Mothering Brooklyn

Abstract

This paper examines how Brooklyn retail signage represents how gentrifying women struggle for claiming space in public and the way in which different intersectional identity formations are used and implicated in transforming urban space. In exploring different ethnographic dimensions to retail storefronts, we show how women, many of whom are college-educated, married, and new mothers, play a significant role in redefining Brooklyn and cultural norms of motherhood more broadly. Yet, as newly arriving women emerge as key players in the gentrification project, they experience backlash against their public roles. We explore how women also employ race, inequality, and patriarchal notions of heteronormative sexuality as a cover for their public challenges to patriarchal power. Drawing on visual ethnography, interviews, and digital archival material we argue that the ambiguity of word play accomplishes both the pushing of normative boundaries as well as the protective cover of public meanings.

Ní Saoirse go Saoirse na mBan: Gender and the Irish language in the linguistic landscape of Ireland's 2018 abortion referendum

“…Since Milani's (2014:221) critique that LL research has ‘largely ignored—erased even—the gendered and sexualized nature of public space’, gender and sexuality have started to receive more concerted attention in the field, notably the 2018 Special Issue of Linguistic Landscape focusing on gender and sexuality. This included studies addressing the intersection of discourses of motherhood and gentrification in Brooklyn, New York (Trinch & Snajdr 2018), and the commodification of women's breasts on Columbian websites advertising cosmetic surgery (Correa & Shohamy 2018). In particular, though, Milani, Levon, Gafter, & Or (2018) provided an account of two queer groups’ divergent interactions with Tel Aviv Pride, negotiating a path between gender and sexual identities, on the one hand, and national identity, on the other.…”

“…Milani and colleagues’ (2018) distinction between strategies of affirmation and transformation is applicable here, too: the use of Irish in conjunction with discourses of gender equality might be seen as a strategy of affirmation which seeks to incorporate gender equality into the dominant national identity project, rather than a transformational move questioning the compatibility between national projects and gender equality more fundamentally. Trinch & Snajdr's (2018) account of gentrification in the New York LL is also relevant: while white, middle-class women were publicly defying patriarchal power through their impact on the LL, which made traditionally ‘private’ issues public, they were driving gentrification at the same time. In a similar dynamic, the incorporation of gender equality into a new vision of Irishness falls back on the enduring relevance and discursive authority of national identity rather than discarding it entirely, or decoupling Irish from it.…”