Tag Archives: Gender

Written On The Body: Women, Migration and Borders

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By Morag Rose, University of Sheffield

Morag Rose Geog Directions.jpg

Singapore Airport. Image credit: Flikr user Zsoolt CC-BY-NC 2.0

 

 

Much current popular discourse on immigration is often dominated by tabloid hysteria and dangerous political games. Concern about this has been voiced by many, including my former Sunday Times colleague, Liz Gerard, “The press and immigration: reporting the news or fanning the flames of hatred?” This polemic tends to dehumanise individuals and ignore the complex economic, political, social and emotional drivers behind the movement of people.  In her recent article in Area, Lucy Jackson seeks to explore the emotional impact of immigration and how it shapes real lives.

Jackson takes the body as the territory she explores, following the work of Longhurst (1994) who describes the body as the “geography closest in”. Jackson works with two different sets of women in Singapore; western expatriates and foreign domestic workers (even these commonly used words are loaded with assumptions). The two different groups of women have contrasting experiences of stigma and exclusion within Singapore and effectively live “separate but parallel lives”. However, despite their differences, the women share many commonalities and can all be described as economic migrants.

Singapore has actively encouraged temporary migrants but the participants were often discriminated against as outsiders. Their autonomy is limited by a range of social forces which range from comments in the street to being unable to open their own bank account or feeling restricted to certain areas. They create their own distinct personal territories which are both geographical and emotional. Food and clothing become very important as markers of identity, memory and community.  Both groups suffer ill-effects as a result of stigma and stereotyping, although their experiences are very different.  Borders operate and impact at many different scales and Jackson concludes “the border of the body is porous and migrant women actively practice and perform aspects of ‘border maintenance’ as a reaction to being excluded emotionally and physically from the social and cultural territory of the host society” (Jackson, 2016 p297).

Jackson’s work is attentive to individual, embodied experience and humanises the impact of social policies based on exclusion and othering. I fear this is a task that becomes ever more necessary for academics, activists and anyone concerned with civil liberties and freedom of movement.

References

60-world2 Gerard, L“The press and immigration: reporting the news or fanning the flames of hatred?” Subscribe Online

books_icon Jackson, L 2016  Experiencing Exclusion and Reacting to Stereotypes? Navigating Borders of the Migrant Body Area 2016 48.3 pp292-299 doi:10.1111/area.12146

books_icon Longhurst R 1994 The geography closest in – the body … the politics of pregnability Australian Geographical Studies 32214–223

‘A woman’s place is in the kitchen’: Changing culinary culture

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Kate Whiston, University of Nottingham

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In a recent article, Meah (2016) discusses the space of the kitchen – seemingly mundane and neglected by geographical study – and the ways in which it has evolved through time to become more than just a food preparation area for the confinement of women.

“A woman’s place is in the kitchen” is a well-known, oft-used phrase. Last month, BT Sport presenter Lynsey Hipgrave was subjected to this type of misogynistic abuse on social media following her criticism of Lionel Messi’s controversial un-sportsmanlike penalty. Amongst the sexist replies she received were; “we need sandwiches not opinions” and “somewhere there’s a kitchen and it’s missing something”.  Whilst there are some who still rigidly live by this sexist mantra, there is lots of evidence that such marginalisation of women using sexist delineations of space is starting to be dispelled. Whilst Nigella Lawson’s heavily sexualised cookery programmes do women’s cause no favours, the proliferation of successful male chefs on The Great British Bake Off, in reputable restaurants, and as celebrity chefs, suggest that kitchen culture is changing. In a recent article in the Independent, French Chef Alain Ducasse, owner of 23 Michelin-star restaurants in seven countries, suggested that the changing ‘macho kitchen culture’ was displacing the old sexist stereotype. Ducasse even highlighted a lack of female chefs in France, leading him to establish the ‘Femmes en Avenir’ (Women of the Future) programme in association with the French government in 2011. The programme encourages women in the outskirts of Paris to gain culinary qualifications, in order to pursue a career in cooking.

Meah’s (2016) article provides the historical background that explains why women have long been associated with the kitchen. Historically, the kitchen was a space occupied by working class women, either as maids or cooks for the wealthy, or in their own kitchens. The kitchen was at the rear of the house, out of public view; gendered labour concealed from the rest of society. This is similar to Erving Goffman’s (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which he explains how our identities are performed sometimes less explicitly, hidden from others, in what he calls the ‘back stage’. The kitchen became the symbolic heart of domesticity and the women that produced this sense of domesticity were often marginalised.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Meah (2016), however, argues that the kitchen was transformed from a space of production to a space of consumption, with the evolution of modern kitchen design in the twentieth century, the kitchen becoming an ideological battle ground. Mass housing projects during the inter-war period, she argues, favoured standardised, modernist kitchen spaces, designed to be efficient and functional. By scientifically arranging space within the kitchen to make it more productive, daily life and behaviour were also changed. Functionalist designers of the 1930s saw the repetitive and productive model of factory assembly lines as the ideal method for both easing the housewife’s work and making it more efficient. By reducing the housewife’s need to move around the kitchen, making everything within reaching distance, the routinisation of her work meant cooking was less of a pleasure and more of a practical task. Moving into the 1940s, Meah (2016) traces the emergence of the kitchen-living room arrangement, a space which enabled families to eat their meals in a separate space to the food preparation area, but a low-partition wall meant that the housewife was not isolated whilst at work in the kitchen. Open-plan living spaces, therefore, further redefined the kitchen, showing the resistance of both women and kitchen spaces.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Meah (2016) identifies another societal change, still seen today, which further changed the culture of kitchens. By the 1950s, she argues, women were engaged in paid employment outside the home, becoming increasingly independent and industrious. We see this today to an even greater extent, with the employment of women in some really prominent positions such as merchant bankers, lawyers, doctors, or business owners. The emergence of the career-orientated woman has further led to the separation of women from the kitchen, as they no longer have the time or the inclination to slave away in the kitchen for hours preparing food whilst their husbands work all day. Societal transformations in work, leisure, and gender roles have transformed the kitchen into, what Meah (2016), calls an ‘orchestrating concept’. Kitchens have become spaces where numerous practices and elements are structured and held together, making it both material and symbolic. They are arenas for the performance of everyday life; be it food preparation and eating, playing out relationships with family members and hosting parties, or many non-food activities such as watching TV, reading the paper, and caring for pets.

The personalisation, and sometimes feminisation, of the kitchen space has altered the ways in which kitchens are experienced and consumed. Most notably, the aesthetic of the kitchen is used as an expression of identity. Meah (2016) argues that the space of the kitchen has become a site of memory, a sort of private museum, in which personal objects are kept and displayed which tell personal stories. Collectible silverware, wedding china, and other gifts are often displayed in the kitchen, prized possessions that each have their own story to tell. Fridges and notice boards display collages of mementos and snapshots of lives; fridge-magnet souvenirs, postcards, children’s drawings, photographs, appointment cards, party invitations, and ticket stubs are just a few of the items that may make up such an eclectic archive of family history. This not only shows the portability of memory, but also transforms the kitchen from a space, used and lived in, to a meaningful place of personal importance.

The kitchen has therefore undergone many changes through history, becoming more than just a space for women to make food. Women have also been transformed; from passive consumers and oppressed labourers to active participants in a meaningful and constantly changing space.

books_iconMeah, A. (2016). “Extending the Contested Spaces of the Modern Kitchen”, Geography Compass, 10(2):41-55.

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Guardian Sport (2016) Lynsey Hipgrave hits out at sexist abuse after criticising Lionel Messi

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Casey, L. (2016) Alain Ducasse interview: The French chef on women in the kitchen, and life in Paris after the attacks The Independent

High-flying research: Geographies of air transportation

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Kate Whiston, University of Nottingham

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This weekend marked the fifty-eighth anniversary of the Munich Air Disaster, so what better time than to take a look at some of the work being done by human geographers into the social and cultural dimensions of air space and air transportation. February 6th 1958 was the darkest day in Manchester United F.C.’s history. Following their European Cup quarter final win in Belgrade, the ‘Busby Babes’ – so-called after their illustrious manager Matt Busby – were involved in one of the most documented plane crashes in history, in which twenty-three of the forty-four passengers were killed, including eight of the players, when their plane crashed after trying to take-off amidst a devastating snow storm in Munich. Memories of the victims are still today as poignant as ever, in an age when air transportation has been completely transformed, and has come to signify the complex networks of social, political, and economic relationships in our contemporary mobile world.

‘Aeromobilities’, as Adey (2008) calls it, started to become the subject of geographical enquiry in the twenty-first century, with geographers looking to trace the economic and political links that air transport creates between places. Adey’s (2008) paper provides a useful summary of some of the work within geography about air transportation, research which has drawn on the ‘mobile turn’, a shift towards investigating how spaces are travelled through.

‘Identity’ being a key theme in geography due to the influence of feminism, the airport and the airplane have themselves been unravelled as sites of identity creation and performance. Adey (2008) explains how both airports and airplanes have become important geographical sites for the formation and suppression of identities. For some, airports are sites of alienation and inequality, whilst for others they are happy, homely places, a stepping stone between important places in their lives. Nowhere better is this evidenced than the film ‘Terminal’, in which Tom Hanks plays an eastern immigrant whose country suffers from the collapse of its government whilst he is in the air, leaving his papers no longer valid when he lands in America. Forced to stay in the airport for weeks, he feels the brunt of the airport’s hostility and exclusive power, but starts to enjoy and embrace his time there, making many friends, as well as enemies. Today, Adey (2008) argues, borders are shifting even further, spatially and temporally, with your entry into a country being variously permitted or denied from a distance, before you have left your airport of departure. Thus, the ways in which we imagine our place in relation to the rest of the world have changed, air transportation building notions of national identity and citizenship, and variously connecting and disconnecting people and places.

Modern spaces of air travel, as spaces for international border-crossing as well as state and terrorist violence, have triggered increasing regulation of societies. As Adey (2008) states, air-travel has become one of the most closely-monitored and highly-segregated spaces in modern society. Security screening in airports today has reached very intense levels, which redefine both bodies and belongings as ‘threats’. Full-body searches and X-ray machines mean that it is not only international boundaries that are crossed at airports, but also, as Adey (2008) claims, our personal boundaries. All this is part of a new culture of ‘anticipation’, in which our vision has become so accelerated that it has overtaken time (Adey, 2008). The threat of terrorism is, today, pre-empted, an imaginative geography of disaster created before it has even happened, evoking fear and panic.

Air transportation has also had more fatal effects on societies, playing a major part in wars since the turn of the twentieth century. Aerial warfare has come a long way since the air raids of World War Two, with new unmanned aircraft causing terror and destruction to contemporary society. The aerial view – or as Adey (2008) calls it the ‘cosmic view’ – has, since the early days of landscape surveys and the invention of aerial photography, been associated with a powerful total gaze of the world, with limitless capacity for knowledge and control. This total observation is seen, for example, in Israeli-occupied Palestine, where Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are used for aerial surveillance of military and civilian targets (Adey, 2008).

The performance of gender relations within the space of the plane has also, Adey (2008) claims, captured the imaginations of geographers; cockpit and cabin gender roles being fascinating examples of gender relations. A recent paper by Lin (2015) has explored this in relation to air hostesses on a Singapore airline. Feminisation and sexualisation of air hostesses’ bodies on planes has been long been practised by most airlines. In Lin’s (2015) example in Singapore, the design of air hostesses’ uniforms was evocative yet graceful and traditional, whilst interview candidates were carefully screened for flaws or disfigurement, their body shape, beauty, and complexion being important. Even successful candidates underwent various aesthetic ‘corrections’, such as speech therapy, and were prescribed precise shades of make-up to make them appear uniformly ‘beautiful’. Lin (2015) frames the cabin – a ‘mobile atmosphere’, as she calls it – as an important social space, in which geographers have explored the multi-sensorial interactions between passengers and their environment. The plane and its crew provide a ‘service’, passengers’ bodies forming active consumers during their flight. Air hostesses create a comfortable and professional environment for passengers. These women perform a version of femininity whereby they are a friendly, affectionate, reassuring, approachable, helpful, polite, and glamorous aid to passengers’ journeys.

A lot has changed, therefore, in the fifty-eight years since the Munich Air Disaster. There is a vast range of research being done by geographers into the spaces of air travel, research which can help us better understand the social, cultural, and political experiences of airports and air transportation. The looming threat of terrorism means that geographers have a lot to contribute to understanding ways in which different nations engage with air space. However, it is a testament to the continual improvements to passenger safety being made that today geographers are talking about passenger ‘comfort’ rather threats to their ‘safety’.

 

books_icon Adey, P. (2008). “Aeromobilities: Geographies, Subjects and Vision”, Geography Compass, 2(5):1318-1336.

books_iconLin, W. (2015). “’Cabin pressure’: designing affective atmospheres in airline travel”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40:287-299.

60-world2http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-united/11394795/Manchester-United-Munich-Air-Disaster-anniversary-emphasises-the-magnitude-of-footballs-loss.html

60-world2http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/manchester-united-players-fans-remember-10826494

Promoting Feminism, Opposing Inequality

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By Jessica Hope, University of Manchester

Image credit: Jessica Hope

Image credit: Jessica Hope

Last week UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson launched the HeForShe campaign, a solidarity movement for gender equality that calls upon men to stand up against the inequalities and discrimination faced by women. This week is the 69th session of the Un General Assembly, held in New York between September 24th and 30th.  During this assembly, UN Women will help deliberate a post 2015 development framework, new sustainable development goals and an appraisal of the Beijing Declaration.

As debates about gender inequalities are once again hitting the headlines, with a view to implementing new policies and practice, critical analysis of current practice is vital.  In August this year, Lata Narayanaswamy published a review article in Geography Compass Journal titled ‘NGOs and Feminisms in Development: Interrogating the ‘Southern Women’s NGO’. In this article, Narayanaswamy advocates firstly for more nuanced understandings of the diversity Southern Women’s NGOs and their relationship to wider NGO networks and secondly, for recognition of the contested politics of gender and its entanglements with broader identity politics. The article unpacks  how Southern women are represented, categorised and treated by development discourse and shows that too often, ‘Southern Women’s NGO’ is used as a short hand for subaltern, grassroots, collective action – without recognition of the power dynamics and diversity within the category. Moreover, working with Southern Women’s NGOs is too often viewed as synonymous with working with the most marginalised – ignoring the multiplicity of voices that cannot be heard.

As gender inequalities are debated in global platforms, it is vital that geography contributes to these discussions and helps to illuminate the common assumptions and representations that underpin development practice and shape development impacts.

 Narayanaswamy, L (2014) NGOs and Feminisms in Development: Interrogating the ‘Southern Women’s NGO’ Geography Compass 8 (8), pp 576–589

60-world2 United Nations Women (2014) HeForShe 

Arguing against gender blindness in landscape investments

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By Martina Angela Caretta, Stockholm University

Sibou woman spreading irrigation water. Image Credit: The author

Sibou woman spreading irrigation water. Image Credit: The author

2014 is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ year of family farming. Moreover, the African Union designated 2014 the year of agriculture and food security. Family farming, and hence food security, in Africa would not be possible without the contribution of women, who make up for circa 50% of small holder farmers. The majority of agricultural production in Africa is in fact in the hands of smallholders. Nevertheless, women´s role in agricultural production is still somehow not at the forefront of the debate on food security, as it should be. Against this background, comes the timely call from UN Women’s executive director, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, for the Guardian newspaper to give women the opportunity to turn their small farms in sustainable and profitable businesses.

This aim is hardly attainable given the unequal share of natural resources among genders existing in numerous small holder farming societies. This condition mirrors women who have limited access to land and water, leading to definitions of hydropatriarchy: a masculine system of water control and management (Zwarteveen 2008, 127).

The study of irrigation systems is particularly important in the context of small holder irrigation farming in Africa, where the highest population growth is expected. Accordingly FAO, World Bank and IFPRI (2010) point to the need of improving knowledge about and extending irrigation systems in this continent to bring about food security. Hence, my article focuses on two small holder irrigation systems in East Africa: Engaruka, Tanzania and Sibou, Kenya.

Irrigation systems can be seen as long term landscape investments that enhance productivity beyond the current season and have thus been defined academically as landesque capital (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Håkansson and Widgren 2014). Again, in most academic publication, it has been argued that irrigation systems are the results of the systematic work of the men.

In my article I challenge this assumption by analyzing the crucial role played by women in assisting men in the building and maintenance of irrigation channels. Moreover, women are responsible for sowing, weeding, and harvesting which is also a landscape investment. In fact, however invisible, recursive and difficult to measure, these activities are fundamental in maintaining, and potentially creating, soil fertility, which Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) had also categorized as landesque capital.

If academia is not ready to question its own masculine mantra in the production of agricultural landscape, it is unlikely to envision gender-inclusive agricultural policies where women are truly taken into account as stakeholders in the management and control of irrigation. UN and African Union initiatives to bring the spotlight on African farming will thus be meaningless.

About the Author: Martina Angela Caretta is a PhD candidate within the Department of Human Geography at Stockholm University.

 Caretta, M. A. (2014), Hydropatriarchies and landesque capital: a local gender contract analysis of two smallholder irrigation systems in East Africa. The Geographical Journal. doi: 10.1111/geoj.12102

 Blaikie P M and Brookfield H C 1987 Land degradation and society Routledge, London

 Håkansson NT and Widgren M eds 2014 Landesque capital: the historical ecology of enduring landscape modifications Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek CA

60-world2 IFPRI 2010 Discussion Paper 00993 What Is the Irrigation Potential for Africa? A Combined Biophysical and Socioeconomic Approach

60-world2 Zwarteveen M 2008 Men, masculinities and water powers in irrigation Water Alternatives 1 111–30

60-world2 Salami M 2014 Africa in 50 years: what African women want for the future of their continent The Guardian

Content Alert: Geography Compass, Volume 6, Issue 8 (August 2012) is Available Online Now

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Geography CompassVolume 6, Issue 8 Pages 455-511, August 2012

The latest issue of Geography Compass is available on Wiley Online Library.

Click past the break for a full list of articles in this issue.

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Geography Compass Content Alert: Volume 6, Issue 3 (March 2012)

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Cover image for Vol. 6 Issue 3

The latest issue of Geography Compass is available on Wiley Online Library.

Issue Information

Issue Information (pages i–ii)
Article first published online: 5 MAR 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2012.00487.x

Economic Geography

Social Justice and the Creative City: Class, Gender and Racial Inequalities (pages 111–122)
Deborah Leslie and John Paul Catungal
Article first published online: 5 MAR 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00472.x

Geographies of International Education: Mobilities and the Reproduction of Social (Dis)advantage (pages 123–136)
Johanna L. Waters
Article first published online: 5 MAR 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00473.x

Coerced, Forced and Unfree Labour: Geographies of Exploitation in Contemporary Labour Markets (pages 137–148)
Kendra Strauss
Article first published online: 5 MAR 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00474.x

Environment and Society

Measuring the Performance of Partnerships: Why, What, How, When? (pages 149–162)
Claire Kelly
Article first published online: 5 MAR 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2012.00476.x

Environment, Business and the Firm (pages 163–174)
Federico Caprotti
Article first published online: 5 MAR 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2012.00478.x