This collective volume is devoted to a category of âmisfitsâ, i.e. the meagre and/or abhorred female component â or who identifies as such â of the maritime workforce ashore and aboard between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. This is not a volume of global history â and nor does it presume to be one â but it is undoubtedly influenced by and hinges on globalisation in its third-millennium version. In a more modest scope, this volume focuses on only one part of the so-called âglobal Northâ â or the European and North American continents â during a fascinating and grievous time that we, the âenlightenedâ and âdevelopedâ global-North contemporaries, have come to know as the âModern ageâ self-referentially.
I have chosen to organise the introduction by dedicating the first part to the characteristics of the historical and intellectual processes that have brought us âthis farâ. In the second part, I will give an account of the structure of the volume and the contents of each chapter.
1 Female Maritime Labour in a (Global-Northernerâs) Perspective
For the âmisfitsâ object of study in this volume, the 1980s were a pivotal period. It was a time marked by the hegemonic neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher (1979â1990) and Ronald Regan (1981â1989), often considered the âwildernessâ decade from the governmentâs policies standpoint.1 Nevertheless, from the point of view of intellectual elaboration, academic production, and NGO and international agenciesâ initiatives, it was a vibrant and courageous decennium. During that period, the (Gramscian) wave of British Cultural Studies reached the U.S.A. and Australia, engaging in particular with feminism and poststructuralism.2 This was when gender and labour studies flourished3 and Identity Politics and Postcolonial Studies â particularly in their intersectional and subalternity-oriented declinations â institutionalised and found their own scholarly physiognomy within the academic arena.4 These new sensibilities did not develop only in the scholarly sphere but also found fertile ground âin the fieldââ, especially in terms of advocacy. In this regard, in 1984, the Womenâs International Shipping & Trading Association (WISTA) and International Conference of Fish Workers and their Supporters (ICFWS) were established, the former in Stockholm and the latter in Rome, marking a significant global shift. However, what most oriented work and life trajectories of our âmisfitsâ in the years to come was the release of the International Maritime Organizationâs (IMO) programmatic document âIntegration of Women in the Maritime Sectorâ (IWMS) in 1988. It was the first programme aimed at increasing the presence of women in the maritime sector through education, training, and the transfer of knowledge at a regional intervention level, especially in developing countries, demonstrating the global impact of their initiatives.
From the second half of the 1990s to the first years of the new millennium, the scholarly domain and NGOâs began to once again animate the intellectual and political horizon of the âcoral seaâ. The last five-year period of the twentieth century was particularly lively from the point of view of the organisation and development of advocacy groups within the small-scale fisheries sector. In 1995, the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fish Workers (WFF) was established and, a few years later, in 1998, the Yemaya newsletter â the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF; founded in 1986) bulletin entirely dedicated to gender issues in fisheries, particularly in developing countries â began to be edited and distributed regularly.5 In 1996, Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling published the edited work Iron Men, Wooden Women, which was a crucial turning point for our âmisfitsâ and for the scholars engaged in that herstory â in particular, for the study of the gender and class relations in which those âmisfitsâ were involved.6 Soon after, in 2000, Lisa Norling released her Captain Ahab had a Wife, and the study of domesticity and its economic and relational role in maritime settings, particularly in maritime communities, would take on a completely different approach.7 In the same year, Subaltern Studies produced one of its most sophisticated and influential products: Provincializing Europe by Dipesh Chakrabarty.8 Finally, in 2001, the publication of the collective volume edited by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo, Women at Sea, probably represented the highest point in the elaboration and synthesis of the intellectual and political militancy of the previous 20 years.9 The last milestone we received as an inheritance from those years was Women Seafarers, the International Labour Organizationâs (ILO) first organic report on the employment practices and policies specifically for female seafarers over the previous 50 years.10
The year 2001 can be considered a watershed year in the context of studies on our âmisfitsâ. It was a particularly fruitful year, but it also marked a setback in academic production within the framework of the interpretative sensibilities we have contemplated. Conceptualisations such as âsubalternityâ, âmarginalityâ, âpostcolonialâ, and âintersectionalityâ were seriously battered in the long hot summer of 2001: first came the truncheon beatings and criminalisation in Genoa, then fire and steel in New York, and, finally, the bombs over Kabul silenced any form of âweak thoughtâ and threw the whole world into a âclash of civilisationsâ and a remade normative âworld orderâ again.11 Scholars would return to the âfront lineâ regarding the demands of our âmisfitsâ, but it would take time, and the new advocacy and speculative engagement would take on entirely different contours.
The global financial crisis of 2007â2008 brought back into the spotlight the socio-economic conditions of our âmisfitsâ and those of many other women workers and entrepreneurs that the global financial storm brought to their knees. Against that background, two themes stood out: the issue relating to the empowerment of female professionals and womenâs leadership.12 In Europe, in the framework of seafaring, the World Maritime University (WMU) in Malmö (Sweden) â an emanation of the IMO, which, similarly to the ILO, is a U.N. agency â was the prominent animator of the debate. In 2014, after a successful first experiment,13 the WMU organised the international conference Maritime Women: Global Leadership.14 This event turned out to be the harbinger of substantial solicitations on behalf of our âmisfitsâ. By this time and on a global level, the latter, or at least its most educated component, was willing to recognise itself as marginal and out of place only from a numerical point of view but less and less in terms of agency, relational and economic power and skills.15 The following year, in 2015, along with the conference proceedings, the Maritime Women: Global Leadership Declaration was published: an informal and non-binding document encouraging all strategies to support and enhance female work and leadership in the maritime sector globally.16 In this overview, it is also important to highlight that the U.N. 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development dates back to 2015, and the European academia immediately implemented the recommendations.17 In this context, at least from a global North perspective, the U.N. 2030 Agenda represents a decisive turning point in conceptualisation and approach towards the âmisfitsâ from all over the world and of all genders. Now, the political, vindicative, and identitarian charge of âmarginalityâ, âinequalityâ, âsubalternityâ, and âoppressionâ is completely defused, and those concepts/conditions are understood according to their âmereâ economic implications. This is evidently a drastic sea change compared to the predominant approaches and intellectual sensibilities of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s.
It took the tsunami of the #MeToo Movement to bring back eminently political content and more âtraditionalâ advocacy practices for our âmisfitsâ (and the academic environment, too).18 In the maritime sector, the issue of preventing gender-based violence and abuse was mentioned for the first time in âThe Santiago de Compostela Declaration for Equal Opportunities in the Fisheries and Aquaculture Sectorsâ (art. 10) of 2018.19 In 2019, the ILO adopted the Convention on Violence and Harassment (C190), establishing new global standards in terms of combating violence and sexual abuse in the workplace. Also in the same year, Safer Waves was founded, a charity that deals specifically with bullying, sexual violence, and gender discrimination in seafaring. Finally, I do not think it would be strange to say that, in addition, the Yearbook of Womenâs History/Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis no. 41, Gender at Sea, edited by Djoeke van Netten, can in some way be considered as one of the outcomes that the #MeToo Movement stimulated among scholars who deal with gender and maritime history.20
Between 2021 and 2022, international maritime organisations published other documents with updated information on the working and living conditions of women workers in the maritime sector. From these reports, we learn that, despite the giant strides made in terms of empowerment (e.g. education, legal tools, professional associations), on the whole, at present, those workers remain âmisfitsâ. Although the situation for âpink collarsâ and women with C-level positions employed in the industry is significantly better, the number of female seafarers is below the two per cent of the aboard workforce.21 They are mainly employed in the cruise sector and predominantly come from the global South.22 Like in the past,23 present-day seafarers remain a âfragileâ category of workers, and its (liminal) female component is even more vulnerable. From what we learn from the report commissioned by The Mission to Seafarers in 2022, labour exploitation, the difficulty in reconciling work and family life, sexual harassment, and other forms of intimidation are significant issues for women seafarers. They are also among the workers who suffered the most from the conditions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.24
As previously mentioned, this volume considers the question of womenâs maritime labour and business participation in a part of the âenlightenedâ, âdevelopedâ, and âmodernâ global North. This is a context where the association of âwomenâ with the âseaâ still evokes static and ahistorical images of mythical figures like mermaids, rather than acknowledging the presence of real women â maritime workers and individuals who have been active participants in history and in the development of maritime capitalism and modernity just like men. This reasoning also influenced the choice of the title and the beautiful illustration by Sophie Casson on the cover.
Furthermore, in one way or another, all its contributions preserve a âgenetic traceâ of the evolutionary process of an intellectual and political nature summarised in the previous pages. The hope is that, in one or two decades, this (modest) collective work can be âprovincialisedâ, that is, âtranslatedâ and put into a dialectical relationship with other similar works produced within the global Southâs socio-economic, productive, cultural, and intellectual configurations. This circumstance would undoubtedly benefit the discussion on the so-called âmaritime modernityâ and the development of the notions of subaltern and marginal (i.e. the misfit) from a gender and global perspective.25
2 The Mermaids Volume
As the âgenetic codeâ of this collective volume has been mapped out and its ultimate aim has been declared, it is now appropriate to provide some indication regarding its structure and the contributions it contains. First, it is worth saying that the volumeâs blueprint originates from the International Conference MERMAIDS. (En)Gendering Maritime Labour and Business Histories, held at the University of Ljubljana (virtual) on 9â11 February 2022, in which most of the contributors to this volume participated as presenters.26 As for its structure, the volume collects 12 contributions and is organised into three parts. Apart from the one relating to fishing, the other two sections are structured around the concept of the âshoreâ as the feminine â and effeminated â maritime space.
Although the volume intends to question the weight of and deconstruct the opposition that exists and continues to exist between âseaâ/âshoreâ and âmasculineâ/âfeminineâ in maritime work and business, every contributor in this volume is very well aware that there still is a strong gender polarisation between âseaâ and âshoreâ in the collective consciousness and world of maritime employment.27 In this context, it is necessary to specify that this âgender systemâ does not only involve the spatial and work fields. That is, on-shore is womenâs âproperâ space, while the deep sea is menâs âproperâ realm; when women venture off-shore, they replicate their âproperâ-maritime-unskilled and domesticity-related schemes. That opposition also adopts precise moral and values implications, as Lisa Norling has very successfully highlighted in the case of whale fishing: âWhere women are mentioned, it is usually as the foil against which seamen and maritime culture in general asserted their aggressive masculinity and their alienation from land-based society as they âwanderedâ over âthe trackless deepâ on ships that were always called âsheââ.28 In this regard, and for our case, it is necessary to remember that the on-shore and womenâs work in the off-shore are constantly and heavily influenced by the cultural and political conditioning and bias â often in terms of morals â of âhome-groundedâ communities.
Given these premises, it does not appear, therefore, that the use of the term âmisfitsâ for women involved in the maritime industry is âout of placeâ.
2.1 On-Shore: Informal Maritime Economies and Female Labour
As Peter Turnbull observes in general terms, if there is one characteristic that distinguishes work on the waterfront, it is its unpredictability.29 This observation refers, in particular, to male work. Still, it is also well suited to the conditions where female work took place from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in various maritime contexts between Western Europe and North America. Womenâs work on the waterfront was made possible thanks to the grey spaces left by the legal framework and work regulations, between the folds of the authoritiesâ interests, and, finally, literally in that âno manâs landâ between ancient and new economic and productive savoir-faire.
In their chapter, Paola Avallone and Raffaella Salvemini reconstruct the legal framework that allowed â or prevented â women from participating in formal economy schemes, maritime or otherwise, in Southern Italy in late Early Modern Times. More often, the legislative framework and the lack of formal education required women to work and do business âoff the booksâ. However, as in other maritime contexts, the constant absence of men and a vast âmaritime cultureâ allowed them to manage family maritime businesses and, sometimes, even impose themselves on the scene. Helen Berry also highlights a type of grey economy â or rather, an âamphibiousâ and âambiguousâ one â that featured some women in British naval ports at the turn of the nineteenth century. Her âbum boatsâ women provided Royal Navy sailors with goods (e.g. alcohol) and services (e.g. credit) that proved essential both for the sailors themselves and â perhaps above all â for the Royal Navy authorities. The opportunities for binge consumption provided by the âbum boatâ women not only supported the local port economies but also, since sailors spent all their money, forced them to continually re-embark to secure new emoluments. In that way, the Royal Navy could ensure a recruiting pool of âneedyâ and âfragileâ â i.e. in a state of economic and other kind of dependency â seamen in its service over time. Employment opportunities for women as lighthouse keepers on the U.S. Great Lakes in the late nineteenth century, studied by Kathy S. Mason, were greatly affected by the industrialisation and mechanisation underway at that time. Ever-increasing maritime and port traffic in the most industrialised area of the U.S.A. (the West Great Lakes) led to an increase in navigation support services. This circumstance opened up, although often without an official federal appointment, the possibility of a position as a lighthouse keeper for women. Although it was an eminently male occupation, the position of lighthouse keeper was perfectly acceptable for a woman as it valorised some ânaturalâ feminine qualities (e.g. sense of duty and sacrifice, reliability, domesticity). Returning to the Mediterranean basin, Andreu Seguà and Antònia Morey present a study on female occupation in the Balearic maritime communities based on the population census of 1924. From their study, it emerges that the data relating to the low participation of women in the formal labour market depends on the type of source, which turns out to be âshort-sightedâ compared to the mostly informal and âsubmergedâ forms of female work in maritime communities.
2.2 Fish-Fags: Feminised Labour Practices within and outside the Factory
In an article representing a research agenda for those dealing with gender relationships in maritime and fishing communities, Madeleine Gustavsson urges âmoving beyond documenting womenâs vulnerability to understanding womenâs fishing lives in their own rightâ.30 To do so, Gustavsson indicates three areas of research that have been explored in the contributions of this section of the volume, in particular: analysing womenâs working conditions in the fisheries sector, focusing in particular on forms of feminisation of work (e.g. precariousness, flexibility, double day, underpayment); studying the relational context in the workplace, within the family, of their community of origin and in the broader framework of society; and, finally, paying attention to the âmessiness of womenâs everyday life ad practicesâ in the relational and productive fabric of the fishing communities.31 Given what has been said, Luisa Maria Muñoz Abeledo presents a medium to long-term perspective on the employment situation and human resource management framework in one of Spainâs world-leading production sectors: fish processing and canning. In Spain, as elsewhere, the canning industry relies heavily on female workers, who are often precarious, underpaid, and underestimated from a professional point of view compared to their (few) male colleagues. In this context, employment practices between men and women appear to be dramatically unequal: not only does gender discrimination exist in terms of work tasks but also, and perhaps above all, in terms of contractual treatment between women and men. Returning to the same production sector, Oskar Opassi takes us inside a Slovenian fish-canning factory â the Delamaris in Izola â in socialist Yugoslavia. Even though women represented 45 per cent of the total workforce in socialist Slovenia, in which the system of corporate self-management functioned, female workers continued to do âwomenâsâ jobs and represented the most underpaid workforce. Those women workers had to bear a âtriple burdenâ: work, family management, and political and labour-organisation participation within the factory and their communities of origin. Despite all this, their presence in political and corporate decision-making structures remained limited. Although in different terms, Ariana DomÃnguez GarcÃa and Daniel J. Albero Santacreu also present us with a self-managed form of work: the itinerant female fishmongers of Mallorca (Spain) who necessarily had to refer to self-managed forms of work organisation since the institutional regulatory framework was practically non-existent. However, in that deregulated â and deprotected â working context, those female workers not only contributed in an economically significant way to the family ménage but also, and perhaps above all, carried out a double function as âgo-betweenersâ in all the dimensions of sociability and acculturation that the term entails. On the one hand, they could broker the practices and culture of the maritime communities with that of the communities in the islandâs hinterland; on the other, they acted as a medium of communication between the fishing communities of origin and the rest of the world.
2.3 Off-Shore: a Male Heterotopia between the Uncanny (Das Unheimliche) and the Familiar (Das Heimliche)
Foucault tells us that a ship can be defined as a heterotopia, i.e. a concrete space connected with other spaces (of a physical, cultural, social, economic, etc. nature) but with an intensely alienating power.32 Even oneâs image reflected in the mirror can be considered a heterotopia: sometimes, the vision of oneâs âdoubleâ â real and unreal at the same time â can create forms of intellectual and moral uncertainty. It is the disturbing experience of the uncanny â Das Unheimliche in Freudâs words â when we witness our representation/objectification. Or, in other words, when we recognise ourselves outside of ourselves. From a clinical point of view, this psychic experience can constitute an opportunity for the (narcissistic) strengthening of identity. Still, it can also adopt the menacing connotation of the persecution/punishment of the âotherâ. The reason for (possibly) so much hostility lies in the fact that the uncanny is something familiar but which, then, has undergone some processes of estrangement. This is the case with robots, automatons, wax statues, vampires, zombies,33 and female seafarers.34 As for the latter, in the dominant patriarchal narrative, they resemble the âoriginalâ but are actually its âimproperâ version, even more so since, in most cases, they had very usual, familiar, and reassuring roles (Das Heimliche) for a woman on board â that of the cook, the maid, the nurse. So, to be even tolerated aboard, they must continue to have an âancillaryâ, domestic, or âhomewardâ (Heim) role. Probably, the confirmation of what has been said up to now lies in the fact that, as Jo Stanley observed, women seafarers in the global North, and at least until the 1980s, were not considered equal human beings.35 Not in the slightest.
Given these premises, John O. Jensen presents the story of Lydia Dale and other women seafarers who served as âdomesticâ maritime workers aboard U.S. merchant vessels sailing the Great Lakes waters during the transition from sailing to steam navigation, with all the anthropological implications that followed. Those seafarers found themselves in a constant paradox. It was likely the women chose to find employment as maids â particularly cooks â on board ships because their work there was better paid, and they enjoyed better treatment and greater employment and legal protection. Thus, a womanâs (domestic) work was worth more when done off-shore than ashore. However, considering that female seafarers were more likely to die than their male counterparts in the event of a shipwreck, this circumstance suggests that, overall, the life of a woman seafarer was worth less than that of a man at sea. This was probably due to the fact that those women were not considered âshipmatesâ but the âimproperâ and âminorâ â and therefore expendable â version of a ârealâ seafarer. Justine Cousin also tells us about the same paradox but in different terms. In her chapter, she analyses the position of the Titanic stewardesses and the circumstances by which most of them escaped death. The Titanic tragedy also occurred in a moment of transition. It was no longer the one from sailing to steam â which was now in its mature phase â but one of a social and political nature which particularly involved the âminorsâ of the time, i.e. women and the working class. They were âperturbingâ what was âreassuringâ and âfamiliarâ, everything that was the prerogative of the ânormalâ and the âproperâ: the access to civil, social, economic and political rights. In that context, a woman, a certain Virginia Woolf, also had the audacity to mock one of the most âreassuringâ â since embodying and capable of maintaining the status quo â institutions that existed at the time: the Admiralty. In that framework, on that elegant and very-establishment transatlantic vessel, on that tragic night in 1912, those stewardesses found space on the lifeboats only because they were considered âfamiliarâ and defenceless women. At that moment, if they had wanted to be equal to their ânormalâ and âproperâ male counterparts, they would have also had to share their tragic fate.
In her chapter, Erica Mezzoli shows us a last short-circuit scheme. She considers a specific area of Europe, the North-eastern Upper Adriatic, examining the situation of women seafarers in connection with gender roles/relations and domesticity in post-First and Second World Wars transitions on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The âbachelor girlsâ/âfemale sea dogsâ who served, ironed, and washed clothes sailing the seven seas between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not considered âproperâ seafarers, at least not by the maritime authorities. Conversely, in the very first post-WWII years, socialist Yugoslavia could boast about having two female officers with adequate formal nautical education serving on its merchant vessels. Yet, not even at that time and in that political context were those two âproperâ female seafarers considered âmatesâ. The Tito-Stalin split of 1948 and the consequent rapprochement of Yugoslavia with the U.S.A. also had concrete consequences in everyday life. That altered scenario, in which âfamiliarâ female figures such as sexy pin-ups or actresses like Doris Day began to penetrate the Yugoslav pop imagination, made our two women officers âdisturbingâ.
In the previous chapter, the themes of gender relations and sexuality were introduced, issues Jo Stanley develops in her contribution. Stanley analyses the implications that the âsecond waveâ of women seafarers had in a hyper-eroticised and gay heaven environment like cruise ships. In the 1970s, Jack Tar was no longer the typical male worker aboard, at least not on large passenger ships. On those heterotopias â or place-not-place contexts â Gender, Sexual, and Relationship-diverse (GSRD) men were the uncontested majority with which the recruits of seafaring women â also with leadership roles â had to somehow âdeal withâ, generally unconsciously. In that moment and in that context, the question was posed in eminently hegemonic terms: camp men feared that their reigning position in those (sexual) âhunting reservesâ would be called into question by those female newcomers. On the contrary, considering the general framework outlined throughout the volume, Tomas Nilson finally sings the long-awaited âredemption songâ we had been waiting for. In his chapter, Nilson shows us how the heterotopic space of a ship and the so-called âbachelor cultureâ36 â a cluster of integrated elements capable of establishing specific hierarchies and practices aboard â can be re-appropriated by subjects (i.e. women) who generally suffer its performing force in a deteriorating and objectifying sense. The stewardesses of the Swedish America Line (SAL), through camaraderie and the identity-making process triggered by particularly demanding working tasks and conditions, were able to forge their own âstate of exceptionâ, which allowed them to adapt the synthesis between non-place and gender hierarchical practices according to their own agencies. Finally, for some of our âmisfitsâ, life has been a beach for a while.
Acknowledgements
The present chapter was written within the NextGenerationEU Project âOndine. Womenâs Labour and Everyday Life on the Upper and Eastern Adriatic Waterfronts, mid-19th centuryâmid-20th centuryâ (Funded by EU; CUP E53C22002420001) hosted by the Department of History, Humanities and Society of the Tor Vergata University of Rome.
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Proutière-Maulion, Gwenaele, and Helen Maulion. âThe Feminisation of Maritime Activities in France. Being a Seafarer and a Woman: Gender, Community and Representations?â In Gens de mer: un marché international du travail, edited by Patrick Chaumette, 91â104.
Roberts, Adrienne. âFinancial Crisis, Financial Firms ⦠And Financial Feminism? The Rise of âTransnational Business Feminismâ and the Necessity of Marxist-Feminist IPE.â Socialist Studies/Ãtudes socialistes 8, no. 2 (2012): 85â108.
Sheerin, Corina, and Thomas Garavan. âFemale leaders as âSuperwomenâ: Post-global financial crisis media framing of women and leadership in investment banking in UK print media 2014â2016.â Critical Perspectives on Accounting 86 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2021.102307.
Smith, Barbara, ed. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983.
Stanley, Jo. âWomen/Sea/Misogyny. Ending Silences about Sexual Abuse at Sea.â In Gender at Sea, the Yearbook of Womenâs History/Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis no. 41, edited by Djoeke van Netten, 203â217. Hilversum: Verloren Publishers, 2022.
Stanley, Jo. From Cabin âBoysâ to Captains. 250 Years of Women at Sea. Stroud: The History Press, 2016.
The Mission to Seafarers. Women Seafarers Report 2022. London: The Mission to Seafarers, 2022.
Thieme, John. âThe Emergence of Postcolonial Studies in Britain in the 1980s: A Personal Retrospect.â Ex-position 40 (2018): 95â108.
Thompson, Paul, with Tony Wailey and Trevor Lummis. Living the Fishing. London, Boston and Melbourne: Routledge & Kegan Paul plc, 1983.
Turnbull, Peter. âPort Labor.â In The Blackwell Companion to Maritime Economics, edited by Wayne K. Talley, 517â548. Hoboken: Blackwell, 2012.
Turner, Graeme. ââIt Works for Meâ: British Cultural Studies, Australian Cultural Studies, Australian Film.â In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 640â653. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
Vinen, Richard. Thatcherâs Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era. London: Simon & Schuster, 2009.
Weyer, Birgit. âTwenty years later: explaining the persistence of the glass ceiling for women leaders.â Women in Management Review 22, no. 6 (2007): 482â496.
Yemaya newsletter. https://www.icsf.net/yemaya-newsletter/.
See Vincent J. Cannato, âThe 1980sâA Historiographical Survey,â in The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States, ed. Jerald Podair and Darren Dochuk (London and New York: Routledge: 2018), 84â93; âFeminism and the Political Crisis of the Eighties,â Feminist Review 12 (1982): 3â7; Richard Vinen, Thatcherâs Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009). For the Italian case, see Beppe De Sario, âAnni ottanta. Passato prossimo venturo,â Zapruder thematic issue Ritorno al futuro. Movimenti, culture e attivismo negli anni ottanta 21 (2010): 2â7.
See Stuart Hall, âCultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,â in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 277â294; Graeme Turner, ââIt Works for Meâ: British Cultural Studies, Australian Cultural Studies, Australian Film,â in Cultural Studies, 640â653; Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, âIntroduction,â in Cultural Studies, 8.
As regards our specific ambit, it is essential to highlight the following works: Judith Fingard, Jack in Port. Sailortowns of Eastern Canada (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1982); Paul Thompson with Tony Wailey and Trevor Lummis, Living the Fishing (London, Boston, and Melbourne: Routledge & Kegan Paul plc, 1983); Glasgow Womenâs Studies Group, ed., Uncharted Lives. Extracts from Scottish Womenâs Experiences, 1850â1982 (Glasgow: Pressgang, 1983); Jane Nadel-Klein and Dona Lee Davis, eds., To Work and To Weep. Women in Fishing Economies (St. Johnâs, Canada: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1988); Colin Howell and Richard Twomey, eds., Jack Tar in History. Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 1991).
See Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983); Martha A. Ackelsberg, âIdentity Politics, Political Identities: Thoughts toward a Multicultural Politics,â Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 16, no. 1 (1996): 87â100; Benita Parry, âThe institutionalisation of postcolonial studies,â in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 66â80; John Thieme, âThe Emergence of Postcolonial Studies in Britain in the 1980s: A Personal Retrospect,â Ex-position 40 (2018): 95â108; Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Kimberle Crenshaw, âDemarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,â The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139â167.
As for the Yemaya newsletter, see https://www.icsf.net/yemaya-newsletter/ (accessed 7 February 2025).
Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds., Iron Men, Wooden Women. Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700â1920 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab had a Wife. New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720â1870 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo, eds., Women at Sea. Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Women Seafarers. Global employment policies and practices (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2003). The International Labour Organization (ILO) commissioned the report following the resolution on women seafarers adopted by the 29th Session of the Joint Maritime Commission in January 2001. The Seafarers International Research Centre (SIRC, Cardiff University) carried out the research; the report was published in 2003.
Cfr Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
For example, see: Birgit Weyer, âTwenty years later: explaining the persistence of the glass ceiling for women leaders,â Women in Management Review 22, no. 6 (2007): 482â496; Kalpana Pai and Sameer Vaidya, âGlass ceiling: role of women in the corporate world,â Competitiveness Review 19, no. 2 (2009): 106â113; Corina Sheerin and Thomas Garavan, âFemale leaders as âSuperwomenâ: Post-global financial crisis media framing of women and leadership in investment banking in UK print media 2014â2016,â Critical Perspectives on Accounting 86 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2021.102307; Adrienne Roberts, âFinancial Crisis, Financial Firms ⦠And Financial Feminism? The Rise of âTransnational Business Feminismâ and the Necessity of Marxist-Feminist IPE,â Socialist Studies/Ãtudes socialistes 8, no. 2 (2012): 85â108.
International Conference âEmpowering Professional Women in the Maritime Worldâ organised by the World Maritime University, Malmö (Sweden), 2â4 April 2008.
Second International Conference âMaritime Women: Global Leadershipâ organised by the World Maritime University, Malmö (Sweden), 31 Marchâ1 April 2014.
An essential element that marked the 2010s was the associative activity of women on a professional level. Regarding the fishing sector, the foundation of AKTEA, the European network for women in fisheries and aquaculture, dates back to 2006. As for shipping, it is essential to mention that between 2004 and 2015, a whole galaxy of regional WIMA associations was formed. In 2017, the Women Offshore Foundation was established to support and empower female seafarers. Finally, one of the most valuable outcomes of the WMU conference of 2014 was the establishment of the World Maritime University Womenâs Association (WMUWA), whose aim is to gather WMU female students and alums to work in synergy with the IMO to enhance empowerment and female leadership in seafaring globally, according to a regional approach.
Maritime Women: Global Leadership Declaration, in Maritime Women: Global Leadership, ed. Momoko Kitada, Erin Williams, and Lisa Loloma Froholdt (Berlin: Springer, 2015), 295â298. In this framework, it is necessary to highlight that ILO adopted a pioneering maritime labour convention on merchant marine in 2006 (MLC 2006) and, in 2007, Convention No. 188 on working activities in fisheries.
As for maritime labour, see Patrick Chaumette, ed., Gens de mer: un marché international du travail (2016), particularly Gwenaele Proutière-Maulion and Helen Maulion, The Feminisation of Maritime Activities in France. Being a Seafarer and a Woman: Gender, Community and Representations?, 91â104.
In the latter regard, see Surviving Sexism in Academia. Strategies for Feminist Leadership, ed. Kristi Cole and Holly Hassel (New York and London: Routledge, 2017); Kelly J. Baker, Sexism Ed. Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia (Chapel Hill: Blue Crow Books), 2018.
Seeâhttps://www.icsf.net/resources/the-santiago-de-compostela-declaration-for-equal-opportunities-in-the-fisheries-and-aquaculture-sectors/ (accessed 7 February 2025). That document was followed by the FAO Committee on Fisheries (COFI) Declaration for Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture of 2021, https://www.fao.org/documents/card/en?details=CB3767EN#:~:text=The%202021%20COFI%20Declaration%20for,term%20sustainability%20of%20the%20sector (accessed 7 February 2025).
Djoeke van Netten, ed., Gender at Sea, the Yearbook of Womenâs History/Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis no. 41 (Hilversum: Verloren Publishers, 2022); in particular Jo Stanley, Women/Sea/Misogyny. Ending Silences about Sexual Abuse at Sea, 203â217.
BIMCO and ICS, Seafarer Workforce Report: The Global Supply and Demand for Seafarers in 2021 (Livingston: Witherbys, 2021). In the industry, 39 per cent of women work in mid-management, 28 per cent in technical roles, and 48 per cent in administrative and support roles. As for the C-level positions, out of more than 500 companies that participated in the survey, 125 have a woman as CEO (just under 25 per cent). Women in Maritime Survey 2021. A Study of Maritime Companies and IMO Members Statesâ Maritime Authorities, a study coordinated by IMO and WISTA International (London: IMO 2021), 6â7. At the time of writing, the second Women in Maritime Survey is in progress.
Women in Maritime Survey 2021, 10â13.
See Erica Mezzoli, âSafe Waters. Austrian Seafarers between Charity and Welfare, ca. 1850â1920,â ANNALES. Ser. hist. sociol. 32, no. 4 (2022): 571â590.
Women Seafarers Report 2022, a report commissioned by The Mission to Seafarers (London: The Mission to Seafarers, 2022).
See Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea. Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Antonis Balasopoulos, ââSuffer a Sea Change.â Spatial Crisis, Maritime Modernity, and the Politics of Utopia,â Cultural Critique 63 (2006): 122â156; Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás, Capitalism and the Sea. The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World (London and New York: Verso, 2021); Karen Downing, Johnathan Thayer, and Joanne Begiato, eds., Negotiating Masculinities and Modernity in the Maritime World, 1815â1940. A Sailorâs Progress? (Cham: Palgrave Macmillian, 2021).
The Conference was organised in the framework of the MSCA-IF Project 2019 âWe Can Do It! Womenâs labour market participation in the maritime sector in the Upper Adriatic after the World Wars in an intersectional perspectiveâ (acronym: WeCanIt; grant agreement no. 894257). All Conference materials can be found here: https://www.wecanit.eu/notices-to-mariners/mermaids-engendering-maritime-labour-and-business-histories/.
The gendered dichotomy âseaâ/âshoreâ is an implementation of the âseparate spheresâ paradigm, which, in history and maritime studies, has taken on a life of its own and autonomous speculative relevance. On the âseparated spheresâ concept, see Linda K. Kerber, âSeparate Spheres, Female Worlds, Womanâs Place: The Rhetoric of Womenâs History,â The Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 9â39.
Lisa Norling, âAhabâs Wife. Women and the American Whaling Industry, 1820â1870,â in Iron Men, Wooden Women, 71. Emphasis added.
Peter Turnbull, âPort Labor,â in The Blackwell Companion to Maritime Economics, ed. Wayne K. Talley (Hoboken: Blackwell, 2012), 521.
Madeleine Gustavsson, âWomenâs changing productive practices, gender relations and identities in fishing through a critical feminisation perspective,â Journal of Rural Studies 78 (2020): 45.
Gustavsson, âWomenâs changing productive practices,â 45.
Michel Foucault, âDes espaces autres,â Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46â49.
In this sense, the uncanny is one of industrial modernityâs (late nineteenthâearly twenty century) grand narrative/aesthetic frameworks.
This is sometimes also the case for women in Academia.
Jo Stanley, From Cabin âBoysâ to Captains. 250 Years of Women at Sea (Stroud: The History Press, 2016), 30.
On âbachelor cultureâ see Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor. Creating an American Subculture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). It is interesting to observe what performativity the practices associated with âbachelor cultureâ intervene in the shaping and use of domestic space. In this regard, see Susan R. Henderson, âBachelor Culture in the Work of Adolf Loos,â Journal of Architectural Education 55, no. 3 (2002): 125â135; Joanne Hollows, âThe Bachelor Dinner: Masculinity, Class and Cooking in Playboy, 1953â1961,â Continuum 16â2 (2002): 143â155. Paul B. Preciado, Pornotopia: an essay on Playboyâs architecture and biopolitics (New York: Zone Books, 2014); Laika Katriina Nevalainen, Flexible domesticities: bachelorhood, home and everyday practices in Finland from the 1880s to the 1930s (Florence: European University Institute, 2018, EUI, HEC, PhD Thesis), https://hdl.handle.net/1814/52204 (accessed 7 February 2025).