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Preface.

Article Excerpt
THIS ISSUE OF Feminist Studies explores constructions of gender and sexuality evident in the negotiation of life in regions as far apart as South Korea, the Appalachian United States, Nigeria, Spain, and France. The articles examine the crafting of gender--and especially masculinity--through the shifting relationships between "tradition" and "modernity" in the twentieth century. These constructions, the articles and creative pieces argue, are not monolithic or uniform, but are complexly articulated through local configurations of identity and practice. Rebecca R. Scott illustrates, through support for an environmentally destructive form of coal mining in a small Appalachian town, how "traditions" of family-wage labor and gendered notions of masculinity and work structure present-day understandings of labor, citizenship, and belonging in the United States. Steven Pierce describes the economy of gender and sexual morality in Northern Nigeria, calling for a more dynamic analysis of gendered relationships that "cannot be reduced to a struggle between Islam and the West or between feminism and patriarchal reaction." Nerea Aresti explains how the reality of life on the streets of Madrid exposed the contradictory and contested state of ideals of Spanish masculinity at the end of the 1920s, and Andrea Mansker explores the struggle of French feminists at the beginning of the twentieth century to weaken the ideal of the Republican mother in an attempt to draw attention to the restricted legal and social status of single women. Na Young Lee traces the influence of the Japanese regulation of prostitution in South Korea on the policies and practices of U.S. military bases there after 1945. This issue of Feminist Studies dramatizes the resilience and the determination with which groups as diverse as South Korean sex workers, working-class families in Appalachia, divorcees in Northern Nigeria, and unmarried women in France have approached the economic and social...

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