Cover of the Spring 2012 issue, featuring Stacey Steers’s Fish Dream (2006).
This issue features a comparative perspectives symposium titled “Fish/Wives: Gender, Representation, and Agency in Coastal Communities,” edited by Valerie Burton. The symposium includes historical essays, ethnographic studies of contemporary fishing communities, and analyses of representations of fish/wives. Essays track historical and contemporary gendered labor practices and representations in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. As Burton writes in her introduction, the authors in the symposium “offer historical and anthropological confirmation of a gender order that normatively places men on the water and women on land” (530). In the midst of ecological and economic crises, Burton writes, this symposium is an effort to “rethink the relations between nature and society, the material and the symbolic, the local and the global” (534).
Articles address sex workers’ responses to trafficking in India; the predicament of a sathin in neoliberal Rajasthan; the complex relations between color and sexuality in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; identity formations in US community cookbooks; and the eugenic implications of reproductive technologies in contexts dominated by free-market discourse.
The full table of contents is below. To access the issue on JSTOR, click here.
Comparative Perspectives Symposium: Fish/Wives: Gender, Representation, and Agency in Coastal Communities
Edited by Valerie Burton
Fish/Wives: An Introduction
Valerie Burton
“Good Looks Don’t Boil the Pot”: Irish-Newfoundland Women as Fish(-Producing) Wives
Wileen Keough
Aboriginal Women and Asian Men: A Maritime History of Color in White Australia
Ruth Balint
Not between People and Things but between People about Things: Gendered Investment and the Case of the Lake Victoria Fishery, Tanzania
Modesta Medard
The Fisherman’s Wife: Vulnerabilities and Strategies in the Local Economy: The Case of Lake Victoria, Kenya
Carolyne Lwenya and Ernest Yongo
The Promise of the Southwest Wind: Visayan Fish/Migrant Wives in the Shifting Fishery of the Central Philippines
Cynthia Neri Zayas and Lilian C. de la Peña
Neighbors and Traders in a Seventeenth-Century Port Town
Darlene Abreu-Ferreira
The Multiple Identities of Early Modern Dutch Fishwives
Danielle van den Heuvel
Piggybacking Monsieur and Madame: Seaside Tourism and the Fisherwomen of Arcachon – La Teste
Alice Garner
“There Is Many a Thing That Can Be Done with Money”: Women, Barter, and Autonomy in a Scottish Fishing Community in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Lynn Abrams
Unruly Women and Invisible Workers: The Shrimp Traders of Mazatlán, Mexico
María L. Cruz-Torres
Articles
Rescue and Rehabilitation: A Critical Analysis of Sex Workers’ Antitrafficking Response in India
Veronica Magar
Agency, Injury, and Transgressive Politics in Neoliberal Times
Sumi Madhok and Shirin M. Rai
In the Dark Room: Homosexuality and/as Blackness in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
Josep M. Armengol
Intensifying Taste, Intensifying Identity: Collectivity through Community Cookbooks
Kennan Ferguson
Gendered Eugenics and the Problematic of Free Market Reproductive Technologies: Sperm and Egg Donation in the United States
Cynthia R. Daniels and Erin Heidt-Forsythe
Book Reviews:
| Joycelyn Moody | Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. By P. Gabrielle Foreman. Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible. By Katherine Clay Bassard. Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America. By Renee K. Harrison. |
| Sarah S. Richardson | Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences. By Rebecca M. Jordan-Young. The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture. By Evelyn Fox Keller. |
| Stephanie Jenkins | Feminist Bioethics: At the Center, on the Margins. Edited by Jackie Leach Scully, Laurel E. Baldwin-Ragaven, and Petya Fitzpatrick. Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics. By Karla F. C. Holloway. |
| Aimee Meredith Cox | Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence. By Nikki Jones. Why Girls Fight: Female Youth Violence in the Inner City. By Cindy D. Ness. |
| Julie A. Willett | The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work. By Miliann Kang. Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry. By Tiffany M. Gill. |
| Alexis Pauline Gumbs | Freedom for Women: Forging the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1953-1970. By Carol Giardina. No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism. Edited by Nancy A. Hewitt. |