Gender & Society

The World Social Forum (WSF)—a global gathering of social movements and a process of global change—has come to signify the global justice movements. Since its inception in 2001 in Brazil it has traveled across the Global South, with the 2016 WSF in Montreal. As the WSF has traveled across the world, it has reflected the particular geographies and histories of movement politics in each place. Yet everywhere it has demonstrated what I have called the gendered geographies of struggle. By gendered geographies I mean the epistemic, spatial, and praxis divisions along gender lines evident in the marginalizing of feminist insights about the global political economy and global justice; low representation of women activists in public plenaries and private decision-making structures; and outsourcing of gender issues to women’s activists and movements. Without addressing these gendered geographies, I argue, there can be no global justice.

Given that care duties are central to the definition of motherhood across contexts, an extended separation from the woman’s family due to migration presents a major threat to her social identity as a mother and wife. Drawing on West and Zimmerman’s notion of “doing gender” and ethnographic research on Vietnamese low-waged contract workers in Taiwan, I provide vital insights into the discursive processes and everyday practices that underlie migrant women’s negotiations of motherhood and femininity. Specifically, I examine the various ways migrant women perform and negotiate meanings of hy sinh (self-sacrifice) and chịu đựng (endurance) that are core values of Vietnamese womanhood. Combating the stigma of bad motherhood and failed femininity, I emphasize, is not just about reasserting one’s sense of gendered self but also about reassuring her access to the future support and care of the family. The study emphasizes intentionality and pragmatism in women’s social doings of gender and highlights moral dilemmas in gender politics.

Scholars have yet to understand the gendered performance of aesthetic and emotional labor that maintains routine global power asymmetries. An ethnographic case study of service labor in a global luxury hotel in Beijing, China, reveals how women workers learn to span cultural divides as gendered capacities. These workers must not only “look good and sound right,” they must look familiar and sound understandable. Adopting the term “bridgework,” the research tracks the institutionalization of labor requiring acquisition of the body and the feeling rules of western customers, which reflect the global cultural hegemony of the United States. Managers conceive of these rules as universal, natural feminine orientations, even as they systematically deconstruct and teach them to women workers. Workers bear responsibility for putting rules that bridge divides into practice. When misunderstandings occur, managers attribute them to a failure of the worker’s femininity, rather than the customer’s lack of facility with local practice. Bridgework creates cosmopolitan capital, a form of status accruing to a white, western male business class through ease of movement and preservation of a sense of competence while traveling across borders.

Using the threat of a severe AIDS epidemic in a collection of rural villages in South Africa, we illustrate how men and women reconsider gendered sexualities through conversations and interactions in everyday life. We draw from data collected by local ethnographers and focus on the processes through which men and women collectively respond to the threat posed by AIDS to relationships, families, and communities. Whereas previous research has shown that individuals often reaffirm hegemonic norms about gender and sexuality in response to disruptions to heteronormative gender relations, we find that the threat of AIDS provokes reconsideration of gendered sexualities at the community level. That is, our data demonstrate how men and women—through the interactions and exchanges that make up their daily lives—debate, challenge, make sense of, and attempt to come to terms with social norms circumscribing gendered sexual practices in a context where the threat of a fatal disease transmitted through sex looms large. We argue that ethnographic data are particularly useful for capturing communal responses to events that threaten heteronormative gender relations and reflect on how our findings inform theories of gender relations and processes.

Despite a great deal of feminist work that has highlighted its social construction, menstruation seems a self-evidently “natural” bodily process. Yet, how menstruation is defined or what “counts” as menstruation is rarely questioned. Examining menstruation alongside technologies that alter it highlights these definitional questions. In this article, I examine menstrual suppression through an analysis of medical journal articles and FDA advisory committee transcripts, paired with websites used to market menstrual suppression to consumers. Across these contexts (clinical research, FDA regulation, and advertising), new definitions of menstruation converged on a distinction between bleeding that occurs when women are taking hormonal birth control and when they are not. The case of menstrual suppression birth control pills provides an opportunity to study the work of redefining a biological process understood as quintessentially natural and deeply significant for gendered embodiment, as well as a challenge to consider both the social and material construction of gendered bodies.