Situated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life

Situated Lives brings together the most important recent feminist and critical research that illuminates the lived experience of ordinary women and men. Focusing on gender and culture, these essays situate gender in relationship to the historical and material circumstances where gender, race, class and sexual orientation intersect and shape everyday interaction. They explore several critical social issues: how new technologies are altering reproduction, what new forms of family and household are emerging in response to economic and material realities, what transformations are shaping the workplace, and how men and women in colonial and post-colonial societies resist the cultural construction of their lives by those with greater power and control over the images and ideology.

Utilizing rich ethnographic accounts and first-person narratives, these articles examine how ordinary men and women are responding to the complexities of genetic counseling, surrogate motherhood and the abortion debate inthe US; resisting management policies in the new workplaces of Malaysia; and contesting forms of cultural and economic domination in Jamaica and the US-Mexican border. Several essays explore the politics of representations, including how colonial administrators, missionaries and the tourist industry have represented "Other," such as the Tswana of South Africa, the peoples of Sumatra, Java and Malaya or Pueblo women potters in the Southwest.

In analyzing cultural transformation, gendered practice and varied forms of resistance, these scholars give a sense of hope. Even in the most fouled work sites, repressive regimes, rigid notions of the family, or segregated neighborhoods, men and women express their own cultural meanings, take matters into their own hand and work together.

A collection of more than two dozen essays by diverse authors, this collection focuses on the role of gender and how it affects ordinary people. A cynic might say that some of the essays are merely academics stating the obvious, only in oddly tortured and clunking prose. Yet the themes explored in the collection, such as pieces dealing with people working in jobs that are not traditional for their genders, are deserving of the serious treatment they are given.