GENDERED URBAN SPACES AND STRANGENESS IN JEAN RHYS’ GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT (1939)

This article analyses Jean Rhys’ 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight from the standpoint of spatial and gender theory. Firstly, it explores the portrayal of gendered spaces in the modern city. In order to do so, it examines how Sasha Jensen challenges spatial constraints but is then identified as a stranger to the social order. Secondly, a parallelism between the urban automatisation of production and the female body is established to explore how consumer culture affects Sasha. Finally, it examines how the influence that Sasha’s fractured subjectivity has on her social encounters, which situate her on a liminal space.

World War I and Gendering of the Army in Colonial Punjab

This paper seeks to investigate the impulses that encouraged a ‘gendering’ process and its crystallization in colonial Punjab in relation to the masculine culture propagated by the institution of a military-martial structure by the British Raj. The imperial/colonial gender perceptions led to the creation of gendered spaces in a manner conforming to the masculine ideology of the army. This is highlighted through different aspects of the lives of both men and women – their struggles, works, contributions, dreams and politics – before, during and after the First World War (1914-18). As a result, there emerged amongst the soldiers’ new high-class martial castes, middle-class patriarchal structures, and ideological pillars keen on constructing and upholding ‘ideal masculinity’ and ‘safe femininity’. The paper argues that the process of ‘gendering’ took place at two levels. On the one hand, the army structure of the colonial state paved the way for military-martial culture to exist on extreme masculine lines and, on the other hand, this ‘high’ masculine ideology percolated in the society and presented itself in contrast to the women of the region by further relegating them to the feminine spaces. Thus, the society in colonial Punjab presented a layered martial structure, which, in turn, dichotomized the gender binary. The paper attempts to reveal such ‘gender’ realities and experiences witnessed by the region of Punjab. In this context, the operation of imperial power and the resistance of the colonized to it; the space that was denied to the disadvantaged gender – women – and; the changes they imbibed along with the history of the mutual roles of women and soldiers become crucial to understand the ‘gendering’ process.

Doing feminist participatory action research for disrupting traditional gender discourses with Indonesian Muslim kindergarten teachers

The purpose of this article is to explore the authors’ and the co-authors’ reflexivity in feminist participatory action research, conducted in three kindergartens in Indonesia, aiming to disrupt traditional gender discourses in early childhood education settings. Kindergarten is one of the most gendered spaces that perpetuate the binary between femininities and masculinities. This research takes place in Indonesia, one of the most populous Muslim countries in the world. The first part of the study deals with our own reflexivity as university lecturers, middle class and Muslim women, and we use these as a departure point to understand multiple positioning taken by our nine co-researchers as kindergarten teachers, women as well as Muslims and how these influence their gender understanding. The second part of the study discusses the journey of our co-researchers from having gender blind to more gender flexible attitude. As the co-researchers began to acknowledge their personal values, they were better able to apply gender flexible pedagogies to their kindergarten context. The co-researchers also demonstrate different forms of action in implementing gender flexible pedagogy. Our study suggests continuous reflexivity and the possibility of translating gender flexible pedagogy into the co-researchers’ local context were essential factors in this action research.

‘I Don’t Want to Completely Lose Myself’: Social Mobility as Movement Across Classed, Ethnicised, and Gendered Spaces

This article explores how subjective experiences of social mobility are informed by dimensions of identity other than class (e.g. ethnicity, gender). Drawing on in-depth interviews with British-born young women of Bangladeshi Muslim, working class origins in higher education, I critically interrogate their articulations of class positioning and trajectory and the interplay between participation in education and employment and gendered identities. Findings evidence the multifarious and value-ridden character of class signifiers, the relational nature of class positioning and the entrenchment of middle-classness and Whiteness, and testify to the compounding tensions experienced by upwardly mobile individuals of minority ethnic origins. The pursuit of upward mobility through participation in higher education and employment is also shown to entail shifts in gendered expectations and strains in performing valued gendered identities. Ultimately, I argue that social mobility processes are better understood as involving a movement across material and symbolic spaces where markers, dispositions, and practices linked to individuals’ class, ethnicity, religion, and gender acquire differential value. This intersectional lens enables a complex and nuanced picture to emerge, which foregrounds multiple tensions, displacements, and resulting inequalities in experiences and outcomes.