The stakes of the body: power and subversion in Roman shanties

Dwelling in conflict: Redesigning the home to rethink family and society

This article critically re-examines the domestic space through the lens of feminist, decolonial, and affect theory, centering on Cini Boeri’s Domestic Project as a case study for rethinking architectural, relational, and political dimensions of the home. Far from being a neutral or private refuge, the home is presented as a deeply ideological and contested site where gendered norms, labour relations, and social reproduction converge. Drawing from Italian feminist activism—particularly the movement for wages for housework—the analysis underscores the role of domestic architecture in naturalising women’s labour while systematically excluding them from spatial decision-making. Through engagements with theorists such as Silvia Federici, bell hooks, Lauren Berlant, and Leslie Kern, the text explores how care, intimacy, and subjectivity are produced and governed within domestic infrastructures. The essay argues for a radical reconfiguration of domestic space as a political act, capable of disrupting heteronormative, capitalist, and patriarchal systems. It highlights the importance of feminist design practices in imagining homes that foster autonomy, relational plurality, and collective care. Ultimately, the home emerges not only as a site of structural domination but as a space of potential transformation—where new modes of living, relating, and resisting can be cultivated

After the clash of empires: Women’s stories from Soviet-occupied Karafuto and Lithuania

Building on the concepts of mediation and multidirectional memory, this paper offers a comparative analysis of two memoirs written by women who, at the end of WWII, found themselves in Soviet-occupied territories—Sakhalin in the east and Lithuania in the west. The analysis revolves around two questions: how do the authors understand and construct femininity in their texts and how does this shape their narratives of war and Soviet occupation? Even though both were writing at a time when women’s experiences of the (post)war were marginalized, by aligning their narratives with the ideological demands of the Cold War, the authors could speak publicly about sexual violence and other forms of gendered trauma. By focusing on memory and femininity, this article connects the distant stories of a Japanese settler and a Lithuanian partisan, showing how historical actors recall being liberated from one empire only to be swept away by the next.

UC Merced TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World

The Unquiet Metropolis: Navigating Urban Materialism and Rural Ethical Anchors in The Fiction of Sudha Murty

Sudha Murty’s writing is always anchored in the clash between the burgeoning modernization of the nation and the shifting cultural landscape of India as the economy begins to transform. In her fiction, Murty depicts the struggle between the temptations of a materialist city and the strong ethical codes of the countryside, focusing on the lives of common people impacted by rising economic success, the benefits of education, and the ascent in society. The paper analyzes two novels, Dollar Bahu and Gently Falls the Bakula to discuss how Murty portrays city as a place that promises scope but also fosters emotional loneliness whereas country offers warmth and humility coupled with togetherness. Through Shamala and Vinuta in the former and Shrimati and Shrikant in the latter, Murty attempts to ask a pertinent question if material success can indeed offset the loss of the bond between humans. It is concluded that Murty’s narrative neither idealises the country nor rejects the idea of moving forward. Murty presents an intermediary approach of integrating professional career and the ethics. It is observed that the notion of ‘rooted modernism’ advocated through education, aspiration, and global engagement is embedded within the very fabric of empathy, gratitude, and righteousness in Murty’s fictional works.

Impolitic bodies for liminal economies. Notes to an ethnography at the sexual margins of the nation

This contribution examines the case of transgender bodies inhabiting the margins of Rome: bodies experiencing urban lives shaped by irregular migration and chronic dispossession. The paper uses the “paradoxical” figure of the margin as a conceptual framework, and is based on fieldwork notes collected as legal and social workers for grassroots associations supporting migrant sex workers in the city. The subjects encountered embody long-lasting migration paths, mainly from South America, and access services as migrants (thus welcomed or rejected according to the practices of subjectification in asylum law), non-heteronormative subjects, and sex workers. Following these dimensions, we explore how “inclusion politics” produce processes of marginalization, structurally generating deviations from the norm that sustain the moral and aesthetic national rhetorics of “urban decency”. These processes, in fact, produce “surplus” liminal bodies that nevertheless constitute a population economically and symbolically available to the “city-zenship”. Through informal routes and settlements tied to prostitution and migration in Rome, the urban area thrives on what is publicly known as “urban decay”. On the other hand, the city remains a space inhabited by those who have not yet been included. In the margins, these multi-faced subjectivities practice forms of solidarity, and reinterpret their own lives.

The Riviera of the Middle East: Gaza, Donald Trump and hospitality discourses of imperialism

This conceptual paper seeks to outline how hospitality discourses have been used to rationalize and justify policies of ethnic cleansing and displacement within the occupied and besieged Palestinian Territories, focusing particularly on the comments and social media activity of the president of the United States Donald Trump. Drawing on a post-qualitative inquiry approach, this paper thinks with Foucault by using his concepts as ‘plugs’, to generate new insights into how hospitality discourse, as a form of social control, enacts symbolic violence through the language of care and compassion. The paper establishes links with ongoing scholarship that implicates tourism development and planning within territorial disputes, land grabs and the displacement of Indigenous people, by describing how hospitality can be weaponized as a discourse of development that evokes a sense of respectability alongside the illusion of a politically neutral process. Hospitality articulated in this way enables violent realities to be hidden underneath the language of welcome.