Review of The Cowgirls

If this book suffers from anything it\u27s too much enthusiasm for its subject. Joyce Roach sets out to prove that the cowgirl is our foremost genuine American heroine, and while this is at least arguable, she tends to overstate her case at the expense of the early suffragists (cowgirls, not they, were the advance guard of the feminist movement ) and in particular at the expense of other western women: Other frontier women were more or less forgotten with the passing of the frontier. The life of the farm woman, for instance, was never heroic, just miserable . . . and she disappeared from our consciousness. And, Farm wives walked behind a plow, where horizons were blocked by a horse\u27s rump and days were spent trying to keep from stepping in something. While amusing, statements such as these distort and beg the question of whose heroine it is we are looking for in the first place

Review of The Cowgirls

If this book suffers from anything it\u27s too much enthusiasm for its subject. Joyce Roach sets out to prove that the cowgirl is our foremost genuine American heroine, and while this is at least arguable, she tends to overstate her case at the expense of the early suffragists (cowgirls, not they, were the advance guard of the feminist movement ) and in particular at the expense of other western women: Other frontier women were more or less forgotten with the passing of the frontier. The life of the farm woman, for instance, was never heroic, just miserable . . . and she disappeared from our consciousness. And, Farm wives walked behind a plow, where horizons were blocked by a horse\u27s rump and days were spent trying to keep from stepping in something. While amusing, statements such as these distort and beg the question of whose heroine it is we are looking for in the first place

Review of \u3ci\u3eWomen Elders\u27 Life Stories of the Omaha Tribe: Macy, Nebraska, 2004-2005\u3c/i\u3e by Wynne L. Summers

I\u27m not sure that I\u27ve ever read such a light volume that carries such heavy contents. This book\u27s dramatic core encompasses the life stories of three women from the Omaha Tribe in Macy, Nebraska: Eleanor Baxter, the first woman elected tribal chairperson; and Alice Saunsoci and Hawate (Wenona Caramony), language teachers and educators. Their stories collectively describe mid to late twentieth-century experiences of American Indian women, each of whom grew up learning, living, and working on the Omaha reservation and off it in what they describe as multicultural societies such as in Lincoln, Nebraska. Each returned to the reservation later in life to a position of cultural influence

Review of \u3ci\u3e Forgotten Places: Uneven Development in Rural America\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Thomas A. Lyson and William W. Falk

The editors and authors of this fine collection of articles, though mostly sociologists, demonstrate how geography is in a sense destiny to the rural poor. By focusing on nine regions spanning the country from New England to the Rio Grande Valley to the Pacific Northwest, they show how social as well as spatial isolation has created common problems among a rural underclass that is forgotten by mainstream America. Socio-spatial isolation may take many forms, but the outcome for all the places studied is the same: lack of full participation in American economic life. Educational isolation in the Black Belt of the South has produced a population only half of which has a high school education. In Mississippi, traditional paternalistic society and attendant race and class separatism has produced dependency and small spheres of opportunity for the region\u27s blacks and single-parent families, and thus some of the lowest poverty rates in the nation. Per capita earnings in the Lower Mississippi Delta region are a full 20 to 25% lower than the rest of the nation. Isolation may also be more explicitly physical, as in the Missouri Ozarks where the decline of the backwoods timber and mining industries has produced an underclass of low wage service workers in the now flourishing tourist industry. The Ozarks article documents a type of informal economy working in Douglas County, Missouri, that is far removed from the experience of most of us working in a post-industrial society. Families have found ways to survive without cash . (some better than others), by gardening, stock raising, food preservation, and trading and sharing of all types of goods and services, all that defy quantification: The value of orange-yolked, fresh eggs is different from the retail store price of factory eggs. The value of giving them is different from the value of selling them (p. 44)

Prisoners and Animals: An Historical Carceral Geography

This paper explores some of the key historical-geographical resonances across human and nonhuman carceral geographies that appear in my book, Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals. In it I propose a contribution to carceral geography from a broader vantage point than has yet been done, developing a ‘trans-species carceral geography’ that includes spaces of nonhuman captivity, confinement, and enclosure alongside that of the human. The linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality that I place into conversation draw from a number of institutional and industrial domains, including the prison, the farm, the research lab, and the zoo. In this paper I specifically focus on the shared carceral logics and ‘animalization’ of populations of humans and animals at these sites, as well as key entangled historical-geographies of the prison’s death row and the animal slaughterhouse that are at once structural, operational, and technological

Men\u27s Modesty, Religion, and the State: Spaces of Collision

This article examines religious practices in the United States, which govern modesty and other dress norms for men. I focus both on the spaces within which they most collide with regulatory regimes of the state and the legal implications of these norms, particularly for observant Muslim men. Undergirding the research are those ‘‘gender equality’’ claims made by many religious adherents, that men are required to maintain proper modesty norms just as are women. Also undergirding the research is the extensive anti-Islam bias in American culture today. The spaces within which men’s religiously proscribed dress and grooming norms are most at issue—indicated by First Amendment legal challenges to rights of religious practice—are primarily those state-controlled, total institutions Goffman describes, such as in the military and prisons. The implications of gendered modesty norms are important, as state control over religious expression in prisons, for example, is much more difficult to contest than in other spaces, although this depends entirely on who is doing the contesting and within which religious context. In American society today—and particularly within the context of growing Islamaphobia following the 9/11 attacks—the implications are greatest for those men practicing ‘‘prison Islam.’

Bookreview: American commodities in an age of empire. By Mona Domosh. New York: Routledge 2006. ISBN 0415945720

523BookreviewAmericancommodities in an age of empire. By Mona Domosh. New York: Routledge. 2006.ix + 202 pp. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 0415945720SAGE Publications, Inc.2008DOI: 10.1177/14744740080150040706Karen M.MorinBucknell UniversityFewhistorical geographers whose research is archival-based could write such asmall, succinct book on the subject of American empire building in the 19thand early 20th centuries. This book convinces the reader that American imperialism – whether or not one believes it to have been `informal,' `peaceful,' `free,'or `exceptional' – was fundamentally a business venture of pro- ducingcommodities and cornering markets for them overseas. Domosh examines Americancom- mercial imperialism primarily through three US corporations: Singer Manufacturing,McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, and the H. J. Heinz Company. She arguesthat American foreign economic and cultural dominance were achieved throughthe civilizing `uplift' that commodities such as sewing machines, harvestingmachines, and manufactured food products such as pickles and jellies broughtto the less developed. American imperialism, according to Domosh, was enacted`not through laws but through everyday acts of desiring and consuming' (p.9). American commodities resonates closely with Anne McClintock's work. ToDomosh, con- sumer products do the `work' of civilization, so political, military,religious, and other means were unnecessary to the American project. Domoshhighlights in her final chapter her notion of the `flexible racism' that wasrequired for economic and cultural integration and domin- ance; that is, othernations and peoples `became white' and modern through consumption of Americanproducts. Progress of such nations and peoples, then, could be measured notthrough some racial schema or hierarchy but through economic development measures.In all of this, the role of the US government and military apparatus in developinga foreign policy to enable these ventures is elided, in favor of foregroundingthe role of businessmen, advertising executives, and so on who were set todirectly make the profits (although in many cases, these and `the government'were probably the same people). One might wonder how this book, written bya geographer, differs from other similar works on the topic. In that respect,readers will find an especially useful model for historical economic geographyin Chapter 2, where Domosh carefully lays out the developing orga- nizationaland manufacturing structure of these companies at various scales. The volumeis also loaded with visual images, especially product advertising, and theauthor is as proficient at engaging the reader with these texts as any others

Men\u27s Modesty, Religion, and the State: Spaces of Collision

This article examines religious practices in the United States, which govern modesty and other dress norms for men. I focus both on the spaces within which they most collide with regulatory regimes of the state and the legal implications of these norms, particularly for observant Muslim men. Undergirding the research are those ‘‘gender equality’’ claims made by many religious adherents, that men are required to maintain proper modesty norms just as are women. Also undergirding the research is the extensive anti-Islam bias in American culture today. The spaces within which men’s religiously proscribed dress and grooming norms are most at issue—indicated by First Amendment legal challenges to rights of religious practice—are primarily those state-controlled, total institutions Goffman describes, such as in the military and prisons. The implications of gendered modesty norms are important, as state control over religious expression in prisons, for example, is much more difficult to contest than in other spaces, although this depends entirely on who is doing the contesting and within which religious context. In American society today—and particularly within the context of growing Islamaphobia following the 9/11 attacks—the implications are greatest for those men practicing ‘‘prison Islam.’