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- Convenors:
-
Laurel Bossen
(McGill University)
Hill Gates (Central Michigan University)
- Stream:
- Relational movements: Crossroads, Places and Violences/Mouvements relationnels: Carrefours, Lieux et Violences
- Location:
- FSS 1006
- Start time:
- 3 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Constraints on personal mobility have been instruments of social control across time and cultures. By considering examples of control and exclusion of "others" - women, ethnic, and social minorities - from public spaces, we explore the ways differences are magnified and inequalities perpetuated.
Long Abstract:
Constraints on personal mobility have been instruments of social control across time and cultures. By considering examples of control and exclusion of "others" - women, ethnic, and social minorities - from public spaces, we explore the ways differences are magnified and inequalities perpetuated.
Differences in ability to move around in public, outside the home, and outside the neighborhood, and to access places offering wider knowledge and resources, have been experienced through a wide range of disabling and enabling mechanisms. Such mechanisms have included footbinding, different dress requirements such as veiling, and a wide range of ethnic, color, gender and social prescriptions that limit access to public places. These mechanisms can affect the confidence with which an individual can go outdoors and walk to school, to work, or to market; the safety or danger individuals experience when driving, riding buses or trains, seeking places to eat, access to public washrooms and sanitary amenities, or finding secure guest houses or accommodations. We would like to explore differences in the range of movement beyond the home, and the ways in which types of personal movement by day or by night, become "safer" modes for diverse types of people in rural and urban settings and societies. We explore the constraints and challenges in striving to make greater movement a possibility and an opportunity for individuals and groups to participate in public life.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Laurel Bossen (McGill University)
Paper short abstract:
19th and early 20th century Chinese footbinding limited girls' and women's ability to move about. Macro-economic changes and globalization stimulated its demise. How did rural women overcome cultural resistance and shift from cloistered lives behind the courtyard gate to participate in public space?
Paper long abstract:
When industrial output engulfed Chinese markets, footbound female labor had to shift from intensive handwork at home to other types of training and labor that required physical movement outside the home. In less than 50 years, Chinese women broke through many cultural constraints on their physical movement. The economic context of changing demands for labor pushed and pulled women into public space. Cultural constraints enforced by family, clan and village also had to be confronted. How was resistance to women's presence in public spaces and participation in life outside the home overcome?
Drawing on ethnographic and survey data, interviews with now aged footbound women, and historical sources, I describe the barriers that hampered women's movement outside the home. In addition to economic change, political and social interventions by the state ultimately forced a profound and relatively rapid shift in the way women were expected to participate in public life. Although gender equality remains a distant goal, Chinese rural women have possibilities for movement through public space, for education, and for employment that many other Asian women lack. This paper considers steps involved in the transformation of women from "indoor" people to mobile citizens.
Hill Gates (Central Michigan University)
Paper short abstract:
In preindustrial agrarian societies, a girl's earnings, though pooled with kin, could gain her a nearby rather than a distant marriage. For Chinese brides, nearby marriage was less disruptive of a girl's slender social capital than a distant out-marriage.
Paper long abstract:
How was the spatial movement of Chinese brides influenced by girls' pre-marital work? That work met nearly one-quarter of many families' labor needs, engaging them in cryptic fashion in a complex preindustrial economy. That work took many forms, from textile, basket, and mat making to the collection of dispersed raw materials such as the fruit of the tong oil tree. I hypothesize that money-earning premarital work affected the spatial distribution of brides from different communities. Distance, in turn, affected the resources on which a young married woman might depend by diluting the social capital that even girls could accumulate. Nearby marriages enabled continued contact with the community a new bride knew best. I test two hypotheses on interviews with 1500 elderly Sichuan women, interviewed in 1990-91. When girls produced goods for home use only, their marital distribution should be scattered; when they produced for market, marriages were made nearer their natal homes. Girls' earning capacity helped them, to some degree, to retain the advantages of postmarital residence that was relatively near to their childhood homes, kin, and social ties.
Giovanni Spissu (University of St Augustine)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I discuss how the process of aesthetical reterritorrialization is shaping and transforming the social, political and moral landscape of Cape Town, including how people imagine, understand, relate to and dwell within urban spaces.
Paper long abstract:
In post-Apartheid Cape Town, the removal of physical barriers that had previously restricted free movement led its people to new and different forms of being and of experiencing the city across the different sensory domains. I argue that this sensory reappropriation of Cape Town's urban landscape presents a distinct type of reterritorialization, whereby people actively build new ways of living in, relating to and signifying the city through their sensory and aesthetic actions. In this paper I discuss how the process of aesthetical reterritorrialization is shaping and transforming the social, political and moral landscape of Cape Town, including how people imagine, understand, relate to and dwell within urban spaces. In my research in Cape Town between 2011 and 2012 I investigated the processes of reterritorialization of Cape Town, in which I adopted a type of observation of the city based on urban movement. For example, walking through the streets of Cape Town with Marleane, a young woman resident in the township, I realized how the practice of her moving through the city could not be disconnected from the flow of inner thoughts and images that crossed her mind. Through urban movement she reappropriated the urban spaces of Cape Town, projecting her memories, thoughts, imagination onto them. Drawing from Alex La Guma's novel, A Walk in the Night (1962), and comparing it to the type of movement of Cape Town's inhabitants, I explored the sensory perception of the urban territory and the processes of urban reterritorialization.
Homa Hoodfar (Concordia )
Paper short abstract:
Political Islamists deem women's bodies and their physical movements in public spaces to be a source of disorder. This paper describes how, lacking democratic channels, women politicize fashion and sports to demand citizenship rights and redefine womanhood in Muslim contexts.
Paper long abstract:
The increasingly restrictive and unconventional interpretation of Islamic mores by political Islamists, stressing the need for observing an Islamic code of modesty goes far beyond wearing hijab which covers the entire body except face and feet. The political Islamists have deemed women's bodies and their physical movements in public spaces to be a source of social disorder which inappropriately arouses male sexual desire.
In response, many women are taking up the Muslim veil and simultaneously demanding to have access to the public sphere and presenting their own interpretation of Islam which is based on gender justice and gender equality. In the absence of formal democratic channels for citizens to have a real influence on public policies and programs in many Muslim majority societies, women have embarked on politicizing spaces normally viewed outside politics. In this context fashion and sport have proven to be a vociferous contestation arena where public/gender politics is played out. Women's presence in sport which is a major public space in terms of players and/or spectators, is a medium and space where women's entanglement with politics, power, religion, and resources is playing out in Muslim contexts. Based on a longitudinal study the paper presents the evolution of contestation over access to public spaces, veiling, and women's sport in Iran and wider Muslim contexts.
Camelia Suleiman (Michigan State University)
Paper short abstract:
A Linguistic Landscape analysis of Arabic in Israel points to a language in distress in spite of its official status. Language attitude seems stronger than official status in providing a public space for Arabic speakers. The limits of Arabic seem to signify the limits of Arab presence in Israel.
Paper long abstract:
The Arabic language in Israel enjoys an official status. However, a Linguistic Landscape analysis of signage points at a language in distress. Much of the research has focused on the loss of land and the limits of physical mobility for Palestinians, but not on the language in public spaces in Israel. While Arabic appears second to Hebrew on most road signs, generally followed by English, one notes the following: Arabic script is mostly a transliteration of the Hebrew place name name and not the Arabic name. Arabic is generally written carelessly with spelling and/or grammar mistakes, and many signs in Jerusalem appear with the Arabic crossed over with dark paint, creating a powerful visual effect on the viewer. Despite the municipal regulation of signage in a city like Jerusalem, subtle acts of resistance are able to escape the regulators' eyes, such as in the Saladin, the main street in East Jerusalem.
These observations are based on fieldwork in Israel in the summers of 2013-2015. The study concludes that while Linguistic Landscape analysis is a powerful visual indicator of the symbolic value of a language in a community, it should be anchored in the historic, social, political, and economic contexts. The presence of Arabic in public spaces seems to demarcate the allowable space for Arabic in the state of Israel. Note that in Jerusalem both peoples live in "unwilling proximity" (Butler 2012), with state limitations for the movement of the Arabs, but not the Jews."