option for claiming singlehood as a long-term way of life. However, the aim of the critique proposed here is not merely to deconstruct the discursive mechanism that delegitimizes singlehood, but also to point out some of the potential limitations emerging from the new counter-discourse of chosen singlehood.     

Women at work: Commitment and behavior over the life course

Women at every stage of the family cycle are increasing their labor force participation but few maintain the continuous, full-time attachment characteristic of employed men. What does this mean in terms of women's subjective work commitment? Using data from six waves of the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics this study investigates the relationship between the pattern of employment over a five-year period and employed women's psychological commitment to work; findings suggest congruence as well as incongruence between labor force attitudes and behavior at different stages of the life course. Commitment to work in 1976 is also incorporated in a model estimating 1977 employment status. Results reveal that the greatest congruence between subjective commitment and labor force attachment is found in young women who have not yet begun their child bearing. On the other hand, employed mothers of preschoolers emerge as the group most likely to evidence discrepancies between labor force behavior and psychological commitment to the work role. Subjective commitment to work is shown to have a slight positive effect in estimating labor force activity the subsequent year, but the greatest predictor is women's work pattern over the previous five years.     

Intimacy,trust, and exploitation: Sex workers' relationship with their intimate partners in a Bangladeshi brothel

Being pushed to the margins of society, brothel-based sex workers in Bangladesh develop relations with their intimate partners, referred to as babus. This study, based on fieldwork in a Bangladeshi brothel, documents how sex workers' relations with intimate partners are shaped by intimacy and exploitation and the ways meanings of such relations are rooted in cultural norms. This paper shows that sex workers' intimate relations involve trust, dependency, and emotional attachment, which extend to choices of condom use. This paper argues that sex workers' relations with their intimate partners derive meaning from the broader culture of Bangladesh, in which femininity and domesticity play a dominant role. Understanding sex workers' intimate relations in the Bangladeshi context is important because it sheds light on the nature of the private life of the sex workers from a culture-specific point of view.     

Foreign Policy and the Domestic Worker

In 2009, following numerous high profile abuse cases, the Indonesian government placed a moratorium on its citizens taking up employment in Malaysia as domestic workers. From the perspective of feminist International Relations, the emergence of migrant domestic work as a foreign policy concern between these two states is significant – exposing a relationship between foreign policy and the webs of transnationalized social relations of reproduction that underpin the development prospects of middle to low income states. In this article I utilize the example of the Malaysia–Indonesia dispute in order to develop some tentative suggestions concerning the possibility of integrating an analysis of transnational social relations of reproduction into foreign policy analyses. The article initially overviews how the dispute is widely understood in relation to Indonesia's turn to a more democratic foreign policy. The inadequacy of such a reading is explored further. The article suggests that the above-mentioned dispute should rather be understood in relation to the specific configurations of productive–reproductive relations that underpin migratory flows and the role of Indonesia and Malaysia as ‘regulatory’ states involved in the establishment of return-migration systems in which women migrants are viewed as economic commodities and policed via a range of state-sanctioned practices (including commitments to anti-trafficking).     

Sandboxes and Heavenly Dwellings

ABSTRACT

Finnish housing was fundamentally transformed during the postwar period of (re-)construction. The emergence of new kinds of urban spaces entailed radical changes in the landscape, housing customs, and details of everyday life. The article explores suburbs as lived spaces, where architecture, environment, and inhabitants come together. I consider the built environment, discussions in the media regarding the new suburbs, and the written memories of inhabitants collected between 1995 and 2000. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the new suburbs symbolized a new way of life and were described enthusiastically in the media. However, from the late 1960s onwards criticism grew increasingly louder. By contrast, inhabitants' accounts present a multifaceted and mainly positive view in tension with media representations, offering a radically different perspective on suburban habitation. In my article, I explore the relations of suburban space and gender through two cases: the modern dwelling described as “heavenly” in the written memories; and the playground with the sandbox as its nucleus. These sites were crucial both in the narratives of suburban living and the planning of new residential environments. I pay particular attention to the figure of the suburban housewife and the agency of inhabitants as well as suburban social networks (claimed to be nonexistent in the then current criticism). My analysis proposes that meaningful social relations were formed in the suburbs, but they were constructed mainly by women and children. I suggest that instead of being the antithesis of modernity, suburbs were key spaces for the formation of the postwar Finnish housing environment, society, and gender relations.     

Constructing the Deviant Other: Mothering and Fathering at the Workplace

Gender stereotyping is a widely described and documented process that permeates working life in western societies. It is characterized by ascribing greatly simplified attributes to women and men and forging a dualistic view of gender in which women and men are conceptualized as antipodes to each other. Through this ongoing reproduction of simplistic views; contradictions, variations and complexities are concealed, together with the richness of individuals’ competence and experiences. Intimately related to this gender stereotyping are assumptions that distinct kinds of jobs and positions fit either men or women. In this article I investigate the constructions of motherhood and fatherhood as important elements in the processes of gender stereotyping. I argue that the production of stereotypes is part of an inter‐discursive contest which has a significant impact on gender relations and women's opportunities. My discussion derives from an anthropological study of one workplace.     

Enabling and constraining family: young women building their educational paths in Tanzania

For an increasing number of African girls and women, upgrading the level of education has become a strategy for life improvement. This paper analyses the role that family plays in enabling women's education and contributes to understanding on the interconnectivity of education, work and family in women's lives in collective societies. The analysis focuses on how young Tanzanian women perceive the role of family and education in their ‘youth task’, of becoming adult. The analysis is based on interviews with seven young Tanzanian women enrolled in non-formal secondary education and nine professional women enrolled in higher education. The results show that the women were determined to pursue higher levels of education and committed to continuous self-improvement. The women identified family both as a motivator of further education and as a constraint for their individual aims and ambitions. Respecting and maintaining good family relations were given priority over individual aims and decisions. Consequently, the reasons for women to educate themselves were drawn from the overall benefits to the future of the family and the society at large. Findings suggest a major role of the family in determining the success in improving education and professional advancement of girls and women in Tanzania.     

A Long Loop: Transmigration of Korean Women in Japan

Focusing on new women immigrants/migrants from Korea to Japan in recent years, this article explores the form of transmigratory practice of U‐turnees, who have past experiences of having lived in Japan or been born there prior to the end of Japan's colonial rule in 1945 and returned to Japan around the year 1989 when the South Korean government lifted the restriction of overseas travel for its citizens. I suggest through mini life histories of five women that their lives can best be understood in terms of ongoing engagement with more than one nation‐state as home. On this basis, I argue that what might look like a chaotic swirl of new immigrants/migrants is in fact not based on the discovery of a brave new world, but firmly based on family history and configurated by state‐to‐state relations.     

Gender and Multigenerational Global Human Development

In the context of a growing campaign to focus more international development efforts on women and girls, this article presents a pathways model of multigenerational global human development through an examination of gender and women as agents of development in the context of motherhood. As the vast majority of the world's women are mothers, issues related to motherhood are fundamental to addressing gender and development. Based on the United Nations' concept of human development and a review of the literature, we explore how women are uniquely effective development agents in that increases in women's access to income, education, and health often have higher potential payoffs compared with men in terms of the next generation and beyond. A human development paradigm that does not fully include women is both an injustice to half of the world's population and a missed opportunity for maximizing human development for both men and women in generations to come. Gender and development policies must consider the enhancement of human capacities for long‐term improved quality of life, and they must address structural barriers to equality to not only allow women more opportunities in the public sphere but also to transform gender relations in the domestic sphere.     

Sex Composition,Masculinity Stereotype Dissimilarity and the Quality of Men's Workplace Social Relations

Previous research suggests that the quality of men's work group social relations varies depending on the sex composition of the work unit. Previous studies also suggest that men derive different benefits from working with other men than with women and that the higher status associated with men and masculinity advantages men in their relations with women workers. Previous sex composition studies tell us little, however, about the extent to which the quality of men's work group social relations with women and other men depends on how well a man fits dominant masculinity stereotypes. Drawing on sex composition and gender constructionist approaches to gender and work I investigate in this study the effects of men's individual similarity to masculinity stereotypes on the affective quality of their social relations with coworkers, given the sex composition of their work groups. The data for this study consist of male, mostly white, non‐faculty employees of a public university in the northwest United States. I discuss my results in terms of both individual outcomes and implications for understanding sex and gender inequalities in work organizations.     

Romancing the nation: Family melodrama and the sentimental logics of bourgeois nationalism

Abstract

In the years since the 1970s, something of a revolution has occurred in the area of South Asian American fiction, as writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Ginu Kamani, Anita Rau Badami and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni have begun publishing their work. Bharati Mukherjee's predominant focus is the politics of immigration, not only as a prevalent preoccupation in her fictional writing, but as the focus of a series of newspaper and journal articles as well. This article seeks to contextualize the development of Mukherjee's writing in relation to wider current debates about the nature of the American canon, the question of 'Americanness', and the continually vexed issue of multicultural politics in the US. In reading four of Mukherjee's novels both through and against her polemical writing, I will argue that Mukherjee's fictions should be read together as an ongoing counter-nativist project and, as such, constitute an important intervention in US race relations.     

From Tupperware to Scentsy: The gendered culture of women and direct sales

Consumer culture has transformed the lives of working women and family life for well over a century. Perhaps one of the most gender distinct forms of consumer culture introduced in the 20th century was the direct sales industry. The business model of direct sales depends on women's social circles as a means to market products directly to consumers, antithetical to retail spaces of malls and shopping outlets. In this literature review, I explore how women construct meaning behind products in this sales culture, while examining the emotional investment that women make as direct sales consultants and the personal outcomes of this investment. To begin, I include a brief history of the direct sales industry with a focus on three pioneering companies: Avon, Tupperware, and Mary Kay as foundational to women's contributions and involvement in the industry today. Next, I explore the pathways that motivate women's draw to direct selling as a form of emotional labor that allows them to balance professional work and family life while yielding minimal financial gain. I analyze the messaging of direct sales companies that cleverly speak directly to women's needs for recognition and assist in constructing personal identity and self‐worth. Finally, I examine trends for the future of direct sales companies as they look to maintain relevance through global markets and brand recognition that will expand beyond women's social circles and parties.     

Analyzing Politics and Change in Women's Organizations

Research on women's political action too often passes over women's organizations that do not officially adopt a feminist ideology and do not explicitly set out to change gender power relations. Based on implicit notions that such women's organizations are nonpolitical (or less interesting), the research often supports a false dichotomy between feminist and nonfeminist organizations rather than illuminates women's common political ground. This study addresses women's collective action, politics and change by focusing on the case of Nicaraguan Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs - women who lost a son or daughter in the revolution or Contra War. Although some members in Matagalpa critiqued male domination, the organization itself did not set out to challenge the gendered division of labor; indeed, their collective demands relied upon and in many ways reinforced traditional gender identities. I argue that such movements are important to feminist political analysis. As I demonstrate in this article, an organization's lack of an official feminist ideology does not mean that individual members do not express interests, identities and ideals that challenge the gendered status quo. Such research, however, requires a nuanced approach, recognizing women as both accommodating and resisting gendered social structures. Thus, this study challenges the dominant feminist-feminine dichotomy by demonstrating that women's collective action is not only per se political (and politically important) but may also challenge as well as reinforce gendered power structures.     

LOVE'S EXCLUDED SUBJECTS: STAGING IRIGARAY'S HETERONORMATIVE ESSENTIALISM

This essay responds to Luce Irigaray's essentialist call for men and women to assume their proper places in love's division of labour. In it, I propose a queer reading of her call, resituating it as a confining aesthetic for solo performance.     

Gendering Terror

This article problematizes the deployment of the concept of agency in contemporary international relations scholarship. It examines the problems of relying on a foundationalist conception of agency as a tool to achieve meaningful political action by exploring the case of scholarship on the topic of women and terrorism. I argue that scholars on the topic of women and terrorism inscribe agency into women's subjectivities, that is, they place agency as the goal of feminist political action. By tracing the way that scholars write agency into women's subjectivities through an examination of the literature on the topic, I am able to demonstrate how reliance on agency as a foundational concept hinders the goals of feminists.     

Studying the particular, illuminating the general: community studies and community in Wales

This article is inspired by Frankenberg's (1990 ) claim that the best way to understand general social processes is through the study of their manifestation in the details of social life. We look at how studies of community that have been carried out in Wales, particularly Village on the Border and The Family and Social Change (Rosser and Harris, 1965), have accomplished this link between the particular and the general. We then consider the findings of our own research, which is a restudy of Rosser and Harris, showing how they provide a counterbalance to grand theoretical claims about the transformations that are affecting community and family life. We find that although factors such as increasing geographical mobility and women's greater participation in paid work affect people's experiences of community, people continue to place a high value on what they call communities. Such communities are spoken about and defined in different ways but all are based on local social networks of kin, neighbours and friends and/or locally‐based associations. They are also gendered, with women playing a key role at both informal and formal levels of community. We suggest that the apparent resilience of local social relations evident in our research may help to explain the continued cultural and political resonance of community in Wales.     

‘Knowing one's place’: gender,mobility and shifting subjectivity in Eastern Indonesia

Abstract In this article I analyse the gendered space of transnational mobility by problematizing migrant subjectivity in everyday practices. In line with feminist perspectives I highlight the significance of the micro‐scale experience of female migrants from Eastern Indonesia in acquiring mobility as a struggle for new subjectivity. I frame this migration as a production of the subjective space of power. Based on in‐depth interviews with returned migrants, I present reflexive accounts of two migrants on contract domestic work abroad to illuminate the changing contours of the relationships between gender, mobility and shifting subjectivity. Households take into account the cultural meanings of space in everyday life including local relations in the decisions on mobility. Strategies of ‘knowing one's place’ reflect women's agency in negotiating alternative roles and positions within the intra‐household dynamics and in the workplace. Women's personal accounts have the potential to illuminate spatial processes of migration as a contested space for the repositioning of self in networks of family, kin, local and global relations.     

Sexuality and gender identity: from a discursive to a relational analysis

This paper concentrates on the recent controversy over the division between sex and gender and the troubling of the binary distinctions between gender identities and sexualities, such as man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual. While supporting the troubling of such categories, I argue against the approach of Judith Butler which claims that these dualities are primarily discursive constructions that can be regarded as fictions. Instead, I trace the emergence of such categories to changing forms of power relations in a more sociological reading of Foucault's conceptualization of power, and argue that the social formation of identity has to be understood as emergent within socio-historical relations. I then consider what implications this has for a politics based in notions of identity centred on questions of sexuality and gender.     

Fertility and social change: the neglected contribution of men's approaches to becoming partners and parents

Attitude survey and interview data are mobilised to address neglect of men's contribution to low fertility and wider social change in families and relationships. Men's attitudes are as relevant as women's to understanding fertility behaviour. However, fertility behaviour can only be understood in the context of a package of changes in gender relations and family life. Data from a random sample of men aged 18–49 surveyed in the Scottish Social Attitudes (SSA) survey 2005/06 are combined with in‐depth interviews conducted in 2007 with 75 men aged 25–44 identified through the Scottish Household Survey as not living in co‐resident partnership arrangements. Both datasets encompass the age span conventionally associated with having children and men who were the potential partners of women delaying a first child until their 30s. They allow consideration of the impact of social contact with parents and children on men's fertility intentions and how the role of provider features in men's views about parenting. The interviews focus on men who have fallen out of, or have not entered, co‐resident partnerships and examine the relationship between partnering and parenting. In combination the data suggest how men act as a complementary or contradictory downward drag on women's fertility and that their role has been underestimated in understanding the package of family change of which low fertility is a part.     

Innovative Social Policies: Implications for Work–life Balance among Low‐waged Women in England

We investigated innovative social policies drawn from the European arena — universal systems of childcare, a shorter working week and shared parental leave — asking about their relevance to the work–life balance of low‐waged coupled mothers in England. While in principle the policy environment has shifted from assumptions of a male breadwinner to dual earners, in practice severe constraints on mothers' labour market attachment bring women half the lifetime earnings of men. British Household Panel Survey data for coupled low‐waged women in England show them as likely to work short part‐time hours, have low‐waged partners and low household wages while belonging to male breadwinner partnerships in terms of their contribution to household wages and unpaid work; but that few women support this model. Interviews with low‐waged mothers show evidence of limited choices, constrained by social policies which offer limited and piecemeal support for working parenthood. Given the choice, low‐waged mothers and their partners would find policies available elsewhere in Europe attractive. They see a more universal comprehensive system of childcare as enabling women's employment and improving children's quality of life; a shorter working week as enabling mothers and fathers to lead more balanced lives and a father's quota of parental leave fitting with their assumptions about sharing care.