Aboriginal women and Asian men: a maritime history of color in white Australia

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.

Spatial collisions and discordant temporalities: everyday life between camp and checkpoint

How do we make sense of the colonial subject that is neither in revolt nor in open crisis? How do people reproduce their lives, fashion routines, etch out some meaning when the political is evacuated, when time is on hold? These questions loom over a contemporary disjuncture in Palestine, marked in part by the splintering and opening up of the field of subjective bonds, attachments and associations to new modalities of production, less circumscribed by previous normative parameters and engendering a host of complexities and ambivalences in politico-social relationalities. Yet most scholarship on Palestine remains caught up in reductive binaries of violence versus resistance and heavily reliant on rigid and aggregated categories, the bulk of it unable to capture entire assemblages of action, subjective dissonance, productive ambiguities and contingent vitalities that inflect so much of contemporary quotidian life. The refugee in particular has emerged as a destabilizing figure, capable of subversively using the spatio-temporality of the camp as the very resource through which to disturb ascribed categorizations. Reading the paradoxical multiplicity of actions that refugees — women, children and the elderly — perform in the space between Qalandia camp and its checkpoint provides an insight into some of what defines contemporary refugee subjectivities — flexibility, a readiness to take risks, an ability to maneuver through different temporal orders and instrumentalize the spatial fragmentation. These subjects, traversing and negotiating liminality in everyday life, point to lived and bodied affirmations of presence and visibility that cannot be understood through frameworks of recognition and rights.

The evolution of human warfare

Here we propose a new theory for the origins and evolution of human warfare as a complex social phenomenon involving several behavioral traits, including aggression, risk taking, male bonding, ingroup altruism, outgroup xenophobia, dominance and subordination, and territoriality, all of which are encoded in the human genome. Among the family of great apes only chimpanzees and humans engage in war; consequently, warfare emerged in their immediate common ancestor that lived in patrilocal groups who fought one another for females. The reasons for warfare changed when the common ancestor females began to immigrate into the groups of their choice, and again, during the agricultural revolution.

The two worlds of race: a historical view

Franklin's essay traces the practices, policies, and laws that, from colonial times through the mid-1960s moment when he composed his essay, created and sustained the two worlds of race in America. He outlines the history of efforts from that period to alleviate racial distinctions and to foster a "world of equality and complete human fellowship." Franklin cautions, however, that even certain well-intentioned efforts to extend services, opportunities, and rights to African Americans sometimes reinforced segregation and discrimination. He considers how key historical, legal, political, and social developments from the twentieth century -- World War II, the growth of labor unions, the Great Migration, America's ascendancy as a world power, among others -- advanced racial equality in America while often intensifying the backlash from opponents to such equality. Still, Franklin concludes optimistically that however strident those opponents may be, they "have been significantly weakened by the very force of the numbers and elements now seeking to eliminate the two worlds of race."

Between state power and popular desire: tobacco in pre-conquest Manchuria, 1600-1644

Tobacco entered Manchuria on the same wave of early modern globalization that brought it from the Americas to other parts of Eurasia in the early seventeenth century. Introduced into northeast Asia sometime after 1600, it began to circulate widely in Manchuria precisely at a time when Hong Taiji (1592-1643) was building the early Qing state. This essay examines Hong Taiji's efforts to criminalize tobacco in the 1630s and 1640s, arguing that these prohibitions were largely directed at gaining state control over a valuable economic resource. However, within the commercialized milieu of seventeenth-century Liaodong, a region with ties to broader transregional circuits of trade, tobacco's lucrative profits and its pleasurable allure simply overpowered state efforts to monopolize it. As in most other early seventeenth-century Eurasian societies, the Qing tobacco bans quickly gave way to legalization and taxation.

Precious African American memories, post-racial dreams & the American nation

This interdisciplinary essay explores a fundamental paradox at the heart of American race relations since the 1960s: "the changing same." The more things change; the more they remain the same. Combining historical and social-scientific evidence with autobiographical reflections, this discussion critically probes the paradoxical decline and persistence of two dimensions of our enduring racial quagmire: racial inequality and white supremacy. The essay argues that these powerful and interrelated elements of America's continuing racial dilemma demand a massive democratic movement to alleviate both at once. This wide-ranging struggle to realize the promise of American democracy requires more than just a revitalized African American Freedom Struggle that is both intraracial and interracial. Progress toward resolving the seemingly intractable problem of racial inequality in the United States demands far more than intensified efforts to alleviate economic inequality; it requires alleviating white supremacy as well.

Who pays for obesity?

Adult obesity is a growing problem. From 1962 to 2006, obesity prevalence nearly tripled to 35.1 percent of adults. The rising prevalence of obesity is not limited to a particular socioeconomic group and is not unique to the United States. Should this widespread obesity epidemic be a cause for alarm? From a personal health perspective, the answer is an emphatic "yes." But when it comes to justifications of public policy for reducing obesity, the analysis becomes more complex. A common starting point is the assertion that those who are obese impose higher health costs on the rest of the population—a statement which is then taken to justify public policy interventions. But the question of who pays for obesity is an empirical one, and it involves analysis of how obese people fare in labor markets and health insurance markets. We will argue that the existing literature on these topics suggests that obese people on average do bear the costs and benefits of their eating and exercise habits. We begin by estimating the lifetime costs of obesity. We then discuss the extent to which private health insurance pools together obese and thin, whether health insurance causes obesity, and whether being fat might actually cause positive externalities for those who are not obese. If public policy to reduce obesity is not justified on the grounds of external costs imposed on others, then the remaining potential justification would need to be on the basis of helping people to address problems of ignorance or self-control that lead to obesity. In the conclusion, we offer a few thoughts about some complexities of such a justification.

The neoliberal state and the penalization of misery

The strategy adopted by the neoliberal state to maintain social order and safeguard private property in a context of economic deregulation and social precariousness has destroyed the welfare state and aggravated poverty, depriving the masses of any form of social protection while subjecting them to repression. The reinforcement of the repressive state apparatus is associated with the social instability provoked by the lack of social policies, the degradation of living conditions for the great majority of the population, and the amplification of income and property inequalities both in the so-called capitalist periphery and in the richest industrialized countries. The penalization of misery is revealed as a new expression of class domination.

South Africa's abortion values clarification workshops — an opportunity to deepen democratic communication missed

A rich literature exists on local democracy and participation in South Africa. While the importance of participation is routinely built into the rhetoric of government, debate has increasingly focused on the dysfunctionality of participatory mechanisms and institutions in post-apartheid South Africa. Processes aimed ostensibly at empowering citizens, act in practice as instruments of social control, disempowerment and cooptation. The present article contributes to these debates by way of a critique of the approach used by the South African state, in partnership with the non-governmental sector, in what are called abortion "values clarification" (VC) workshops. This article examines the workshop materials, methodology and pedagogical tools employed in South African abortion VC workshops which emanate from the organization Ipas — a global body working to enhance women's sexual and reproductive rights and to reduce abortion-related deaths and injuries. VC workshops represent an instance of a more general trend in which participation is seen as a tool for generating legitimacy and "buy-in" for central state directives rather than as a means for genuinely deepening democratic communication. The manipulation of participation by elites may serve as a means to achieve socially desirable goals in the short term but the long-term outlook for a vibrant democracy invigorated by a knowledgeable, active and engaged citizenry that is accustomed to being required to exercise careful reflection and to its views being respected, is undermined. Alternative models of democratic communication, because they are based on the important democratic principles of inclusivity and equality, have the potential both to be more legitimate and more effective in overcoming difficult social challenges in ways that promote justice.

Between affiliation and autonomy: navigating pathways of women's empowerment and gender justice in rural Bangladesh

Inasmuch as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be "path dependent." They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they seek to change. The universal value that many feminists claim for individual autonomy may not therefore have the same purchase in all contexts. This article examines processes of empowerment as they play out in the lives of women associated with social mobilization organizations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh. It draws on their narratives to explore the collective strategies through which these organizations sought to empower the women and how they in turn drew on their newly established "communities of practice" to navigate their own pathways to wider social change. It concludes that while the value attached to social affiliations by the women in the study is clearly a product of the societies in which they have grown up, it may be no more context-specific than the apparently universal value attached to individual autonomy by many feminists.

Surveillance as cultural practice

This special section of The Sociological Quarterly explores research on “surveillance as cultural practice,” which indicates an orientation to surveillance that views it as embedded within, brought about by, and generative of social practices in specific cultural contexts. Such an approach is more likely to include elements of popular culture, media, art, and narrative; it is also more likely to try to comprehend people's engagement with surveillance on their own terms, stressing the production of emic over etic forms of knowledge. This introduction sketches some key developments in this area and discusses their implications for the field of “surveillance studies” as a whole.

Within salvation: girl hawkers and the colonial state in development era Lagos

For almost two decades between the close of the Second World War and Nigerian independence in 1960, the British colonial state which faced a crisis of legitimacy in Lagos upheld city ordinances that made itinerant trading by young children in Lagos a punishable status offense. Although anti-trading regulations were gender-neutral in their language, girls were disproportionately sanctioned for engaging in street trading and related activities. In defending their concentration on girl sellers over boy sellers, colonial welfare officials painted a picture of the urban context as an inherently dangerous context and of girls as being particularly at risk of violent assault in the city, making them particularly in need of protection from town life. Sources which show that parents generally resisted or ignored the street trading regulations and continued permitting their daughters to sell despite entreaties, warnings, or fines from colonial officials, suggest that African parents and British colonial officials may have had conflicting views on the inherent danger of the city, on what constituted child endangerment, and on the gendered nature of childhood. This article argues that the girl saving campaigns of development era Lagos were as much about the legitimization of a colonial state facing a crisis of legitimacy as they were about debates between African parents and colonial welfare officials in Lagos concerning ideas of children and childhood and the dangers of street trading by African girls.

Confessions of a Wannabe (American Folklore Society Presidential Invited Plenary Address, October 2009)

This paper is a written rendering of a plenary address delivered at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society. Drawing on materials from his forthcoming book Confessions of a Wannabe, the author provides a personal account of the deeply emotional sense of responsibility, obligation, and reciprocity involved in long-term ethnographic research among Native American communities, particularly the Omaha and Pawnee tribes of Nebraska. The author details the ways in which personal relations with the people and communities he has observed have shaped his personal and professional life, and he calls into question the ideal of purportedly neutral or distanced ethnography. Details are provided of the author's experiences in converting his farm into an appropriate reburial site for repatriated Pawnee remains recovered under the aegis of the Native American Graves Repatriation and Protection Act (NAGPRA).

Managing a massacre: savagery, civility, and gender in Moro Province in the wake of Bud Dajo

This article examines the delicate ideological maneuverings that shaped American colonial constructions of savagery, civility, and gender in the wake of the Bud Dajo massacre in the Philippines's Muslim south in 1906. It looks particularly at shifting notions of femininity and masculinity as these related to episodes of violence and colonial control. The article concludes that, while the Bud Dajo massacre was a terrible black mark on the American military's record in Mindanao and Sulu, colonial officials ultimately used the event to positively affirm existing discourses of power and justification, which helped to sustain and guide military rule in the Muslim south for another seven years.

The form, the permit and the photograph: an archive of mobility between South Africa and India

Inspired by recent scholarship that calls for a more critical engagement with archives and knowledge production, this article plots the biography of an archive in Cape Town. Unravelling the layers of paperwork, it locates the origins of the archive in a repressive state project of excluding Indian immigrants and controlling those within the borders of the Cape Colony. The paper trail reveals documents of identity and the state’s attempts to verify identity. In seeking to answer the question as to how the historian should approach such an archive of control and surveillance, it concludes that a social history and gendered approach to migration is possible and the real treasures are those documents that enter the archive beyond the limits of state intentions.

Maternalism, race, class and citizenship: aspects of illegitimate motherhood in Nazi Germany

This article juxtaposes three types of illegitimate motherhood that came in the wake of the Second World War in Nazi Germany. The first found institutional support in the Lebensborn project, an elite effort to raise the flagging birth-rates, which at the same time turned a new page in the history of sexuality. The second came before the lower courts in the form of paternity and guardianship suits that had a long precedent, and the third was a social practice that the regime considered a ‘mass crime' among its female citizenry: namely, forbidden unions between German women and prisoners of war. Through these cases the article addresses issues such as morality, sexuality, paternity, citizenship and welfarism. The flesh-and-blood stories have been culled from the Lebensborn Dossiers and Special Court files, as well as cases from the lower courts.

What was uniform about the fin-de-siècle sailor suit?

The sailor suits widely worn by children in late-nineteenth-century Britain have been interpreted at the time, and since, as expressions of an Imperial ethos. Yet, a closer examination of the ways that these garments were produced by mass manufacturers, mediated by advertisers and fashion advisors and consumed by families makes us question this characterization. Manufacturers interpreted sailor suits not as unchanging uniforms but as fashion items responding to seasonal changes. Consumers used them to assert social identities and social distinctions, selecting from the multiple variants available. Cultural commentators described sailor suits as emulating Royal practice—but also as ‘common’ and to be avoided. A close analysis of large samples of images and texts from the period 1870–1900 reveals how these different meanings overlapped, making the fin-de-siècle sailor suit a garment that undermines many of our assumptions.

[To God through science. Natural theology in Francoism]

In Spain, during Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975) the teaching and divulgation of science were subordinated to the Catholic religion and many books defended a theistic and creationistic point of view of biology that accepted a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis and denied the theory of evolution, especially as it relates to human origin. This article is devoted to the main books and characteristics of this way of thinking which reproduced arguments and metaphors of the pre-Darwinian natural theology, arguing that nature was ruled by God and living organisms were the results of his design.

"Now the African reigns supreme": the rise of African boxing on the Witwatersrand, 1924-1959

This essay explores the growth of boxing among the African populations on the Witwatersrand region of South Africa between 1924 and 1959. It details how the sport's jump in popularity with Africans paralleled migration to Johannesburg. Africans increasingly saw boxing as an activity and skill conducive with survival in this new environment, and thus the sport grew in popularity, stature, and skill-level amongst this emergent urban population. The essay further explores the various ways that the sport was disseminated and popularized during the era, thus detailing how the sport reached both the African masses and petit-bourgeois educated elite. As their presence in Johannesburg became more and more permanent, boxing came to encompass various meanings and ideals, such as notions of discipline, independence and civility, to these urban populations.

Who cares in Nicaragua? A care regime in an exclusionary social policy context

In Latin American countries with historically strong social policy regimes (such as those in the Southern Cone), neoliberal policies are usually blamed for the increased burden of female unpaid work. However, studying the Nicaraguan care regime in two clearly defined periods — the Sandinista and the neoliberal eras — suggests that this argument may not hold in the case of countries with highly familialist social policy regimes. Despite major economic, political and policy shifts, the role of female unpaid work, both within the family and in the community, remains persistent and pivotal, and was significant long before the onset of neoliberal policies. Nicaragua's care regime has been highly dependent on the ‘community’ or ‘voluntary’ work of mostly women. This has also been, and continues to be, vital for the viability of many public social programmes.

South Africa: a legacy of family disruption

This article draws together unusual characteristics of the legacy of apartheid in South Africa: the state-orchestrated destruction of family life, high rates of unemployment and a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS. The disruption of family life has resulted in a situation in which many women have to fulfil the role of both breadwinner and care giver in a context of high unemployment and very limited economic opportunities. The question that follows is: given this crisis of care, to what extent can or will social protection and employment-related social policies provide the support women and children need?

Torture by Cieng: ethical theory meets social practice among the Dinka Agaar of south Sudan

Here I detail violence in South Sudan by first discussing a specific Dinka Agaar practice alongside existing discourses on the social aspects of violence and universal human rights, then I show how these acts had meaning and purpose using data from personal accounts of violence. I posit that the violence described was consistent with Dinka Agaar concepts of justice and basic human rights and that it cannot be judged against any universal human rights standard, devoid of local context or of an overarching metanarrative. These events highlight conflicting subjectivities, ethical norms, and the painful difficulties inherent to advocacy in areas of conflict. Viewed from the perspective of the larger social unit, it is easy to see how violence was required to end violence. However, witnessing punitive violence purposefully enacted on innocent individuals to achieve peace has the potential to create conflicting positions that modern anthropological discourse cannot reconcile.

Two accounts of the colonised "other" in South Asia re-exploring alterity

Taking examples from South Asia, this article shows how British colonial knowledge about the non-European "other" hinged substantially on the participation of sections of that other, especially in the context of liminal groups, for whom no ready standardised formula of identification was available. Development of a colonial episteme often involved active intervention from the colonised body, thereby dispelling any strict notion of coloniser-colonised alterity and mere top-down governance. This process of identity construction took place in several arenas and also involved negotiations in courts of law, where rival sections of the amorphous colonised body fought for competing ideals of selfhood. Complementing this legal construction were ethnographic formulations, internally diverse, and often relating to broader politico-intellectual concerns and debates of the Empire, at different planes in different ways. The article explicates their theoretical bases and practical modalities.

White Anglo-Saxon hopes and black Americans' Atlantic dreams: Jack Johnson and the British boxing colour bar

This article examines the controversy surrounding Jack Johnson's proposed world heavyweight title fight against the British champion Bombardier Billy Wells in London (1911). In juxtaposing African Americans' often glowing discussions of European tolerance with the actual white resistance the black champion faced in Britain, including the Home Office's eventual prohibition of the match, the article explores the period's transnational discourses of race and citizenship. Indeed, as white sportsmen on both sides of the Atlantic joined together in their search for a "White Hope" to unseat Johnson, the boxing ring became an important cultural arena for interracial debates over the political and social divisions between white citizens and nonwhite subjects. Although African Americans had high hopes for their hero's European sojourn, the British backlash against the Johnson-Wells match underscored the fact that their local experiences of racial oppression were just one facet of a much broader global problem. At the same time, the proposed prizefight also made the specter of interracial conflict in the colonies all the more tangible in the British capital, provoking public discussions about the merits of U.S. racial segregation, along with the need for white Anglo-Saxon solidarity around the world. Thus, this article not only exposes the underlying connections between American Jim Crow and the racialized fault lines of British imperialism, but it also traces the "tense and tender ties" linking U.S. and African American history with the new imperial history and postcolonial studies.

“One man one job”: the marriage ban and the employment of women teachers in Irish primary schools

In 1932, the Irish government, facing an economic downturn, introduced a marriage ban which required that female primary school teachers were required to resign on marriage. This followed a series of restrictive legislative measures adopted by Irish governments throughout the 1920s which sought to limit women's participation in public life and the public sector. Such a requirement emerged in several countries in response to high unemployment and applied principally to women's white-collar occupations, leading some commentators to argue that it stemmed from a social consensus rather than an economic rationale. Despite opposition to the ban from the Irish National Teachers' Organisation (INTO) on the basis that it was unconstitutional, would lead to fewer marriages and that married women were in fact more suited to teaching children, it remained in place until 1958. Although the ban is much referred to as part of the gender ideology that informed legislation in the early years of independent Ireland, the particular history of married women teachers has been little researched in the academic context. Over 50 years since the rescinding of the ban, this article examines its impact through an analysis of primary sources, including government cabinet minutes and the public commentary of the INTO and positions this history within the international context.

The household registration system and migrant labor in China: notes on a debate

The household registration (hukou) system in China, classifying each person as a rural or an urban resident, is a major means of controlling population mobility and determining eligibility for state-provided services and welfare. Established in the late 1950s, it was initially used to bar rural-to-urban migration. After the late 1970s reforms, an inflow of rural migrant workers was allowed into the cities to meet labor demands in the burgeoning export industries and urban services without, however, changing the migrants' registered status, thus precluding their access to subsidized housing and other benefits available to those with urban registration. While there have been many calls for reforming this system, progress has been limited. Proposed reforms have attracted increasing academic and media attention.

Cementing the enemy category: arrest and imprisonment of German Jews in Nazi concentration camps, 1933-8/9

Understandably, research has focused overwhelmingly on Jews in the camps of the Holocaust. But the nazis had been detaining Jews in concentration camps ever since 1933, at times in large numbers. Who were these prisoners? This article analyzes nazi policies that brought Jews into the concentration camps. It ventures into the inner structure and dynamics of one of the most heterogeneous groups of concentration camp inmates. By contrasting the perpetrators' objectives with the victims' experiences, this article will illuminate the role of the concentration camp as the ultimate means of pressure in the fatal process of turning a minority group into an outsider group: that is, the act of defining and marking the enemy which was the critical stage before the destruction of European Jewry. Furthermore, it will examine Jewish reactions to SS terror inside the camps.

Minors in name only: child laborers on the diamond mines of the "Companhia de Diamantes de Angola" (Diamang), 1917-1975

Although African men and women comprised the vast majority of the labor force on Angola's colonial-era diamond mines, child laborers, or "minors," also played important roles, primarily as mineworkers and plantation laborers. While these young male and female laborers' daily tasks were often lighter than those assigned to adult males, they often worked side-by-side with more senior workers and were equally subject to physical abuse, poor rations, and injuries. Similarly, minors also employed many of the same strategies as their more senior coworkers to better their lives. Their experiences suggest that these young laborers were minors in name only.

Traditional vocations and modern professions among Tamil Brahmans in colonial and post-colonial south India

Since the nineteenth century, Tamil Brahmans have been very well represented in the educated professions, especially law and administration, medicine, engineering and nowadays, information technology. This is partly a continuation of the Brahmans' role as literate service people, owing to their traditions of education, learning and literacy, but the range of professions shows that any direct continuity is more apparent than real. Genealogical data are particularly used as evidence about changing patterns of employment, education and migration. Caste traditionalism was not a determining constraint, for Tamil Brahmans were predominant in medicine and engineering as well as law and administration in the colonial period, even though medicine is ritually polluting and engineering resembles low-status artisans' work. Crucially though, as modern, English-language, credential-based professions that are wellpaid and prestigious, law, medicine and engineering were and are all deemed eminently suitable for Tamil Brahmans, who typically regard their professional success as a sign of their caste superiority in the modern world. In reality, though, it is mainly a product of how their old social and cultural capital and their economic capital in land were transformed as they seized new educational and employment opportunities by flexibly deploying their traditional, inherited skills and advantages.

Socio-cultural aspects of the high masculinity ratio in India

The paper aims to explicate those factors accountable for the continuing imbalance in the sex ratio and its further masculinization over the whole of the 20th century. Here it is contended that the traditional practice of female infanticide and the current practice of female foeticide in the contemporary period, especially in the north-west and Hindi-speaking states, have significantly contributed to the high masculinity ratio in India. In addition, increasingly higher survival ratios of male children, particularly from the 1951 census onward, have been the prime reason for a declining proportion of females in the Indian population. As the Indian value system has been imbued with a relatively higher preference for sons, improvements in health facilities have benefited males more than females, giving rise to a highly imbalanced sex ratio in the country. This scenario, however, has steadily tended to alter in favour of greater balance in sex ratio.

Food rationing and the black market in France (1940-1944)

French food rationing was more stringent than that of any other Occupied country in Western Europe in the Second World War, and the nation's resulting aversion to a regime that controlled rations and prices would increase the difficulties of post-war governments. This article investigates the role of French state management in wartime food shortages, assessing the parts played by French policy and German interference in the food shortages, the diversion of supplies to the black market and the inequities in distribution. It finds the French rationing administration to have been poorly organized, but attributes significant responsibility to the German Occupation authorities, whose interference increased the rationing system's dysfunction. French consumers blamed the French state for the problems and relied increasingly on alternate means to supplement inadequate rations. The result was a rationing system that delivered malnourishment, social division and hostility to state management of the food supply.

Muslim women and foreign prostitutes: victim discourse, subjectivity, and governance

In this article, we juxtapose the ways “Muslim women” and “foreign prostitutes” are commonly constituted as victims in media and politics. We analyze the functions of these two prototypical female victims in terms of the role they play in epitomizing “the problems of globalization” and in reinforcing the existing social and political structures. Victim discourse, when tied to the transnational proliferation of the sex industry and of (radical) Islam, has depoliticizing effects because it places nonindividual causes of victimization outside of “our” polity and society and casts the state as protector and neutral arbiter of national and global inequalities, marginalization, and social conflict.

"This villa life": town planning, suburbs and the "new social order" in early twentieth-century Sydney

In Australia, social reformers approached the new century and post-First World War reconstruction with the hope of establishing a "new social order" based on national efficiency and class harmony. This was to be delivered through the new science of town planning. The would-be reformers posited themselves as an intellectual vanguard which would provide leadership and assist in establishing an enlightened bureaucracy of professional public servants who would also lead the way to social betterment. Their project, however, had collapsed by the end of the war. Lacking collective political clout, the nascent planning professionals' influence declined as the political environment became more conservative in the 1920s. Reformist and radical features of town planning were stripped from suburban agendas. Suburbs, once held up as the cradle of the 'new social order', were to become places for quarantining class and reinvigorating liberalism.

"No fertile soil for pathogens": rayon, advertising, and biopolitics in late Weimar Germany

Recent research on twentieth-century German history has begun to re-examine the centrality of race as a category of analysis. While not discounting its importance in the shaping and enacting of Nazi policies and practices, race is seen instead as one among many factors leading to the crimes of the Nazi regime. In this paper, the author considers the role consumerist desires and fantasies played in the wider context of the inter-war European fascination with notions of technology, "hygiene," democracy, and modernity. Using advertisements that were created to promote manufactured-fiber (rayon) apparel, this article suggests that continuities across cultures and time periods necessitate a re-evaluation of race as the signal organizing principal. Instead, the author argues that by complicating the intersections between class, science and technology, and an emerging, but troubling, modernity, 1920s rayon advertising offers an especially rich site for analysis of the ways in which biopolitics and nascent consumerism both sold products and constructed ideologies before 1933, and influenced the post-war welfare state.

Expressing the self in Bengali women's autobiographies in the twentieth century

This article discusses evidence from the autobiographical writings of three Bengali women to explore expressions of the self in such literature. Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, Santisudha Ghosh and Manikuntala Sen were contemporaries, all three active in different capacities in the various political formations that shaped the outcome of the struggle against colonial occupation. Their autobiographies lay bare the prescriptions they encountered as daughters and women and the choices they made, all the time straddling multiple worlds, occupying multiple subject positions. The article contends that these autobiographies, along with other personal and public documents, reflect the construction of tortured, fractured female subjectivities that must continually negotiate with "modernity" in early twentieth century Bengal. Consequently, the "female self" in these autobiographies is not a securely rooted and stable entity but is constantly "becoming", as the various fragments try to cohere around an elusive centre, "modernity", which is itself a nebulous, unstable product of multiple discourses.

Our women must return home: institutionalized patriarchy in colonial central Nyanza district, 1945-1963

Colonial policies and practices were very instrumental in the creation of the Luo Diaspora. This Diaspora extended far beyond the physical and cultural boundaries of Central Nyanza as was constituted by the colonial administration. To colonial officials, this Diaspora represented "detribalized natives" responsible for social decay and immorality in the colonial townships. Similarly, to the male elders in the rural areas, this Diaspora was an affront towards destabilizing tribal authority and sanctions, which governed Luo moral order, Luo marriage, and Luo identity as it existed prior to colonialism. This article uses patriarchy as an analytical framework to understand how male elders and colonial officials collaborated to assert control over young women under suspicion of prostitution. The article argues that the Ramogi African Welfare Association (RAWA) was a post-war patriarchal institution which was used by male elders, with the encouragement of the colonial officials, to intimidate, harass and repatriate young women seeking wage employment within the emerging colonial townships. In this article, I use archival and field data gathered from Central Nyanza between 1999 and 2002 to illustrate how institutionalized patriarchy threatened many women and young girls seeking to migrate to colonial towns in order to exploit the limited economic and social opportunities that colonialism provided.

Dianomy: understanding religious women's moral agency as creative conformity

This essay seeks to contribute to work on moral agency of religious women through the creative naming of a dynamic that is emerging in recent scholarship. Drawing on fieldwork in Iran in 2004, I argue that prominent models of agency based on autonomy, heteronomy, and theonomy are unable take into account both religious influence on and individual creativity of women's actions. I propose the neologism, "dianomy," meaning dual-sources of the moral law, to account for moral agency that relies neither exclusively upon the self as a source of moral authority nor exclusively upon religious traditions. Dianomy also attempts to comprehend creative ruptures in obedience to tradition, even when these innovations are unintentional. Such a concept is particularly important in order to correct past tendencies to ignore or even negate feminist politics that do not resist or strategically reform religious norms. With dianomy, tactical moves, actions that are not "freely chosen," and even happy accidents can be studied as productive within traditional religious communities. I call these types of actions, which confound the actions theorized by autonomy, heteronomy, and theonomy, "creative conformity."

The rights of a Florida wife: slavery, U.S. expansion, and married women's property law

Civil law rules were adopted in Florida that granted married women property rights long before legal reforms occurred in northern states. This article analyzes white wives' property and law in Florida between 1820 and 1860. Initially, married women's property rights were inadvertently protected by treaty law and limited to women who married before 1818. Wives' right to own separate property in Florida was subsequently reconfirmed in statute and extended to include later marriages. In contrast, nonwhites generally lost the rights and property they had enjoyed under Spain's civil law in the same period. This contrast reveals that in Florida (and other southern borderlands) it was not concern for women, or simply legal precedent, but the desire to incorporate new territory and expand slavery that influenced the development of marital property law. This challenges previous histories, which have excluded the earlier acts in the Southern borderlands and emphasized those passed in the Northeast beginning in the late 1840s. While those later acts were influenced by the early woman's rights movement and by concern for families reduced to poverty during the rise of market capitalism, this case study indicates that expansion of United States territory and slavery were responsible for the earlier married women's property rights in southern borderland territories such as Florida.