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The introductory paper to this special edition provides an overview of the multi-country research project on Muslim youth identities upon which all the papers draw. It includes outlines of its methodological and theoretical frameworks and its rationale. Using a case study approach, the research explored the identity narratives of Muslim youth in the four socio-political contexts of Pakistan, Senegal, Nigeria and Lebanon, each of which have distinctive post-colonial histories. In each context we explored how youth performed and constructed their identities with reference to intersecting discourses of nation, religion and gender. The data was collected with the support of local researchers through female and male focus group discussions which sought to privilege youth voices. Our analysis drew upon feminist, poststructural and postcolonial theorists (e.g. Butler, Foucault, Hall, Said), who understand identities to be constituted through difference. Taking up this theoretical stance, we highlight the axes of difference that were integral to youth identity formations, discussing these with reference to internal and external 'others'. By attending to youth voices and their shifting discourses of allegiance and difference, the research provides a counter to the stigmatisation and misrepresentation of Muslim youth within much Western media. Our analyses emphasise the ways that youth identities are constructed within their particular socio-historical, postcolonial contexts and the contingencies of their local social relations, while also acknowledging the interpenetration of the global and the local. The introductory paper concludes with an overview of six articles which provide cross-case analyses that address key themes emerging from our data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Chile, the 'social outbreak' that began on 18th October 2019, closely questioned the transitional processes of the last 30 years. In the context of a neoliberal society crisis, political mobilisation could problematise the country's democratic statute. One of the phenomena most worrisome to observe was the confirmation of a police vocation which, far from banning human rights violations, exerted cruel and systematic violence against social mobilisations. This was not new. In the past 15 years, social irruptions resulting from environmental, university, mapuche, and workers' revindications had already experienced the police voracity that trampled corporalities and subjectivities, reaching dehumanising extremes. These events became the anteroom for the violent practices from spring 2019 onwards. From the various expressions of police violence, this paper explores the 'sexual political violence' aspect. This term encapsulates the inflicting of pain and suffering on a subject due to political motivations, via violence on the sexed body. The study 'Institutional violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transexual individuals: a systemic view' aroused interest in exploring police sexual political violence against LGBT collectives during mobilisations in 2019. Although direct physical violence is also present, this paper focuses on sexual political violence accompanied by psychological violence, insults, mockery, and threats of sexual suffering, thus highlighting the gendered aspects of this violence. Hence, evidence collected in this study makes it interesting to reflect on the presence of this violence and on how gender and sexuality concur with a disciplining strategy on the bodies that are driven back from the street. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the author's personal experience as a second-generation Greek-Australian woman caring for aging parents living in Australia to illustrate issues that arise for Greek Orthodox Australians in response to mourning practices. The Greek diaspora, at its peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is now an aging population in Australia. Burial and mourning practices for Greek Orthodox Australians are much the same as they are for Greeks living in Greece. However, this paper argues that some of these practises are not easily reconciled with an Australian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on our recent research into Muslim youth identities to consider theoretical and methodological issues with respect to gender and Muslim women's agency. Western constructions of Muslim women often portray them in essentialised ways as subordinated and without agency. We take up alternative theoretical frameworks that illuminate the limitations of modern understandings of the self and agency, and in particular their problematic association of agency with autonomy. These alternative frameworks also alert us to the possibilities of a different 'ethics of the self' in which cultivation of Islamic values and submission to the will of God can involve agonistic work on the self which is not without agency. They prompt us to consider the methodological limitations of our research approach, in particular how this agonistic work on the self could readily be flattened and rendered invisible within a focus group discussion. We reflect on the kinds of research spaces which could have been more productive for a richer portrayal of Muslim women's agency. We then turn to our data to explore the complex entanglements of our participants' submission and agency, indicating the different ways female youth assumed, negotiated, and contested 'subordinated' identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoclassical economists explain social phenomena in the decision-making process with the rational and prudent agent, seeking the highest amount of personal utility with her idiosyncratic preferences. However, atomistic choices and preferences cannot explain the phenomena, such as unequal living conditions and discrimination in labor. The agent, as a human being, is always in interaction with the social environment. Social identity is one of the areas in which the social environment is influential. Social identities are associated with social inequalities, directed by some practices, attitudes and institutions that negatively affect the life prospects of social groups of different identities. Therefore, economists need the social unifying analytical concepts, such as social identity, to comprehend the inequalities and related issues, such as redistribution policies in societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how migrants negotiate and construct their identity in London. In particular it discusses how they position themselves in relation to other ethnic groups - English people and other migrant and ethnic minority groups within British society. The discussion draws upon qualitative research with recent Polish migrants in London. In addition to key informants from a range of community and voluntary groups, 3 focus groups and 30 individual interviews were carried out with migrants across various locations in the city. Participants were drawn from a range of occupations and included equal numbers of men and women. Rather than attempting to select a representative sample, the research sought to capture the range and diversity of Polish migrants. The paper examines how ethnic identity is mediated through language, gender, whiteness and European-ness. Using Goffman's concepts of 'normality' and 'stigma' the paper also discusses the ways in which participants engage with Polishness through multifaceted and complex interactions with or, indeed, avoidance of 'Poles abroad'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the eroticization of labour in Cuba's new, all-inclusive beach resorts where workers are asked to enact scripts of affective labour, sexual enticement, and servility in the delivery of their occupational roles. Most studies of sexualized labour argue that workers’ resistance is found in not complying with management's exigencies. Instead, in this paper I argue that workers’ resistance can be found in the appropriation of their sexualized labour to establish relationships with hotel guests that provide more direct benefits and opportunities for travel and migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following feminist and postcolonial discourses, this paper uses the concept of ‘everyday experience’ as a tool to trace the social world of educated Palestinian women in Israel. The term refers to the complex array of these women’s experiences in racialised and gendered social sites, as well as within the class, religious, and ethnic contexts in the subordinated group and its relations with the dominant Jewish group. Based on 108 in-depth interviews with Palestinian women citizens of Israel, the paper claims that educated Palestinian women are located in a ‘third place’ between cultural, gender, class, national and racial structures that generates a continual ambivalence. Within this marginal, ‘unhomely’ space women negotiate their own identities and challenge dominant social definitions. Women create various modes of interim spaces and multi-dimensional, shifting identities for themselves. The ambivalent attitudes generated by the women’s experiences expose the possibility of shedding categorising markers. The omnipresent existence of the gendered, racialised regime of knowledge makes every place a potential site of subversion and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how young people of migrant background in Australia make meaning of cultural, ethnic and racial difference to work out belonging in times of super-diversity. It asks what functions difference still has for a generation growing up within conditions of proliferating diversity that demand and accommodate competing constructions of cultural identities. It suggests that young people's narratives about difference depend on the space of belonging, and explores how young people use difference differently depending on whether they are articulating membership in the local community, the nation or youth culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzesLittle Mosque on the Prairie, its characters and themes within the context of post-9/11 discourses of nationalism and citizenship. Against the backdrop of the Canadian national narrative, I argue that the sitcom foregrounds a ‘moderate Muslim’ that demarcates the boundaries of the multicultural nation-state, especially when juxtaposed against the racially and sexually coded Muslim ‘other’ on the global landscape. The moderate Muslim is represented as ‘liberal’ and ‘modern’, one who seeks to integrate her faith into the multicultural fabric of society. Such a figure, represented both as a ‘good’ Muslim/immigrant and a ‘good’ Canadian citizen-subject, illuminates the boundaries of ‘acceptability’ within the Canadian national imaginary. The figure of the moderate Muslim reinforces the racial coding embedded in this imaginary, while enabling the state to proclaim its ‘multicultural tolerance’ and benevolence. Building on previous scholarship on race, citizenship, and nation-building, I argue that the moderate Muslim – as exemplified inLittle Mosque on the Prairie– serves important ideological functions in (re)defining the internal (and racially coded) borders of the nation. WhileLittle Mosque on the Prairiemakes an important contribution to the representation of Muslims, challenging some stereotypes, I argue that it does not deliver on its considerable potential to articulate nuanced representations of Muslims. Through its foregrounding of the figure of the moderate Muslim, the sitcom reaffirms key norms, engages in a politics of authenticity, and reinforces hegemonic messages, both within Muslim communities and in Canadian society. Thus, the moderate Muslim becomes a key player in enabling the state to render invisible its exclusion of the ‘Muslim Other,' while maintaining its non-racist credentials. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a watershed event in the context of race, nation, and the law because it denied Chinese immigration into the USA for over 80 years. This paper analyses the media coverage of the Chinese in the San Francisco Chronicle during the year of the Act's passage. The theoretical framework of ‘Purity and Danger’ provides a starting point in analyzing how whiteness and nation are constructed as ‘pure’, while Chinese immigration is constructed as a ‘danger’ within a symbolic, racial and political manner. Discourse analysis was applied to the data for an intersectional investigation of race, class, gender, and nation, to determine how the discourse is organized thematically, as well as uncover ideological meanings in relation to how ‘fearing yellow’ also reflected ‘imaging white’ in media discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the magazine Muslim Girl (started publication 2007) and explores how the representations on the magazine's pages construct a particular type of identity for Muslim women: an 'idealized' Muslim woman who is both North American/Western and Muslim. Such a woman is portrayed as liberal, educated, fashionable, a 'can-do' woman, who is also committed to her faith. This 'ideal' woman is situated squarely as a neo-liberal subject in an increasingly consumerist world: she is 'marketable' (and marketed) as the 'good Muslim' (Mamdani, 2004) and is positioned as the 'familiar stranger' (Ahmed, 2000) in North America. This so-called 'modern' Muslim (read: 'good Muslim') is juxtaposed both against the 'fundamentalist' Muslim (read: 'bad Muslim') and the 'normalized' white North American subject. Against the discourse of post 9/11 nationalism and within the context of (gendered) Orientalism, this article argues that such idealized representations present easily recognizable tropes, which serve important political, ideological and cultural purposes within North American society. An analysis of these representations - and the purposes which they serve - provides an important window into the nuances of the structured discourses that seek to control and discipline the gendered Muslim body. On the one hand, the representations in Muslim Girl focus on the so-called 'integrated North American Muslim' - a 'modern' or 'good' Muslim - within the context of the multicultural, neo-liberal and post 9/11 nation-state. On the other hand, these representations also highlight examples of Muslim women, who seemingly remain committed to their faith and community. Such representations of hybridized North American Muslims speak powerfully to the forces - ideological, cultural, political and social - that are at play in the post 9/11 world. In analyzing the representations found in Muslim Girl, this paper provides an insight into some of these forces and their implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a comparative study of India and Pakistan's national security discourses, this article explores the linkages between post-colonial India and Pakistan's nationalist/communalist identities, configurations of masculinities, and gendered representations underpinning their nuclear (in)securities. This paper contends that the colonial politics of place-making in the sub-continent has not only inscribed a process of 'othering' between these states but has also facilitated the rise of divergent visions of post-colonial nationalisms, which, at each of their phases and with particular configurations of masculinities, have used women's bodies to re-map India-Pakistan's borders and national (in)securities. This article particularly draws attention to a new form of gendered manipulation in South Asian politics in the late 1990s, whereby both states, embedded in colonial notions of religious/cultural masculinities, have relied on discourses of Hindu/Indian and Muslim/Pakistani women's violence and protection from the 'other' to pursue aggressive policies of nuclearization. It is at this conjectural moment of a Hinduicized and Islamicized nationalism (flamed by the contestations of a Hindu versus an Islamic masculinity) that one needs to provide a feminist re-interpretation of India-Pakistan's nationalist identities, gendered imaginaries, and their re-articulation of national (in)securities - that represents a religious/gendered 'otherness' in South Asia's nuclear policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present global context, the 'problem' of religion in relation to gender has become predominantly about the situation of Muslim women and what this indicates about the state of our civilization. Thus, in such incidents as the death of Aqsa Parvez (age 16) in late 2007 in Toronto, Canada, Muslim women's bodies, as many scholars have argued, become the battlegrounds which clearly demarcate the line between the civilized secular modern nation and premodern religious fundamentalisms. In this paper, I want to extend this critical work by bringing in an analysis of the second or 'homegrown' generation as it is in this context, I will argue that national anxieties about Canada's global status as a tolerant multicultural nation are most pronounced. Drawing on the work of Asad (2003), Mahmood (2006) and Brown (2006), I will outline how conceptions of tolerance and secularism operate through culture to produce a racialized distinction between the civilized, modern citizen and premodern fundamentalist groups in the making of Canada as a white settler multicultural nation. In order to illustrate this concretely, I will carry out a critical content analysis of representations of Aqsa Parvez's death in the media, representations which clearly demonstrate the contemporary operation of secularism and tolerance in relation to multiculturalism and its particular intensity as it pertains to second generation Muslims. In the conclusion, I want to reflect on how we might rethink our understanding of violence against Muslim women in order to destabilize this powerful binaristic framing which continues to secure a white settler hegemony of 'multiculturalism within a bilingual framework' even as it obscures the power relations through which it sustains a racial hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the relationship between ageing, gender, cultural norms, and the constitution of gendered body-subjects. It briefly discusses three conceptual approaches which have been used to understand ageing, gendered body-subjects: postmodernist/social constructionist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist feminist. It is argued that the first two approaches are entrenched in dualistic modes of thinking, and therefore can never construct ageing gendered body subjects as other than through the dualistic discourse of decline and cultural devaluation in Western consumer cultures. The third, however, appears to hold some promise for a more just and flexible way of accounting for the integrity of, and culturally valuing, the gendered body-subject in old age. Examples from writings on dance are used to illustrate this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the racialisation and gendering of a collective subject described as 'Middle Eastern or Muslim' in the US media in the aftermath of 9/11. It examines how this category came to be visible and prominent through the workings of disciplinary power and forms of governmentality through the binary of freedom and unfreedom, necropolitics and the politics of security and freedom. Multiculturalism in the US, as it was articulated in consumer culture through the national spectacle of the flag, emerged as an example of this new form of governmentality that is both regulative and productive of American nationalism and transnationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arab Americans constitute a diverse, sizeable ethnic minority in the United States. However, limited research has examined the content of Arab American ethnic identity and whether this ethnic identity differs by demographic factors. In the present study, we developed measures of Arab American ethnic identity and cultural practice, and assessed differences in those variables by gender, religious affiliation (Muslim, Christian), and age. Arab American adults recruited online from Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 391) completed an adaptation of the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity and a measure of cultural practice that was created for this study based on pre-existing scales. Items loaded onto dimensions of identity (ethnic centrality, private regard, public regard), and subscales showed invariance across gender and religious upbringing. When examining group differences in ethnic identity, we found that attitudes regarding being Arab American varied by gender, such that Arab American women reported higher private regard and lower public regard than men. In turn, participants raised in Muslim households reported higher ethnic centrality and cultural practice than those raised in Christian households, potentially related to Muslims' status as a religious minority in the United Status. Finally, young adults were lower in centrality and private regard than older adults, suggesting either that ethnic identity may develop into adulthood or that young adults' ethnic identity may be influenced by growing up in American society post-9/11. Taken together, findings illustrate the heterogeneity in the ethnic identity of Arab Americans. Further research is needed to understand individual differences in Arab Americans' ethnic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the gendered aspects of naming practices in Palestine. We study the personal names of the new generation in relation to name derivations and motivations in order to identify the emerging sociological aspects of naming practices in the West Bank of Palestine. We collected the names of the registered births over the last 10 years from local hospitals as well as the names of the parents, classified the names into separate categories and conducted structured online interviews with a random sample of parents from different areas in the West Bank of Palestine so as to elicit their motivation for giving their children the names chosen here. We classify the names into semantic categories and use these categories to disclose the motivations of the names using the premises of the socio-onomastic theory. The study concludes that the males in the study group are still given traditional names while females are given fashionable and foreign names that show the influence of the Western culture on the Palestinian people and the concern of Palestinians with females' beauty which promotes their future marriageability rather than with their being as autonomous subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-care, self-improvement and biopower, as they relate to the commodification of adolescence and the grooming of young people as neoliberal citizens, are the central concerns of this article. Foregrounding new perspectives on the effects such trends have on the body [Cusset, F. (2018). How the world swung to the right: Fifty years of counterrevolutions. MIT Press], it analyzes two texts, the film Eighth Grade and the Atlanta episode entitled 'Fubu' (season 2, episode 10), to consider how neoliberal capitalist values manifest in the lives of protagonists, Kayla and Earn, whose young bodies have been colonized by the self-care, self-improvement ethos of our current cultural spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Spain, the national and local authorities boast in recent years about their progressive programs for the integration of Roma migrants from Romania. Many state efforts to work with Roma on their integration are specifically directed at women. Economic integration into the waged labor market is considered a major goal as it, supposedly, leads to the empowerment of Roma migrant women while also securing decent standards of living for entire families. This article argues that integration programs adversely result in the further discrimination and exclusion of those they pretend to relief. This adverse result is produced through a two-tier intervention in the lives of Roma families. The caring state works with a general category of ‘vulnerability’ for targeting populations, in which Roma migrant women are specifically incorporated through designated social programs. The performance of Roma as the subject-object of these programs is carefully evaluated. According to these evaluations, Roma women often fail to meet the normative standards of ‘good mothers’, ‘decent wives’, and ‘diligent workers’. Subsequently, to deal with ‘failing subjects’, the disciplining state, a-la Foucault, inflicts an array of penalties on Roma women and their families: cut-offs of social benefits, evictions from poor dwellings, withdrawal of children’s custody, and forced removals to Romania. We thus argue that initiatives by the caring state (and civil society) often prescribe or go hand-in-hand with repression from the correcting state. In welfare states, social programs can thus conclusively ‘evidence’ existing stereotypes about marginalized Roma families and about women in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A weaver, seamstress, laundress and artist, in this essay I shall spin a yarn, tangle a web, and construct a text(ile) of the inter-weave of narrative and identity that I define as my intellectual, textual, somatic and material/visual practice obsessions. My work explores ‘the places in-between’ in the entanglements of Irish and Northern Irish gender and identity, and in the abject fabrics of death and of desire. As an Irish feminist, sense-making of the complexities, conundrums, challenges and contradictions of my land, my cloth, my body and my culture owes much to Irish women before me who fought for female suffrage, and Irish women now – north and south of the border that divides the island of Ireland – who still struggle for equality of citizenship, social justice, human rights, and full reproductive autonomy. My contention is that when we accept that Ireland herself is a many-layered cloth, a stained and bloodied cloth, a cloth marked irreversibly by history, conflict, denial and abuse, stained by its own repression, marked through denial ofallits people’s rights and needs, and bloodied by its greatest export, the haemorrhage of its people, then – polemical, didactic or reflective, with more compassion, empathy, humility and heart – we just might make peace with our past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My essay highlights how this (otherwise excellent) documentary filmHe Named Me Malalasuffers from a historical amnesia in failing to connect the historical, local, and global/Western factors that have set the political-social context within which occurred the Malala incident in 2012. This is because the documentary – exposing the voice of a Pakistani female activist as a postcolonial/global agent – does not look into the historical-colonial, Cold War, or the post-Cold War dynamics that have set the ‘context’ within which the theme of the documentary unfolded. My essay addresses these issues of historical amnesia, arguing that to better comprehend the Malala incident (and broadly the issue of gender violence in Pakistan’s socio-cultural context) it remains imperative to connect how factors of power, politics, and vested interests have intersected at historical, local, and global levels to explain the 2012 Malala incident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article addresses the support and supervisional relations of Palestinian Israeli single mothers vis-à-vis their families and communities. It links the theoretical discussion on intersectional analysis with power relations and gender. In this article I focus on the importance of employing analytical models that take into consideration the internal variance within this social category of ‘Palestinian Israeli single mothers' which emerge due to the contradictory social trends typifying Palestinian society in Israel today – models that examine the implications of the complexity of women's lives in discrete locations, the changes society is undergoing, together with processes of discrimination and the strengthening of conservative trends. The article is based on data gathered during in-depth, semi-structured interviews that were conducted and analyzed with a commitment to the principles of feminist research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This chapter is a discussion of the various ways Canadian-born young men of colour (aged 17–26) experience (in)visibilities in the public spaces of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). I begin this chapter by analyzing the different ways ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ have been conceptualized in the scholarly literature, including literatures on homelessness, public space, and race. Invisibilities include ‘invisible homelessness’ as well as material invisibilities in which young men of colour both purposefully and accidentally navigate public spaces in ways that affect whether they are seen or unseen and by whom. This research emphasizes the contingency and indeterminacy of varying (in)visibilities. Despite the various ways they move between visibility and invisibility in public spaces, young men of colour experiencing homelessness maintain an explicit presence in urban street spaces. Understanding their experiences of (in)visibility in urban space helps us understand the geographies of race and racism in the GTA and in North American cities more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the largest migration of the Afghanistani population in modern history. More than six million people migrated to neighbouring countries, and to North America, Europe and Australia. Among them were almost all of Afghanistan's female authors; some eventually returned, but others chose to remain in diaspora. Some stopped writing, while others have continued. Maryam Mahboob was the first Afghanistani female author to leave Afghanistan (in 1981). Her major works since then have dealt chiefly with the issues of women living in ‘Outlandia’. Having been treated as second-class citizens in Afghanistan, how do Afghanistani migrant women perceive their social status in a new environment? How has migration affected the lives of Afghanistani women of different generations? Have they assimilated with the new culture and adopted new identities, or have they retained their cultural identities and stayed in closed communities? How do these women perceive their ‘new home’ vis-à-vis the ‘old home-land’. What does it mean to be a female author from a Third World Islamic society living and writing in the First World? Why does Mahboob still write overwhelmingly about themes from her place of origin and in her native language, after so much time abroad? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-immigrant politician, whose party received 15.5% of the vote in the elections of June 2010, made his name in part by focusing on the headscarf as an emblem of the Islamic threat in Europe. On 16 September 2009, he (in)famously proposed to levy a ‘headrag tax’ on women wearing a headscarf – a levy for their pollution of the public space. Connecting Islam to gender inequality, he further suggested that the €1000 tax would be donated to women's shelters. The ‘headrag tax’ is an example of what I call an impossible law – a law that would never pass parliament or stand up in a constitutional court. Yet, Wilders' reliance on such proposals shows how these impossible laws can have the power to shape public debate regarding the place of Islam in contemporary immigrant-receiving societies such as the Netherlands. I analyze the parliamentary debate during which Wilders made this proposal and the media responses to it, situating the discussion in larger debates regarding head covering and immigrant integration that have unfolded in the Netherlands over the past decade. I analyze the legal, symbolic and material discourses structuring these debates to show how they delineate the meaning of Dutch national belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malay and Acehnese single women live their lives within an Islamic religious and political frame in different ways. Aceh and Malay societies share a similar tradition. Cognatic kinship and a varying focus on matrilocality and matriliny concern them both, as well as an old Islamic tradition. As other researchers have shown, for both the Malays and the Acehnese, ‘sexual desire’ or ‘passion’ and its control are a central theme in discourses on human beings and gender. Through the marginal stories of some Malay and Acehnese single women, this article examines two types of Muslim marriage, kahwin misyar and nikah siri, in relation to the basic notions of passion and control. It points to some women's forms of resistant behaviour and personal agency within the internationalization and standardization of Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ethnic identity formation of high school aged Mexican immigrant adolescent girls. The ethnic identity is new to them and acts as a coping mechanism that allows them to confront the racial order and gender monitoring they experience at home and at their high school. Being Mexican allows them to make meaning of their immigrant experience. The author contends that these girls rather than disconnecting from their national ethnic identity are developing a stronger sense of being Mexican than if they had never left Mexico. However, developing a strong sense of being Mexican comes with challenges. This article is based on 20 unstructured interviews conducted at a local high school in Napa, California. The interviews trace the identity transitions and challenges each girl experienced both before migration and after they arrived in the US. The author finds that they develop an ethnic identity based on their memories of Mexico that they share amongst each other where they long to continue to be part of their old community. The stories of girls point to the identity transitions Mexican immigrant youth experience. Their stories also point to how identities are not clean sequential transitions, but are rather messy, conflicting, and contradictory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviews were held with 12 Muslim Palestinian women from Israel, presently studying in Jordan (6) or who had completed their higher education in Jordan (6). They explained the factors that pushed or pulled them to study in Jordan, the independence that they experienced there, the empowerment they achieved, and the price they paid when they returned to Arab society in Israel. The Arab cultural space in Jordan is defined as both foreign and close, due to its geographical and cultural proximity, and yet its distance from home and patriarchal supervision. The research findings indicate that this situation influences the formation of these women's gender identity and their empowerment but also creates much pain and conflict. The Palestinian women's new identity, formed during their studies, assists them in their efforts to reintegrate and establish their status when they return from their academic studies abroad to their society of origin, Muslim Arab society in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore the gendering of race, colonialism and anti colonial nationalism in selected novels from the Zimbabwean literary canon with the view of showing how this gendering affected different facets of colonial life and, by implication, post independence life. It relies on the Gramscian concept of hegemony in terms of how it refers to gender, particularly masculinities. The selected texts, A Son of the Soil by Wilson Katiyo, The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing and Bones by Chenjerai Hove, cover the colonial period from the moment of contact to the early post independence period. The article links the gendered nature of colonialism to the gendered aspects of anti colonial nationalism and shows how the two existed in an oppositional yet ambivalent relationship. This is also manifest in the schizophrenia of the post independence state in modeling itself after its predecessor, its anti colonial rhetoric notwithstanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Salt, Sand and Water' is the outcome of a writing project that evolved out of a series of workshops in theatre and writing carried out in Sri Lanka over a period of three weeks in 2004. The workshops brought together 14 Muslim and Tamil women into a dialogue about the condition of displacement that has become an integral part of the decades-long ethnic conflict and ensuing civil war in Sri Lanka. Having lived as neighbours, these women were thrown headlong into an inter and intra-ethnic conflict as a result of which they continue to live as neighbours but now as strangers in their displaced state. The coming together of these women is an exercise in forming a political consciousness of ethnic and gender marginality and displacement. This becoming collective consciousness celebrates heterogeneity, not for its own sake, but for the query it brings into understandings of the state, power, authority, privilege and territory. As a political and theoretical intervention of the formation of the state, this collaborative essay dislocates the notion of place as fixed by recovering its mobility in the midst of the political, cultural and economic realms. Similarly, the emerging consciousness of the displaced class undermines traditional notions of ethnicity as homogenous and of the state as bounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the Philippine state's incorporation of a ‘gender-sensitive criteria’ within its overseas employment policy framework in recognition of the increasing participation of Filipinas in the global economy and their ‘vulnerabilities’ in the workplace. However, such recognition and strategies in place for minimizing women's vulnerabilities reflect a neoliberal framework that promotes economic competitiveness and entrepreneurship and seeks to ‘empower’ them to embody an ethic of responsibility as citizens, workers, and women. I deconstruct such discourse of ‘empowerment’ in relation to the recognition of Filipina workers’ ‘vulnerabilities’ in the workplace and argue that the ways the state attempts to deal with these ‘vulnerabilities’ are shaped by a formation of a gendered moral economy linking family, religion, and nationalism with ideals of economic competitiveness and entrepreneurship that seemingly leads to the disempowerment of Filipina workers. ‘Empowering’ Filipinas is not only about producing economically productive workers but also about generating ‘good’ wives, mothers, and women. This essay is based on a larger ethnographic project of Philippines’ labor export industry and specifically draws from interviews with government officials, labour brokers, and NGO representatives while incorporating content analyses of key policy reports and participant observations of pre-departure orientation sessions and national government labor conferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the socio-historical effects of the intersection of representations of gender, race, and the nation which determine black Brazilian women's subaltern social position and inform their self-representations. This intersection is presented from two perspectives: analysis of quantitative data and a case study. Through the examination of socio-economic data on black women participation in the labour market, it show that, when compared with white women and black men, black women are unequally concentrated in certain low paid jobs in the service industry, such as for instance domestic work. Through a brief case study, basically interviews with women from different colours and social classes - i.e. domestic workers and their employers - it shows how the particularities of domestic work inform black women's race and gender self-definitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]