Mobile Subjects

The first famous transgender person in the United States, Christine Jorgensen, traveled to Denmark for gender reassignment surgery in 1952. Jorgensen became famous during the ascent of postwar dreams about the possibilities for technology to transform humanity and the world. In Mobile Subjects Aren Z. Aizura examines transgender narratives within global health and tourism economies from 1952 to the present. Drawing on an archive of trans memoirs and documentaries as well as ethnographic fieldwork with trans people obtaining gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, Aizura maps the uneven use of medical protocols to show how national and regional health care systems and labor economies contribute to and limit transnational mobility. Aizura positions transgender travel as a form of biomedical tourism, examining how understandings of race, gender, and aesthetics shape global cosmetic surgery cultures and how economic and racially stratified marketing and care work create the ideal transgender subject as an implicitly white, global citizen. In so doing, he shows how understandings of travel and mobility depend on the historical architectures of colonialism and contemporary patterns of global consumption and labor.

This book is derived from lectures at an international NATO-Russian Advanced Research Workshop on the Stand-off-Detection of concealed explosives carried by suicide-bombers or in vehicles. Ideally, explosives should be detected by harmless methods at a distance, and unknown to the persons under inspection. The aim is to devise sensing techniques that will allow the shortest developing time sufficient to start commercial production. Short time availability is a prioritizing isssue.

In an increasingly globalized world, mobility is a new defining feature of our lives, livelihoods and work experiences. This book is a first in utilising transnational migration studies as a new theoretical framework in management and organization studies. Ozkazanc-Pan presents a much-needed new concept for understanding people, work and organizations in a world on the move while attending to growing inequality associated with work in changing societies.

In the twenty-first century, everything and everybody seems to be on the move. Global flows of people, goods, food, money, information, services and media images are form an intensely mobile background to everyday life. This book addresses the challenges and opportunities of researching mobile phenomena.

Over the past fifteen years or so, there has been a widespread and increasing fascination with the theme of mobility across the social sciences and humanities. Of course, geographers have always had an interest in mobility, but as yet they have not viewed this in the same 'mobility turn' as in other disciplines where it has been used to critique the standard approaches to the subjects. This text brings together leading academics to provide a revitalised 'geography of mobilities' informed by this wider 'mobility turn'. It makes connections between the seemingly disparate sub-disciplinary worlds of migration, transport and tourism, suggesting that each has much to learn from each other through the ontological and epistemological concern for mobility.

Investigating how intimacy is constructed across the restless world of empire

The core of this edited volume originates from a special issue of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA) that goes well beyond the special issue to incorporate the stimulating discussions and insights of two Middle East Studies Association conference roundtables and the important work of additional scholars in order to create a state-of-the-field volume on Ottoman sociolegal studies, particularly regarding Ottoman international law from the eighteenth century to the end of the empire. It makes several important contributions to Ottoman and Turkish studies, namely, by introducing these disciplines to the broader fields of trans-imperial studies, comparative international law, and legal history. Combining the best practices of diplomatic history and history from below to integrate the Ottoman Empire and its subjects into the broader debates of the nineteenth-century trans-imperial history this unique volume represents the exciting work and cutting-edge scholarship on these topics that will continue to shape the field in years to come.

The present volume explores through cultural and literary representations the contributions of women to the construction of knowledge in an ever changing, global world as migrant subjects. The essays contained in this book also focus on the female body as a site of physical violence and abuse, fighting prevalent stereotypes about women’s representations and identities. This collection intends to enter a forum of discussion in which the colonial past serves as a point of reference for the analysis of contemporary issues. Women’s strategies for building possible identities are seen to be based on their own experiences, seeking the ways in which the public marking and marketing of the female body within the western male imaginary contributes to the making of women’s social and personal identities. The different articles contained in this volume examine issues of gender and boundaries, the realities of women as colonial and postcolonial subjects, and darker realities such as alienation and discrimination as a result of migration, racism, and colonization analysed through a variety of critical perspectives. The gendered, raced, classed dimensions and mixed heritages not only of white women but also of women of the African Diaspora; these are important issues for the construction of knowledge and identity in our present multicultural societies, and can potentially change the ways we conceptualize, situate and engage the humanities in our scholarly work and in our social and cultural policies. These women, their presumed sexuality and their capacity to produce hybrid subjects, as well as their supposed irrationality make them a singularly disruptive figure in our contemporary world; this interpretation has its roots in the treatment of women in colonial times, especially when they were out of the margins of respectable society. The volume is addressed to a wide readership, both scholarly and those interested in investigating the dynamics of the social and cultural conceptualizations of our multicultural and multiethnic contemporary societies, marked by the intercultural exchanges of migratory subjects from a gender perspective.