1,721,014 research outputs found
“Scary” heterosexualities in a rural Australian mining town
No full textThis paper draws upon Hubbard's (1999, p. 57) term ‘scary heterosexualities,’ that is non-normative heterosexuality, in the context of the rural drawing on data from fieldwork in the remote Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie. Our focus is ‘the skimpie’ – a female barmaid who serves in her underwear and who, in both historical and contemporary times, is strongly associated with rural mining communities. Interviews with skimpies and local residents as well as participant observation reveal how potential fears and anxieties about skimpies are managed. We identify the discursive and spatial processes by which skimpie work is contained in Kalgoorlie so that the potential scariness ‘the skimpie’ represents to the rural is muted and buttressed in terms of a more conventional and less threatening rural heterosexuality
At work, at home? New geographies of work and care-giving under welfare reform in the US
No full textThis paper examines what is considered work within contemporary US welfare policy and how work relates to care-work. After putting changes to US social welfare policy in the 1990s in context, the paper compares what counts as a work activity under welfare reform. It is argued that 'work' and 'non-work' are implicitly defined in terms of gender, race and space. Through engagement with contemporary feminist social theory (particularly the work of Nancy Fraser), it is argued that within America's new world of welfare, work continues to be defined in terms that are both masculinist and place-based
“Neither forget nor remember your sex”: sexual politics in the early twentieth-century Canadian office
No full textThis paper examines social relationships in the early twentieth-century Canadian corporate workplace, focusing on Quebec—where the majority of the nation's financial services industry was located. I argue that in the course of building new networks for the flow of information and capital, women and men in the early twentieth-century white-collar workplace also produced new meanings about work and gender. This paper has two parts. Part one charts an overview of when clerical work feminized in Quebec, drawing on published census data and a 10% sample of the 1901 nominal census of Montreal. Drawing on personnel files and company journals from several Canadian financial institutions, part two explores social rules and mores about contact across differences—particularly of gender and religious affiliation—in the early twentieth-century white-collar workplace
"Miss Remington" goes to work: gender, space, and technology at the dawn of the Information Age
No full textAt the end of the 19th century, the financial services sector underwent a technological “revolution” with the invention of the typewriter, dictaphone, and hollerith machine. At the same time, the gender of labor within this sector was also changing, such that by the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, most of the work taking place in white-collar offices was performed by women. After introducing the broader research project on which this is based, I consider how technology and social relations shaped one another at the level of the body, the workplace, and with broader networks of branch banking, focusing on early 20th-century Montreal, Canada. I argue that the financial services sector worked to create a system in which men flowed through and women functioned as fixed points. I further argue that this pattern was echoed at different scales within the financial services industry, from the level of the body and the workplace up through spatially dispersed national-level networks
For home and country? Engendering nationalism in the workplace: Pour le foyer et la patrie? Fonder le nationalisme dans le milieu de travail: Por el hogar y por la patria? El engendramiento del nacionalismo al trabajo
No full textThough geographers have taken seriously the ways in which representations of place, race, sexuality and gender are woven into narratives of nationalism through experiences of conflict, spaces of memorialization and the practice of ‘heritage', less attention has been paid to the ways nationalism is constituted in and through day-to-day space and spatial practice in times of peace. This paper examines how nationalism is produced in and through the workplace. In particular, I focus on how narratives of nationalism were constituted within the early twentieth-century Canadian financial services sector. Through an analysis of archival materials from six Canadian financial institutions, I compare how narratives of nationalism were employed strategically by women and men in efforts to win employment in this sector after the First World War. I argue that the workplace constitutes and important site for the production and deployment of nationalist feeling, and suggest that nationalism has long been used strategically to reach multiple, sometimes competing, goals.A pesar de los geógrafos haberle dado importancia a los modos en que representaciones de lugar, raza, sexualidad y género se entretejen en narrativas sobre nacionalismo por experiencias de conflicto, espacios de memorialización y la práctica de 'patrimonio', no han considerado las formas en que el nacionalismo está constituido en espacios cotidianos y por costumbres espaciales cotidianos en tiempos de paz. Este papel examina cómo el nacionalismo está producido en y por el lugar de trabajo. En particular se centra en cómo se constituían las narrativas de nacionalismo dentro del sector de servicios financieros en Canadá al principio del siglo veinte. Mediante un análisis de materiales de archivo de seis instituciones financieros canadienses comparo cómo las mujeres y los hombres empleaban las narrativas de nacionalismo de manera estratégica con el fin de ganar empleo en este sector después de la primera guerra mundial. Sugiero que el trabajo constituye un sitio importante para la producción y despliegue de sentimientos nacionalistas y sugiero que el nacionalismo ha sido empleado de manera estratégica desde hace mucho tiempo para lograr objetivos múltiples y a veces contradictorios.<br/
Reform and resistance: a consideration of space, scale and strategy in legal challenges to welfare reform
No full textThis paper examines the law as a mechanism for resisting neoliberal policy change through a consideration of legal challenges to welfare reform in the United States. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 marked a sea change in both the content and scale of the American social welfare system. It has entailed a downward shift in policy creation and administration from the national to the state and local level, and conveys a heavy emphasis on the "responsibility" of single mothers to engage in waged labor. In addition to changing the scale at which the social welfare system operates, welfare reform has changed how the more oppressive aspects of this policy might be resisted. While some legal advocates are challenging welfare reform by working within the "policy scale", others are invoking national level protections by appealing to Civil Rights legislation. By working against the scale imposed by neoliberal social policy, Civil Rights legislation presents the possibility for advocates to "rescale responsibility" from that of single mothers to submit to wage labor in order to survive, to the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens against identitybased discrimination. Herein, I argue both that the law can serve as an important mechanism for refocusing the scale of resistance in efforts to challenge oppressive social policy; and that even in the face of policy that imposes a local scale, the national level holds potential as an important terrain of resistance
Affect, corporeality and the limits of belonging: breastfeeding in public in the contemporary UK
No full textThe UK has some of the lowest breastfeeding duration rates in the industrialised world. This paper considers women’s experiences breastfeeding in public as a factor in breastfeeding duration. Research is based on a mixed-method qualitative analysis of: 11 interviews and a 46-person survey of new mothers’ experiences breastfeeding in public conducted in Southampton, Hampshire between 2008 and 2009; 180 postings relating to breastfeeding in public submitted to UK parenting website mumsnet between 2007 and 2010; and a patent application for a ‘portable lactation module’. I analyze these data through an engagement with the work of cultural theorist Sara Ahmed in order to argue that the ‘limits of sociability’ in the public space in the UK can be marked through affective practice. This paper makes three unique contributions to scholarship. First, it increases understanding regarding an issue of direct importance to health policy by filling a recognized gap in knowledge about women’s experiences breastfeeding outside the home in the UK. Second, it contributes to the field of health geography by highlighting some of the ways more-than-visual affective environments can shape and constrain health-promoting behaviours. And third, it extends conceptual work in human geography relating to corporeal practice and urban materiality more broadly through an analysis of the relationships between affect, embodiment and the limits of sociability
The way to break the taboo is to do the taboo thing: breastfeeding in public and citizen activism in the UK
No full textLike other forms of infant feeding, breastfeeding is a fundamental act of care. Yet despite being therecommended way of feeding babies, breastfeeding is not always easy to do. In addition to lack ofsupport, bio-physical problems and the need to return to work; discomfort with breastfeeding in publicis a factor shaping infant feeding choice (and the decision to stop breastfeeding specifically). Withincreased awareness of breast milk’s health benefits in recent years, there has been a rise in efforts tomake breastfeeding in public more commonplace and socially acceptable (including through lactationadvocacy or ‘‘lactivism’’). This paper considers breastfeeding in public and lactation advocacy in the UKthrough interviews with lactation activists, non-activist breastfeeding mothers, and participantobservationat two breastfeeding picnics held in 2009. Building on existing scholarship in Geography, Isuggest that lactivism can be understood as an effort to expand the boundaries of where care-work isallowed to take place: thus constituting a form of ‘‘care-work activism’’
Of care and commodities: breast milk and the new politics of mobile biosubstances
No full textAdvances in lactation technology in recent years have changed the ontological status of breast milk, giving it new-found mobility. This paper considers the contested meanings over breast milk’s ‘proper place’ in US and UK society. By synthesizing scholarship from geography, gender studies and science and technology studies, I use the case of mobile breast milk to propose a new framework for how geographers might conceptualize mobile biosubstances. Drawing on the work of Waldby and Mitchell (2006), I suggest that the ways in which breast milk now travels reflect how mobile biosubstances increasingly function as a hybrid form, drawing together elements of both gift-exchanges and commodity-exchanges
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