Signs最新文献

Drawing on microlevel research with men and women of differing ages living in rural and urban Siem Reap (home to the global heritage and tourist site of Angkor), this article focuses on the key discourses and practices that men and women draw on to (de)stabilize putatively traditional ideals of Cambodian womanhood and to (re)situate them in the contemporary period. Mapping the complex ways that people represent, make sense of, and respond to prerevolutionary cultural norms of female behavior in a very different era (with particular, though not exclusive, attention paid to mobility and education), the article demonstrates how deeper ideological changes concerning women’s relationship to Khmer tradition will have to accompany the surface reordering of Cambodian gender relations if equality between women and men is to be achieved. Until then, the ideal woman in contemporary Cambodian society is ultimately one who can creatively negotiate and balance the multiple demands placed on her by society, family, and self.

“Fertility tourism” is a journalistic eye‐catcher focusing on the phenomenon of patients who search for a reproductive treatment in another country in order to circumvent laws, access restrictions, or waiting lists in their home country. In Europe, the reasons why people seek reproductive treatments outside their national boundaries are quite diverse, in part because regulations differ so much among countries. Beginning with four examples of people who crossed borders for an in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment with gamete donation, this article provides some insight into these transnational circumvention practices based on material from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in Spain, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. In all three countries, gamete donation is made strictly anonymous. Clinical practices such as egg donor recruitment and phenotypical matching between donors and recipients serve to naturalize the substitution of gametes and to install social legitimacy through resemblance markers with the prospective child. In comparison to other areas of medical tourism, which are subjects of debate as a consequence of neoliberal health politics and international medical competition, mobility in the area of reproductive technologies is deeply intertwined with new forms of doing kinship. For prospective parents, it holds a promise of generating offspring who could pass as biogenetically conceived children. Therefore, IVF with gamete donation is mostly modeled after conceptions of nature. Through anonymity and concealment it creates forms of nonrelatedness that leave space for future imaginings and traces of transnational genetic creators.

As part of a feminist commitment to collaboration, this article, which appears as a companion essay to Minh-Ha T. Pham's "The Right to Fashion in the Age of Terror," offers a point of departure for thinking about fashion and beauty as processes that produce subjects recruited to, and aligned with, the national interests of the United States in the war on terror. The Muslim woman in the veil and her imagined opposite, the fashionably modern and implicitly Western woman, become convenient metaphors for articulating geopolitical contests of power as human rights concerns, as rescue missions, as beautifying mandates. This essay examines newer iterations of this opposition, after September 11, 2001, in order to demonstrate the critical resonance of a biopolitics of fashion and beauty. After the events of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush's administration launched a military and public relations campaign to promote U.S. national interests using the language of feminism and human rights. While these discourses in the United States helped to reinvigorate a declining economy, and specifically a flagging fashion industry (as Pham addresses in her companion essay), feminism abroad was deployed to very different ends. This article considers the establishment of the Kabul Beauty School by the nongovernmental organization Beauty without Borders, sponsored in large part by the U.S. fashion and beauty industries. Examining troubling histories of beauty's relation to morality, humanity, and security, as well as to neoliberal discourses of self-governance, the author teases out the biopower and biopolitics of beauty, enacted here through programs of empowerment that are inseparable from the geopolitical aims of the U.S. deployment in Afghanistan.

This essay explores how concepts of value and cheapness circulate around the bodies of clients of the Johannesburg-based cosmetic surgery tourism company Surgeon and Safari. I show how the production of a luxurious experience and the mitigation of risk take place within a transnational network enabled by the presence of medical tourism in multiple locales. By placing Surgeon and Safari's activities within the context of the neoliberalization of health care in South Africa, I explore how the division between private versus public health spaces functions as both a technique of valuing clients' bodies and as a process of racialization.

Tourists travel to Arkansas' mountain regions to experience, appreciate, and consume multiple aspects of otherness, including sacred sites and pristine and authentic peoples and environments. A largely unexplored aspect of this consumption of authenticity is alternative medicine, provided to tourists and day travelers in search of physical and emotional restoration. Traditional forms of medicine are deeply rooted in women's social roles as community healers in the region and are perpetuated in part because of the lack of readily accessible forms of so-called modern medicine. Contemporary medical tourism in Arkansas has promoted access to folk health systems, preserving them by incorporating them into tourists' health care services, and also has attracted new and dynamic alternative medical practices while encouraging the transformation of existing forms of traditional medicine. Ultimately, the blend of alternative, folk, and conventional medicine in the Arkansas highlands is evidence of globalizing forces at work in a regional culture. It also serves to highlight a renewed appreciation for the historic continuity and the efficacy of traditional knowledge in the upper South.

The "new middle class" as a political construct is valuable for feminist theorizations of international political economy, particularly those concerned with development. The rise of the new middle class is usually juxtaposed with neoliberalism, so we offer a new theorization of neoliberalism-as-event and analyze an array of new-middle-class signs and subjects in India. Questioning the repetition of the figure of the new Indian woman in resolving the sociotemporal and spatiotemporal paradoxes of the nation, we argue, first, that the figure of the subaltern woman is a necessary counter to the new Indian woman. The arrival of the gendered subaltern on the national stage is celebrated through discourses that articulate and disarticulate the subaltern woman and bear the traces of subaltern struggles. Her gendered body constitutes the line between who can be new middle class and at the vanguard of neoliberal development and who cannot. Second, we argue that new-middle-class formation is taking place in the households of diasporic returnees through class practices that involve speaking to and for domestic servants. Returnees hold in tension urges to encourage class mobility and to discipline their servants through neoliberal governmentalities that draw on global discourses of corporate responsibility, professionalism, and empowerment. These development scripts are interspersed with reflections on the poor material conditions of domestic service work. The implications of this article for feminist theorizations of international political economy are methodological, analytical, and political.

This article explores the politics and practices of labor in two penal institutions for women: a maximum security facility for women in Hungary and a community‐based facility for women in California. Diverging from other accounts of imprisonment that tend to operate at either the individual or macroeconomic level, this article analyzes the concrete institutional relations of prison and complicates the assumption that they simply reflect the logic of the prison‐industrial complex. Based on years of ethnographic work in two very different penal systems, I describe variation in how prisons institute labor within and across institutions and cultures: the Hungarian facility positioned wage labor as a right and an obligation that formed the basis of women’s social relationships and ties to others, while the U.S. prison excluded wage labor from women’s lives so they could get on with the work of self‐improvement and personal healing. From the comparison, I reveal how prisons can both draw on and subvert broader social meanings assigned to women’s work, making it difficult to view prison labor as wholly exploitative or abusive. I also argue that refusing to allow female inmates to engage in wage labor can be a more profound form of punishment than requiring it of them. By juxtaposing the discourses and practices of work in two very different penal contexts, this article offers a critical reflection on the political economy of prison labor from the ground up.

The goal of this article is to introduce a new category into international political economy-the global household-and to begin to widen the focus of international political economy to include nonmarket transactions and noncapitalist production. As an economic institution composed of transnational extended families and codwellers (including international migrants and family members left behind in countries of origin), the global household is engaged in coordinating international migration, sending and receiving billions of dollars in remittances, and organizing and conducting market- and non-market-oriented production on an international scale. We first trace the discursive antecedents of the global household concept to theories of the household as a site of noncapitalist production and to feminist ethnographies of transnational families. In order to demonstrate the potential significance and effect of this newly recognized institution, we estimate the aggregate population of global households, the size and distribution of remittances, and the magnitude and sectoral scope of global household production. We then examine the implications of the global household concept for three areas of inquiry: globalization, economic development, and the household politics of economic transformation. Finally, we briefly explore the possibilities for research and activism opened up by a feminist, postcapitalist international political economy centered on the global household.

Over the past decade, abolitionist feminist and evangelical Christian activists have directed increasing attention toward the “traffic in women” as a dangerous manifestation of global gender inequalities. Despite renowned disagreements around the politics of sex and gender, these groups have come together to advocate for harsher penalties against traffickers, prostitutes’ customers, and nations deemed to be taking insufficient steps to stem the flow of trafficked women. In this essay, I argue that what has served to unite this coalition of "strange bedfellows" is not simply an underlying commitment to conservative ideals of sexuality, as previous commentators have offered, but an equally significant commitment to carceral paradigms of justice and to militarized humanitarianism as the preeminent mode of engagement by the state. I draw upon my ongoing ethnographic research with feminist and evangelical antitrafficking movement leaders to argue that the alliance that has been so efficacious in framing contemporary antitrafficking politics is the product of two historically unique and intersecting trends: a rightward shift on the part of many mainstream feminists and other secular liberals away from a redistributive model of justice and toward a politics of incarceration, coincident with a leftward sweep on the part of many younger evangelicals toward a globally oriented social justice theology. In the final section of this essay, I consider the resilience of these trends given a newly installed and more progressive Obama administration, positing that they are likely to continue even as the terrain of militarized humanitarian action shifts in accordance with new sets of geopolitical interests.

Although the empowerment of women is a prominent goal in international development, feminist development professionals, activists, and scholars remain deeply dissatisfied with the limited extent to which women's empowerment is actually achieved. Their experiences and analyses raise questions about the connections and disjunctions between discourse, institutional practices, and everyday life. A major effort to reform development aid guided by the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness raises new questions about the place of gender in development practice. Drawing on recently conducted research on women and development in Kyrgyzstan and using a range of institutional texts, we interrogate how development professionals and activists engage with the aid effectiveness discourse. Our analytic approach, institutional ethnography, shares with work on governmentality an empirical focus on practices undertaken by diversely situated people and how these practices constitute a particular field of action. Institutional ethnography directs analytic attention to the operation of texts as local and translocal coordinators of people's everyday activities. The product of this coordinated work is what we call, in this case, the development institution. For those concerned about women and development, we see the usefulness of making visible how global governance is accomplished in both enactments of and resistance to institutional practices, but in ways that do not necessarily benefit women.