Gender and History最新文献

This article combines ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Coast's Kotokuraba Market with theories of ‘the right to the city’ and historical literature on gender and space in West Africa to highlight the connections between women's food labour and the social production of market space in Ghana. In identifying two critical moments from Ghana's history that exemplify the influence of economic policy on the gender arrangement of the marketplace, this article argues that although women have historically dominated Ghana's public marketplaces, their ‘right to the city’ – the collective and individual rights to determine the form and function of market space – remains out of reach.

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, pobladora women in Valparaiso were crucial in the organisation of their communities and the ollas comunes (common pots). Many observers linked these new ollas comunes to the ones that existed during the Pinochet dictatorship, in this manner citing a politics of gendered memory and local feminist history that allowed them to re-organise in record time. The article explores this comparison, using women's narratives on ollas comunes in the past and the present in order to critically assess their similarities and differences. Additionally, it analyses how, and why, pobladora popular feminist memory regarding food insecurity resistance strategies and ollas comunes is transferred between generations. This article uses interviews done with popular-sector and feminist women in the Chilean port city of Valparaiso during 2020 and 2021, as part of the project, ‘Women's Solidarity Networks Take on COVID-19: the case of Valparaíso, Chile’.

How did Haiti, where peanuts were once a staple crop often grown, traded, processed and shared by women, reach its contemporary food crisis, when some mothers must feed their children a diet of donated peanut-based nutritional supplements to keep them alive? Case studies of peanuts as food aid in Haiti reveal the ways neoliberalism and disaster capitalism stymie women's embodied sovereignty. This article uses the concept of embodied sovereignty to build on food sovereignty literature, enabling a sharper focus on the bodies that produce, process, feed and eat food, as well as the historical production of gendered food responsibilities, and the life-and-death stakes of sovereign power.

This article explores the way that bourgeois women academics and social reformers adopted the quantified language of economics to advance their own position in the Weimar Republic. As statistics and indices proliferated as measures of national recovery, women attempted to record and describe their own economic realities within the household. They promoted bookkeeping as an indispensable tool of household rationalisation. This article argues that these bookkeeping practices enabled prominent women, including Henriette Fürth, Alice Salomon and Erna Meyer, to delineate the household – in its role as both economic unit and unit of reproductive and care work – as a site of economic importance and a field of intervention in the nascent social welfare state. Furthermore, the article shows how in the 1920s and 1930s, the market intruded into domestic life to shape notions of value and worth.

Reading two United States Department of Agriculture propaganda films, Helping the Negro Farmer (1921) and The Negro Farmer (1939) along with Maryland narrative reports, this article considers the evolution of state-sanctioned discourse around domestic science, race and diet. The films rely on themes that construct the Negro home as a foil to a whitewashed progressive domestic front. Tasked with reforming this home, Negro female home demonstration agents participated in these films and worked as interlocutors, selling the narrative of kitchens as workshops of patriotism and civility. Yet, they also negotiated a form of domestic citizenship, crafting tactics of early Black food sovereignty despite being underfunded. This important period of African American foodways urges us to consider how agents were both framed as expert and expendable in the production of a national domestic standard.

This article examines the intersections between gender, domestic slavery, maritime empires and food in the early modern world, focusing on the Dutch East India Company's empire in the Indian Ocean during the eighteenth century. It traces the stories of three very different women in the Dutch Indian Ocean Empire and shows how food provisioning, preparation and consumption intersected with their gendered, racialised and classed roles in European colonial kitchens. In different ways, these women exerted sovereignty over food in colonial households which highlights their role as active participants in both shaping and contesting the social hierarchies of empire.

For Turtle Island's Buffalo Nations – those sharing a common food system with bison at the centre – herds are a food source, as well as relatives and pillars of cultural continuity. Bison give life while exemplifying it to their tribal relatives who learned from the herds’ matriarchal organisation. Other matriarchs, including regional seeds, offer their own cultural teachings to help balance buffalo foodways. Colonial annihilation of these interspecies relatives was an attack on Indigenous People's relationships and lifeways. Re-centring these knowledge systems and ways of being is a priority in asserting tribal sovereignty and revitalising foodways. To do so, two initiatives in the Fort Peck Reservation are using contemporary tools, interlaced with cultural knowledge to increase access to Indigenous foods. First at the Fort Peck Bison Ranch where community members organise a hunt and oversee animal transfers to other communities re-establishing their own cultural herds. Further, Woicago Tipi, a Fort Peck gardening project, is working to rematriate Indigenous seed varieties so that they may continue to adapt to the regional climate and rebalance Buffalo Nation food systems.

For survivors of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, food is a sensory embodiment of the punishment and powerlessness they experienced while contained within the institutions. As part of the Irish Free State's architecture of containment, the relationship between the Laundries and the state is unique: the Catholic-run institutions operated outside of state bureaucracy, yet they were central to its attempts to consolidate sovereignty as a fledgling nation. For historians, the sensing body is one of the few avenues to understanding the Magdalene institutions and their place in twentieth-century Irish history. This article uses memories of food as a point of access to the subjectivities of survivors, and in doing so reveals the affective imprint of institutional power on embodied experience.