‘It's true,I'm English… I'm not lying’: essentialized and precarious English identities

This article explores relationships between Englishness and racialization in order to consider the potential for English identities that are progressive in anti-essentialist or multicultural terms. The article draws on data from interviews in which people from a South London area talk about Englishness. I will examine how English identities are understood by participants who are white and participants who are not white. While white participants experience Englishness as a taken-for-granted identity, for participants who are not white English identities are a more calculated, precarious performance. I will then examine discussions of ‘who can be English’. While most participants argue that ‘anyone can be English’ in principle, this is not necessarily the case in practice. It will be suggested that talk of Englishness is particularly constrained by relationships between Englishness, whiteness and ancestry, but that for those who experience Englishness as precarious there are signs that this is not necessarily the case.     

Trends in educational attainment by race/ethnicity,nativity, and sex in the United States, 1989–2005

Despite the importance of education for shaping individuals’ life chances, little research has examined trends and differences in educational attainment for detailed demographic subpopulations in the United States. We use labour market segmentation and cohort replacement theories, linear regression methods, and data from the National Health Interview Survey to understand educational attainment by race/ethnicity, nativity, birth cohort, and sex between 1989 and 2005 in the United States. There have been significant changes in educational attainment over time. In support of the cohort replacement theory, we find that across cohorts, females have enjoyed greater gains in education than men, and for some race/ethnic groups, recent cohorts of women average more years of education than comparable men. And in support of labour market segmentation theories, foreign-born Mexican Americans continue to possess relatively low levels of educational attainment. Our results can aid policymakers in identifying vulnerable populations, and form the base from which to better understand changing disparities in education.     

Mixing as an ethnoetiology of HIV/AIDS in Malaysia's multinational factories

Minah Karan, the stigmatizing label appended to Malay factory women in the 1980s, signaled a dangerous female sexuality that risked spreading beyond the factory gates and infecting Malaysia's idea(l)s of its traditional kampung culture. This article narrates how Minah Karan, as the former antihero of development, was reconstituted in the 1990s, with the government's labeling of factories as high-risk settings for HIV/AIDS. This is an ethnoetiology based not on any evidential epidemiological data but on the racial and gendered mixing that transpires behind factory walls: a fear that the mixing of the sexes means ipso facto sexual mixing among the races. The article demonstrates how importation of the high-risk label articulates at the local level the new and contested linkages, economic, religious, and scientific, constitutive of globalization. The pragmatic nature and imperatives of this high-risk process are discerned in factory women's accounts of how they negotiate the interactional imperatives of factory work, because transnational structures of productivity violate the social boundaries that have long connoted political stability, moral integrity, ethnic community, and individual safety. The article concludes by questioning whether ethnoetiologies, especially when they concern sexual networks, become social etiologies, because this would locate ethnoetiologies as central to conventional public health praxis rather than as ethnographic exotica in the margins.     

‘For her protection and benefit’: the regulation of marriage-related migration to the UK

This paper argues that a two-tier system has evolved dividing intra-UK/EU marriages from extra-UK/EU marriages. For the former, marriage is a contract between two individuals overseen by a facilitating state. For the latter, marriage has become more of a legal status defined and controlled by an intrusive and obstructive state. I argue that this divergence in legislating regulation is steeped in an ethnicized imagining of ‘Britishness’ whereby the more noticeably ‘other’ migrants (by skin colour or religion) are perceived as a threat to the national character. The conceptualization of women as legally ‘disabled’ citizens (1870 Naturalisation Act) for whom a state must act as responsible patriarch, is a fundamental part of this imagining of the nation. The paper therefore examines the social (gendered and ethnicized) assumptions and political aims embedded within the legislation.     

Gender expectations: natural bodies and natural births in the new midwifery in Canada

In this article, I examine the meaning of natural bodies and natural births in contemporary midwifery in Canada and explore the impact of these central concepts on the embodied experiences of pregnant and birthing women. The ideal of a natural birth has been used as a successful rhetorical strategy in scholarly and popular feminist works on childbirth to counter and critique the predominant biomedical or "technocratic" model of the pregnant and birthing body as inherently problematic and potentially dangerous to the fetus. Contemporary Canadian midwifery--which only as recently as 1994 made a historic transition from a grassroots social movement to a full profession within the public health care system--continues to work discursively through the idiom of nature to affect women's knowledge and experience of their bodies and selves in pregnancy and birth. However, my key finding in this ethnographic study, which focused primarily on midwifery in the province of Ontario in the years following professionalization, is that natural birth is being redefined by the personal, political, and pragmatic choices of midwives and their clients. I argue that the construction, negotiation, and experience of natural birth in contemporary midwifery both reflects and promotes a fundamental shift away from essentialized understandings as it makes room for biomedical technology and hospital spaces, underpinned by the midwifery logics of caring and choice. Natural birth in this context also carries important cultural messages--gender expectations--that posit women as persons and bodies as naturally competent and knowing.     

Intersectionality and mediated cultural production in a globalized post-colonial world

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate how intersectionality provides an important conceptual tool to analyse practices of cultural production in ethnic minority media. In the context of the digital age, media are increasingly central as systems of representation of identity, culture and community. However, research examining how ethnic minority media become engaged in struggles of power is rare. Few works have paid attention to the ways in which race and gender operate in tandem to produce and maintain the unequal distribution of power in the mediascape of countries of post-colonial immigration. This paper juxtaposes gender studies and ethnic studies in order to analyse the representation of gender in ethnic media, with a particular focus on journalistic practices.     

The racial body is gendered: a comment on Emirbayer and Desmond’s The Racial Order

ABSTRACT

In The Racial Order, Emirbayer and Desmond offer a systematic theory of race. The social psychology of race is central to the theoretical framework of this book. In their discussion of bodily aesthetics, bodily cognition, and bodily morality, they neglect the important theoretical insights and empirical contributions of feminist sociologists who have studied the racialized and gendered body. The exclusion of the intersectional research of feminist sociologists weakens their analysis of ‘relational social epistemology’. Intersectional research conducted by feminist sociologists during the past decade should be central to any theoretical discussion of the social psychology of race in North America, which is their primary focus.