Signs最新文献

For abortion seekers, Peru is an uncaring state where legal and policy interventions have resulted in violence, persecution, and neglect. This state of abortion uncare is set within historic and ongoing denials of reproductive autonomy, coercive reproductive care, and the marginalisation of abortion. Abortion is not supported, even where legally permissible. Here we explore abortion care activism within the Peruvian context, foregrounding a key mobilisation that has emerged against a state of un-care - acompañante carework. Through interviews with people involved in abortion access and activism in Peru, we argue that acompañantes have constructed an infrastructure of abortion care in Peru through the bringing together of actors, technologies, and strategies. This infrastructure is shaped by a feminist ethic of care that differs from minority world care assumptions regarding high quality abortion care in three key ways: (i) care is provided beyond the state; (ii) care is holistic; and (iii) care is collective. We argue that US feminist debates relating to the emerging hyperrestrictive state of abortion un-care as well as broader research on feminist care can learn from acompañante activism strategically and conceptually.

This paper draws on ethnographic and interview based fieldwork to explore accounts of intimate relationships between widowed women and poor young men that emerged in the wake of economic crisis and a devastating HIV epidemic among the Luo ethnic group in Western Kenya. I show how the cooptation of widow inheritance practices in the wake of an overwhelming number of widows as well as economic crisis resulted in widows becoming providing women and poor young men becoming kept men. I illustrate how widows in this setting, by performing a set of practices central to what it meant to be a man in this society - pursuing and providing for their partners - were effectively doing masculinity. I will also show how young men, rather than being feminized by being kept, deployed other sets of practices to prove their masculinity and live in a manner congruent with cultural ideals. I argue that ultimately, women's practice of masculinity in large part seemed to serve patriarchal ends. It not only facilitated the fulfillment of patriarchal expectations of femininity - to being inherited - but also served, in the end, to provide a material base for young men's deployment of legitimizing and culturally valued sets of masculine practice.

During the 1980s, a group of women from rural communities in the Mexican state of Sinaloa organized a grassroots social movement in order to gain legal access to the sale of shrimp. The movement reached its peak in 1984, with the formation of a shrimp traders union and the establishment of a shrimp marketplace in the tourist city of Mazatlán. Despite the long trajectory of the movement and the success of the shrimp market, these women and their work have been completely ignored by government agencies in charge of the development and management of the fishing industry. For the most part, one gets to read about the shrimp traders only in tourist-oriented brochures depicting them as a “local attraction,” something to be seen while one is touring the city on a private charter bus en route to the Archaeological Museum or to the upscale jewelry shops in the Golden Zone. In this article, I examine how women used their gender and their identity as rural workers to defy the state and its policies, overcome poverty, and take control of the local marketing of shrimp. Another objective of this article is to show why and how women engaged in collective action so they could be legitimized as workers and how gender shaped their individual experiences.

In 1901, Broome—a port town on the northwest edge of the Australian continent—was one of the principal and most lucrative industrial pearling centers in the world and entirely dependent on Asian indentured labor. Relations between Asian crews and local Aboriginal people were strong, at a time when the project of White Australia was being pursued with vigorous, often fanatical dedication across the newly federated continent. It was the policing of Aboriginal women, specifically their relations with Asian men, that became the focus of efforts by authorities and missionaries to uphold and defend their commitment to the White Australia policy. This article examines the historical experience of Aboriginal women in the pearling industry of northwest Australia and the story of Asian-Aboriginal cohabitation in the face of oppressive laws and regulations. It then explores the meaning of “color” in contemporary Broome for the descendants of this mixed heritage today.

Using the example of one of the African fisheries that has been most significantly transformed from family based to commercialized—that on Lake Victoria in Tanzania—this article considers the social nexus of decision making and focuses on analyzing women’s place. It is true that women have never been more than a minority in fisheries due to traditional inheritance patterns and new market structures, both of which bypass women in questions of ownership and decision making. We look in vain for fishwives, if this means female fish producers acting with a highly visible degree of economic and social autonomy. There is no vernacular term to identify women who work with fish or those rare women who own fishing vessels. And yet the absence of derogatory representation suggests that there have been few attempts to detract from women who are active in the fishery. Should we thus be aiming at more subtlety in our analytical approaches to fishing relations on Lake Victoria? The article unveils the ways in which women’s relations with fishermen are negotiated and how agreements are reached on behalf of their families. It explores for women’s empowerment via the customary social relations and management arrangements that exist in these riparian communities. The lake fishery has a basis for development, but its potential for the kind of growth that will have returns for future generations rests on an appreciation of how fisher-wives conceive of, and respond to, the opportunities, constraints and risks of investing in this fishery.

This article explores the historical understanding of maritime womanhood in Newfoundland by examining women in fishing families along the southern Avalon Peninsula from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It does not talk about fishwives in any popular sense of the word, for these women did not market fish; rather, they produced salt fish for market. And while middle-class observers may have perceived them as coarse and bold, within their own families and fishing communities they were seen as essential partners who contributed equally to family economies. Within a sexual division of labor that assigned vital and complementary tasks to both men and women, Newfoundland fish(-producing) wives carried out hard physical labor at public sites of production. This contributed significantly to the construction of “woman” as essential worker, which in turn had broader repercussions for their status and authority within fishing communities. The participation of fish(-producing) wives changed significantly from the 1950s onward, as the fishery moved from household production to a modernized, and discursively masculinized, industry. Yet the iconic image of the fish(-producing) wife in traditional household production remains undisrupted in the early twenty-first century.