Discursive Constraints on Pregnant Women's Participation in Sport

I discuss the discursive constraints on the participation in sport of 22 Hamilton women who are pregnant for the first time. Most women tended to withdraw from sport especially as they became more visibly pregnant. Their withdrawal can be partly explained using Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection. Pregnant bodies are often considered to be fragile, fearful and ‘inactive’-they are containers for unborn children and are best confined to places and activities where protection for the unborn child can, supposedly, be maximised.     

Women in agriculture: advocates for a gendered sustainable agriculture

A gendered consideration of rural geography has been barely discernible within Australian and New Zealand literature. The notable exceptions in this case have illustrated the complexity and merit of studying the gender patterns and relations of rural life. Outside geography, there is an expanding literature on rural women in Australia. These works parallel significant developments in the lives and politics of rural and agricultural women themselves. This paper reports selected findings from a study of the women in agriculture movement in Australia. As such, it illustrates the increased awareness of the gendered conditions of farming. The women in agriculture movement works to increase the recognition of women's contribution to agriculture. In doing so it affirms the legitimacy of women farmers’ voices and perspectives. There will be no sustainable rural systems while half the rural population is unseen or unheard. Women in agriculture demonstrate a social dimension of sustainability. They highlight the need to integrate gender equity and a ‘wider‐than‐economic’ conceptualisation of sustainable agriculture. Their actions can stimulate rural geographers to further consider the social and political aspects of rural sustainability beyond the conventional farm/industry and community service sites we usually consider.     

Counting for Women*

Despite their limitations, quantitative methods have an important role in feminist geographic research. As discussed in this essay, quantitative methods can contribute by describing and analyzing the broad contours of difference, by providing a basis for informed policy making and progressive political change, by identifying people and places for in-depth study, and by situating qualitative research in a broader context. At the same time, feminist insights can enhance quantitative analysis. Collaboration between quantitative and qualitative researchers is essential.     

Women on wheels: Gender and cycling in Solo,Indonesia

This paper explores the question of how to promote cycling among women who face disproportionate mobility and accessibility barriers in rapidly urbanizing contexts by analyzing empirical findings from a multi‐method research study based in Solo, Indonesia. Building on and applying a combination of critical gender, geography, and development perspectives, it focuses on the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of women residing in low‐income neighbourhoods with little access to public transportation networks in Solo as an ‘indicator species for bike‐friendly cities’. Based on research and analytic findings, the paper further contemplates alternative policy and planning approaches to promoting cycling in more gender‐inclusive and responsive terms.     

Women, science and identity: interviews with female physical geographers

Summary Interviews with female physical geographers show that although the significance of gender in influencing a woman's position and identity in physical geography is contested, gender still remains an important social relation that structures the personal relations, institutional practices and material outcomes of academic physical geography.     

Women in Geographic Education: An Agenda for the New Century

Abstract

Geography textbooks represent an underutilized raw material for understanding the society which created them and which, with their aid, “writes” important images for social survival. This paper represents an attempt to examine the images of the Palestinians that are embedded in Hebrew geography textbooks that have been written over the past century during which Zionism has existed. The texts, which were examined with the aid of ideas provided by Thompson (1987) and others, indicate the existence of a wide range of treatments of the Palestinians: ethnocentric, romantic, experiential, anthropological, etc. The spectrum of images is dependent on the historical period in which the text was written and the relations that were created between the Palestinians and Zionism in the Land of Israel.     

Faculty Reappointment,Tenure, and Promotion: Barriers for Women

Women faculty continue to experience academe differently than male faculty. A review of recent literature indicates that women's representation on university faculties has advanced slowly; women are less likely to be tenured or promoted compared to male faculty; and women faculty earn less than their male colleagues. A recurring theme is that the intellectual and social isolation of women faculty affects their research productivity. Gender stereotypes held by colleagues, departmental and college administrators, and students also contribute to the difficulties women face in the reappointment, tenure, and promotion process. A personal perspective on the reappointment process is provided in order to illustrate how isolation and naïvete regarding the social structure of academe can affect a woman's career advancement. The benefits of greater representation of women on university faculties are reviewed, and departmental and college administrators are reminded of the important role they play in ensuring future gender‐balanced faculties.     

Faculty Reappointment,Tenure, and Promotion: Barriers for Women

Women faculty continue to experience academe differently than male faculty. A review of recent literature indicates that women's representation on university faculties has advanced slowly; women are less likely to be tenured or promoted compared to male faculty; and women faculty earn less than their male colleagues. A recurring theme is that the intellectual and social isolation of women faculty affects their research productivity. Gender stereotypes held by colleagues, departmental and college administrators, and students also contribute to the difficulties women face in the reappointment, tenure, and promotion process. A personal perspective on the reappointment process is provided in order to illustrate how isolation and naïvete regarding the social structure of academe can affect a woman's career advancement. The benefits of greater representation of women on university faculties are reviewed, and departmental and college administrators are reminded of the important role they play in ensuring future gender-balanced faculties.     

Women in the Field: Critical Feminist Methodologies and Theoretical Perspectives*

Feminist scholars have traditionally emphasized the importance of incorporating “the everyday” worlds of women into the historically masculinist theoretical and empirical foundations of the social sciences. Such emphases have commonly resulted in smaller-scale research projects and more interactive kinds of research methods and methodologies. Feminist geographers have uniquely contributed to the body of feminist scholarship through drawing out the importance of place in everyday constructions of gender and, more recently, sexuality. Critical field-based research has therefore from the beginning been the mainstay of subdisciplinary research. Like the discipline as a whole, however, little explicit attention has been given in publications or pedagogically to the politics of fieldwork (including how a “field” is defined and the politics involved in choosing and working in a particular “field”) or the politics of representation (which includes considerations of the partiality of knowledge and how and to whom we represent our work, ourselves and others in various kinds of texts). These “Opening Remarks” show how these issues are addressed in the papers that follow and how feminist geography has much to contribute to critical analyses of global and multinational processes, including patriarchy, capitalism, and racism.     

Women and seed management: A study of two villages in Bangladesh

Seed management has until recently been neglected in agrobiodiversity research. Gender dimensions in seed selection, processing, storage and exchange embody critical task areas in the human management of diverse crop species and varieties. This paper focuses on women's roles in seed management in field and homegarden crops in Bangladesh and reports on the findings of a study in two villages in Tangail District. Seventy-five women were surveyed with a questionnaire and subsets interviewed in-depth; focus groups conducted for women and men provided a means of cross-checking responses. Three distinct areas of agrobiodiversity were addressed: the gendered divisions of labour among agricultural tasks; the pervasiveness of seed saving among respondents; and seed management practices and techniques. The results indicate that while men have greater authority over field activities, homegarden production is the exclusive domain of women. Seed management is seen as an extension of women's domestic duties: women are responsible for all seed processing, storage and exchange for field as well as homegarden crops. The vast majority of seeds sown are saved on-farm by women, revealing important cultural, economic and environmental implications for agrobiodiversity conservation and local differences.     

Heading Households and Heading Businesses: Rural Kenyan Women in the Informal Sector

The dynamics of intra-household economics among sedentary farmers in rural Kenya suggest that women, whether or not they have a male household head, are responsible for providing basic resources to insure the daily survival of household members. Many rural Kenyan women operate small businesses in rural market centers in order to meet these obligations, and many of these women are also heads of their households. This paper examines women's resource bases for establishing and maintaining small-scale businesses. Compared to women who are associated with male-headed households, women who head households have fewer resources for establishing businesses which in turn generate lower earnings. At the same time, these women are almost completely dependent on their businesses for meeting the household's needs.     

Inhabiting the Imaginary: Factory Women at Home on Batam Island, Indonesia

Batam Island, Indonesia, located a short ferry ride away from Singapore, is a place where tourism and industry have been developed simultaneously and a border area where “developed” and “developing” nations meet. Government officials, investing international corporations and the “factory women” who work in the island's industrial estates arrive in Batam ‐ native to none of them ‐ with their own preconceptions and goals. When challenges not foreseen through master planning arise, the authorities cling ever more tightly to their physical and structural development model: the nearby city‐state of Singapore. Conversely, the factory workers who travel intranationally to work in this export processing zone (EPZ) find their objectives contested in the face of the Master Plan, corporate agendas and ethnic fusions characterising this transnational capitalist space. Entering into the homes of three groups of women migrants living and working in Batam, the relationship between the private realm that they inhabit and the social contexts in which they participate publicly is investigated. Some of the choices that women make at and about home are identified, and their ability to “micro‐resist” these external structures is explored. At home, the dynamic relationship between the Batam development project and the women's own hopes and visions of the place ‐ sometimes parallel and sometimes incongruous ‐ are revealed. As they experience life on Batam, their “social imaginaries” of it are shaped into various new realities, and their homes, removed from the confines of the factory floor, thus become spaces of release from these tensions.     

Women in geography in the 21st century. Introductory Remarks: Structure,Agency, and Women Geographers in Academia at the End of the Long Twentieth Century

This paper provides an introduction to the set of articles presented in the focus section Women in Geography in the 21st Century. The paper argues that feminist geographers should view their professional biographies in a structure-agency context. Such a theoretical perspective views events that are commonly thought to be unique and attributable to individual merit or foible as the outcome instead of interactions between actors and social structures. Creating genuinely equal opportunities in geography departments for women and others who are different from the able-bodied, middle-class, white heterosexual male model of “the geographer” depends upon challenges to and transformations of the structures which bear on the discipline, rather than solely upon individual initiative.     

Women in geography in the 21st century. Introductory Remarks: Structure,Agency, and Women Geographers in Academia at the End of the Long Twentieth Century

This paper provides an introduction to the set of articles presented in the focus section Women in Geography in the 21st Century. The paper argues that feminist geographers should view their professional biographies in a structure‐agency context. Such a theoretical perspective views events that are commonly thought to be unique and attributable to individual merit or foible as the outcome instead of interactions between actors and social structures. Creating genuinely equal opportunities in geography departments for women and others who are different from the able‐bodied, middle‐class, white heterosexual male model of “the geographer” depends upon challenges to and transformations of the structures which bear on the discipline, rather than solely upon individual initiative.     

Transit,Employment and Women on Welfare1

Inadequate transportation has emerged as a major barrier to employment for welfare recipients required to transition from public assistance to employment under welfare reform. Transportation is a particularly daunting barrier for single women without access to a household car. This study uses multivariate techniques to examine whether nearby transit access impacts the employment outcomes of this population in Los Angeles County. Results show that the level of transit service near a recipient's home makes a moderate, yet statistically significant, contribution to increasing the probability of employment and transit use for work-related trips. However, recipients who use public transit face multiple problems, including overcrowding and infrequent service.