Hegemonic gender role is specific configuration of different gender performances and practices that represents socially accepted answer on concrete circumstances within given society in particular historical moment. Analytical insight into their content and direction of change could provide us better understanding of other social structures and aspects of social life of society/ culture/sub cultural community/social group within which hegemonic gender role has been formulated and practicized. In that sense this research shell try (...) to recognize them as a legitimate source of data about societal process of structural transformation of Serbian society during the last two decades. (shrink)

Osnovna intencija istrazivanja je da retrospektivno sagleda promene u konstruktu pozeljnog modela zenskih rodnih uloga u periodu 'razvijenog samoupravnog socijalizma' (1970-tih), periodu strukturne krize socijalizma (1980-tih) i postsocijalistickom periodu srpskog/jugoslovenskog drustva, onako kako je on konstruisan u zenskom casopisu 'Bazar'. Kroz osnovne postavke teorijskog okvira istrazivanja pokusacemo da koncipiramo i priblizimo se pretpostavljenom novom komunikacionom modelu koji ce biti u stanju da u istrazivanje inkorporira sve promene nastale u samom procesu komunikacije izmedju emitera i recipijenta i time doprinesemo boljem razumevanju (...) sadrzaja poruke. (shrink)

The essay analyses the utopian imaginary in women’s writings with specific reference to the 1970s. Since the late 19 th century, utopia as a genre becomes a space to deconstruct and re-elaborate women’s identity and subjectivity. The appropriation of the utopian paradigm enriches the classical critique of the existing social systems with the deconstruction of gender roles and female stereotypes as a means to fight gender discrimination as well as other forms of oppression which lie (...) at the foundation of the Western symbolic and social orders. It also implies the restructuring of the technical and stylistic devices of the utopian genre. The imaginary worlds represent a space of empowerment that will enable the transformation of power systems, gender and sexual policies against any discriminations. This transformation is seen as salvific for both men and women. (shrink)

The international gender equality agenda evolved into one of mainstreaming a gender perspective into all policies and programmes. Within this process, the role of men gained increasing attention in the debates on gender equality. This resulted in the inclusion of ‘men's role’ as one of the themes of the agenda of the Commission on the Status of Women for the year 2004. While this is another step forward in the global efforts for achieving equality between (...) class='Hi'>women and men, its potential risks should not be overlooked. Therefore, it is necessary to revisit the concept of gender and carefully assess and monitor how the role of men is included in the agenda. This article starts with the premise that gender inequalities are the product of historically determined gender order in which the differentially assigned male female attributes are unequally structured in layers of privileged and subordinate positions of masculinities and femininities. The concept of patriarchy is brought back into the analysis to capture the interlinkages between the various status hierarchies that lead to shifts in hegemonic forms of masculinity that reproduces itself under diverse and changing conditions. Thus, while the article attempts to account for the generic and universal characteristics of gender inequality, at the same time, it draws attention to its specific socio-cultural manifestations. Finally, policy guidelines are offered for the consideration of the role of men in gender agenda setting. Accordingly, it is suggested that men's initiatives for alternative masculinities are acknowledged and that the questions regarding which men, in what kinds of alliances and for which end are reflected upon in formulating policies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 59-69 [Access article in PDF] Buddhist Views on Ritual Pactice Protestant Character of Modern Buddhist Movements Yukio MatsudoUniversity of HeidelbergWhat is the relationship between ritual and ethical activities in Nichiren Buddhism, as practiced in the Soka Gakkai (SG)? SG is a lay Buddhist organization which is, as such, involved extensively in secular affairs, specifically in the field of educational, cultural, social, and peace-promoting programs. (...) The question is, therefore, not at all whether there is a connection of religious practice and ethical activities. Rather it begs an explanation regarding its ideological background. In this respect a further reflection on a metareflection level would be useful to clarify the "modern" character of SG, which may be discussed in relation to Christian Protestantism since it has been regarded as a spiritual background for the formation of modern ethos such as individualism, egalitarianism, and social engagement. Thus, I will depict the fundamental feature of Nichiren Buddhism as "reformative Buddhism," which makes the practice of Buddhism congruent with "modern" understanding of religious roles in daily life as well as social engagement. On the other hand, I will also discuss some problems being inherent to the Western acculturation of the reformed and "engaged Buddhism." 1 The Ethical Activities of the SG in the World Ethical and Social Aspects of the Movement It is generally well known that the lay Buddhist organization, SG, as a whole has initiated wide and multifaceted activities even in an international level in order to transform its religious ideals into social reality, specifically in the field of educational, cultural, social, and peace-promoting programs. For this purpose it established educational institutes ranging from kindergartens to universities as well as research [End Page 59] institutes such as the Institute of Oriental Philosophy (founded 1961), the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century (founded 1993), the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research (founded 1996), and other centers for ecological researches. For promoting mutual respect and understanding through cultural expressions and exchanges several institutes have been established, like the Min-On Concert Association (founded 1963), the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum (founded 1991), and La Maison Littéraire de Victor Hugo in Bièvre, France (founded 1992). On a global level, its political involvement is, for a large part, situated as a NGO in the frame of the UNO and the UNESCO. With the help of the UNO, SG has organized all over the world expositions translating its concerns for peace, e.g., "Nuclear War: Threat to our World" and "War and Peace." With the Simon Wiesenthal Center it organized an exhibition "The Courage to Remember: Anne Frank and the Holocaust Exhibition." The issue of human rights is another of its major concerns. Commemorating the forty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations' adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, SG held an exhibition entitled "Toward the Century of Humanity: An Overview of Human Rights in Today's World" at the UN office in Geneva. Also, money received from fund-raising activities has been donated to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and related agencies to provide medical supplies and food, and to support educational programs in the areas concerned. To expose the horrors of war, SG has also published life histories written by members about their sufferings in war: "Women against War," "Cries for Peace," and "Peace is our Duty." Segmental Differentiation of Organizational Structure To meet the requirements of functional differentiation of today's modern societal life SG is organized in a segmental and hierarchical structure. The basic structure is the regional units, organized in a hierarchical model, and all members are integrated "in each group" in their residence area. At the same time each member belongs to a specific "division" which is organized according to gender, age, and occupation. There are the four divisions of men, women, young men, and young women. Additionally there are divisions for school boys and girls, university students, as well as divisions according to occupation such as artists, lawyers, medical doctors, academics, and so on. These divisional differentiations reflect the need... (shrink)

Gender stereotypes are shaped by the roles men and women fulfill in society. Our study uses a cultural artifact analysis and explores the way in which remunerated jobs, development across lifespan and historical time frames influence the content of gender stereotypes. We coded the feminine and masculine attributes in a selection of epitaphs written on the painted crosses of the Merry Cemetery of Săpânţa (Romania) between 1935 and 2010. This novel historical approach allowed us to explore the (...) dynamic nature of gender stereotypes and the extent to which changes in the social context or the social roles have transformed the content of gender stereotypes. We show that during years of social unrest associated with the World War II and the early communist years the masculine attributes are dominant while during the last decades of the communist regime and the post-communist period the feminine attributes become more prevalent. Moreover, people having paid jobs are described as being more masculine than the homemakers. Finally, our results show an increase of masculinity during the lifespan for both male and female as well as an increase of androgyny with age for women and a slight decrease with age for men. (shrink)

In many facets of Western culture, including archaeology, there remains a legacy of perceiving gender divisions as natural, innate, and biological in origin. This belief follows that men are naturally pre-disposed to public, intellectual pursuits, while women are innately designed to care for the home and take care of children. In the interpretation of material culture, accepted notions of gender roles are often applied to new findings: the dichotomy between the domestic sphere of women and the (...) public sphere of men can color interpretations of new materials. In this innovative volume, the contributors focus explicitly on analyzing the materiality of historic changes in the domestic sphere around the world. Combining a global scope with great temporal depth, chapters in the volume explore how gender ideologies, identities, relationships, power dynamics, and practices were materially changed in the past, thus showing how they could be changed in the future. (shrink)

The sexual revolution: an evocative term, but what meaning can be given to it today? How does “sexuality” come into being, and what connections does it have with the changes that have affected personal life more generally? In answering these questions, the author disputes many of the dominant interpretations of the role of sexuality in modern culture. The author suggests that the revolutionary changes in which sexuality has become cauth up are more long-term than generally conceded. He sees them as (...) intrinsic to the development of modern societies as a whole and to the broad characteristics of that development. Sexuality as we know it today is a creation of modernity, a terrain upon which the contradictory tendencies of modern social life play themselves out in full. Emancipation and oppression, opportunity and risk—these have become a part of a heady mix that irresistably ties our individual lives to global outcomes and the transformation of intimacy. We live today in a social order in which, for the first time in histroy, women are becoming equal to men—or at least have lodged a claim to such equality as their right. The author does not attempt to analyze the gender inequalities that persist in the economic or political domains, but instead concentrates on a more hisdden personal area in which women—ordinary women, in the course of their day-to-day lives, quite apart from any political agenda—have pioneered changes of greate, and generalizable, importance. These changes essentially concern an exploration of the potentialities of the “pure relationship,” a relaitonship that presumes sexual and emotional equality, and is explosive in its connotations for pre-existing relations of power. The author analyzes the emergence of what he calls plastic sexuality—sexuality freed from its intrinsic relation to reproduction—in terms of the emotional emancipation implicit in the pure relationship, as well as women’s claim to sexual pleasure. Plastic sexuality is decentered sexuality, freed from both reproduction and subservience to a fixed object. It can be molded as a trait of personality, and thus become bound up with the reflexivity of the self. Premised on plastic sexuality, the pure relationship is not exclusively heterosexual; it is neutral in terms of sexual orientation. The author speculates that the transformaion of intimacy might be a subversive influence on modern institutions as a whole, for a social world in which the dominant ideal was to achieve intinsic rewards from the company of others might be vastly different from that which we know at the present. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship between Christian and Jewish Orthodox women with their sacred books from a feminist point of view. While recent socio-economic changes have enabled women from an orthodox religious background to become financially independent and ultimately prosperous, from a religious perspective women’s status has not undergone major transformations. Using the cognitive principle of conceptual blending, I will focus on common aspects in Orthodox Judaism and Christianity related to sacred texts as objects, in order to (...) shed light on the religious understanding of prosperity in the twenty-first century, beyond that of empowerment as financial gain or social status. The importance ascribed to authoritative texts both as images of divinity and sacred objects of veneration is a common trait of Orthodox Judaism and Christianity. The gendered perception of the sacred is most prominent in two similar processions. Simchat Torah, a Jewish holiday which celebrates the yearly reading cycle of the Torah, is actively celebrated only by men, who are the ones to carry the Torah scrolls. Similarly, the orthodox Good Friday procession involves a cross and the church’s copy of the Scripture together with the Holy Epitaph being carried only by men. The ban on women to carry sacred objects, at least at appointed times, as well as women’s responses in the two communities will be analysed comparatively to establish whether women commonly perceived as prosperous can make steps in order to re-evaluate the theological implications of this restriction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 403 Gyanendra Pandey Men in the Home: Everyday Practices of Gender in Twentieth-Century India This article responds to a call by feminist historians of South Asia to attend to the “complex experience of family” as conditioned by age, gender, and class, and the ordinary “daily practices of gender” in the domestic arena.1 My essay focuses (...) on the comparatively neglected aspect of men’s domesticity—their performance of life in the home—as revealed in the writings and practices of prominent nationalist thinkers and activists who lived and worked in an era of militant anticolonial agitation in India. The domestic sphere, with its assigned gender roles and routines, was at the heart of major debates between the colonizers and the colonized about the meaning of culture and enlightenment. “Among rude people, the women are generally degraded; among civilized people they are exalted,” James Mill declared, in his classic statement on domestic manners.2 From Mill, writing in the second decade of the nineteenth century, to Katherine Mayo in the third decade of the twentieth, colonialist 1. Indrani Chatterjee, introduction to Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia, ed. Indrani Chatterjee (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 4; Mrinalini Sinha, “A Global Perspective on Gender: What’s South Asia Got to Do with It?” in South Asian Feminisms, ed. Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 359. 2. James Mill, The History of British India, 4th ed. (1817), edited by H. H. Wilson, vol. 1 (London: James Madden, 1848), 309. 404 Gyanendra Pandey writers dredged up the condition of women, familial relations, and domestic life in India to demonstrate the necessity of colonialist-initiated improvement and reform.3 Colonial rule thus provided the impetus for “a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of Indian ‘tradition’ along lines more consonant with [a] ‘modern’ economy and society.”4 Faced with insistent colonial critique, nationalist reformers and thinkers set out to controvert suppositions about the fallen state of Indian women and the oppressiveness of Indian homes. They also further sought to ameliorate conditions where these had deviated from their version of a glorious past. The Hindi/Urdu writer Premchand sums up the nationalist rebuttal in a 1931 essay entitled “Nari-jati ke adhikar” (“The Rights of Women”): “In fact, the Indian woman has always been considered the goddess of the home, and she has a higher status than men in the society.” For a variety of reasons, Premchand suggests, women fell from this preeminent position over time and men began to appropriate the established rights of women. “But,” he concludes, “the [new] wave of nationalism and enlightenment that has arrived now will obliterate all these [gender] distinctions, and our mothers [sic] will be re-installed in the exalted place that is their right.”5 It was in this way that early nationalist thinkers and spokespersons produced an argument about the existence of a sacred and relatively uncolonized “inner” space of Indian society, as contrasted with a more quickly changing, compromised, and negotiated “outer” space. In what is now a familiar precept in South Asian gender history, women were cast as the (predominant) custodians of “tradition” in private and in public life; men were (predominantly) the instruments of national, social, and cultural transformation in the wider, public domain. With this framing came propositions about the need for rapid progress in the “outer” realms of science, industry, and voluntary association as well as the later goals of welfare and development, secularism, and socialism. The push 3. Ibid.; Katherine Mayo, Mother India (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927). 4. Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 88. Mani makes a powerful critique of the so-called “Indian tradition” and of claimed colonial efforts to improve Indian society. 5. Premchand, “Nari-jati ke adhikar,” in Vividh Prasang, vol. 3, ed. Amrit Rai (Allahabad, India: Hans Prakashan, 1980) 249. Gyanendra Pandey 405 for such advancements developed alongside a more guarded approach to change in the “inner” world and its inherited store of spiritual resources— symbolized above all... (shrink)

‘Doing gender’ has often been used as the theoretical entrance for research on gender issues in the social sciences. However, research has been accused of using the concept in a ‘ceremonial’ way, treating gendered structures as static. In response to this claim, this article investigates the process of ‘hierarchization’, or how gendered and racial hierarchies occur through everyday practices and political and economic contexts in the rural, wild berry industry in contemporary Sweden. The industry has gone through (...) a thorough transformation, from irregular and small-scale production to regularized and large-scale production, which has affected the intersection of gender and racial structures. In particular, Thai women have gone from being active participants both as entrepreneurs and as workers, to working under native men, or being passive receivers of men’s remittances. The mechanisms behind the intersection of gender and racial structures are a complex interplay of economic, social and institutional factors, which act on nested global, national and translocal scales. (shrink)

The place of men in reproductive and contraceptive changes and the role of informal social interaction in these processes have become central themes in recent research on fertility change in sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions. These two themes, however, have been treated separately in the literature, and this study bridges them by examining men's informal communication on family planning matters through a gender lens. This analysis, based on qualitative data collected in Greater Maputo, Mozambique, indicates that although (...) men's communication on these matters is limited in comparison to women's communication, it nonetheless plays an important role in the formation of men's reproductive and contraceptive attitudes and preferences. Gender ideology emerges as a powerful delimiter of men's communication circles and of the information transmitted in those circles. The author argues that gender barriers in peer communication affect individuals' perceptions of reproductive and contraceptive matters and their corresponding preferences and decisions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:594 Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch The Paradoxical Privilege of Men and Masculinity in Institutional Review Boards In the 1939 Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz, the great wizard admonishes Dorothy and her friends to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Dorothy and company turn to see a man standing before a large (...) control panel operating the smoke, holographic image, and voice of the great wizard. Realizing he has been discovered, the man gives up manipulating the switches and the nebulous wizard vanishes.1 Hegemonic masculinity is analogous to the “all-powerful” wizard.2 In order to maintain its grandeur, power, and mystique, the mechanics of masculine ideology—as well as the social actors who participate in its reproduction —must be kept hidden.3 A crucial aim of feminist research is to 1. The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming (Culver City, CA: Metro-Goldwyn -Mayer, 1939). 2. See R. W. Connell, Masculinities: Knowledge, Power and Social Change (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995); R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19 (2005): 829–61; Michael Kaufman, “Me, Feminism, and Men’s Contradictory Experiences of Power,” in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), 142– 63; and Michael S. Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity” in Brod and Kaufman, Theorizing Masculinities, 119–42. 3. Michael Flood and Bob Pease, “Undoing Men’s Privilege and Advancing Gender Equality in Public Sector Institutions,” Policy and Society 24, no. 4 (2005): 119–38; Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch 595 pull back the curtain on men’s lives and masculine institutions in order to demystify socially constructed masculinities, particularly in their most powerful forms. As early feminist scholars note, male privilege renders women’s lives invisible.4 But male privilege renders aspects of men’s lives invisible, too. In this article we highlight how institutional review boards (IRBs) in universities and hospitals erect barriers to research that render particular aspects of men’s lives invisible. We draw on our experiences of submitting ten applications for a series of methodologically diverse studies of masculinity to eight IRBs. First, we argue that, despite their original function of protecting subordinated groups, IRBs are gendered institutions in which members base their decisions on culturally dominant, normative images of women and men. We show how this results in the stringent protection of male research participants, the safeguarding of participants’ personal masculinity, and the shielding of men’s lives from social inquiry. Second, we argue that IRBs are gendering institutions. Our experiences reveal how the privileging and protection of masculinity results in mandatory protocol modifications that idealize hegemonic masculinity. These modifications require researcher-participant interactions that socialize men to engage in gender “appropriate” behavior and reify gendered expectations. Third, our experiences reveal the ways in which IRBs protect the institution itself and privilege the universities, hospitals, and (predominantly male) medical doctors they represent. Consequently, the ways they reproduce social inequality remain impervious to academic inquiry. IRBS AS GENDERED AND GENDERING INSTITUTIONS Every university and hospital in the United States where human research is conducted houses a human research protections program, or IRB, to oversee academic research. Universities with hospitals typically our Patriarchal Legacy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997); Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). 4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1951); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Dorothy E. Smith, “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology,” in Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, ed. Sharlene N. Hesse-Biber and Michelle L. Yaiser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 84–96. 596 Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch maintain two types of IRB committees: a social-behavioral committee that oversees studies in the social sciences, and a biomedical committee to supervise clinical drug trials, experimental medical treatments, and tissue and blood research. The duty of the... (shrink)

Dynamic engineering models have yet to be evaluated in the context of feminist engineering ethics. Decision-making concerning gender in dynamic modeling design is a gender and ethical issue that is important to address regardless of the system in which the dynamic modeling is applied. There are many dynamic modeling tools that operationally include the female population, however, there is an important distinction between females and women; it is the difference between biological sex and the social construct (...) of gender, which is fluid and changes over time and geography. The ethical oversight in failing to represent or misrepresenting gender in model design when it is relevant to the model purpose can have implications for model validity and policy model development. This paper highlights this gender issue in the context of feminist engineering ethics using a dynamic population model. Women are often represented in this type of model only in their biological capacity, while lacking their gender identity. This illustrative example also highlights how language, including the naming of variables and communication with decision-makers, plays a role in this gender issue. (shrink)

<I>Women and Social Transformation brings three women from different countries together into dialogue. Judith Butler is the most referenced author in current feminist literature, and we find the latest developments of her work in this book; Lidia Puigvert has recently reached international relevance with her contribution about the -other women-, who have not yet had a voice in feminism; and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim complements this debate with her work about immigrant women. The authors argue the need (...) to open feminism to the plurality of all women's voices, especially those who are in the margins. <I>Women and Social Transformation is a debate, and speaks about transforming gender relations, taking a distance from postmodern stances, and insisting on the need for egalitarian dialogue among women. This book gives back the meaning of the feminist struggle.". (shrink)

This article traces the gendered consequences of changes in the problem of combining work and family caused by the collapse of state socialism in former East Germany. The transition to capitalism made the trade-offs between work and family more extreme, amplified the experiential distance between work and family, and increased the perceived social value of work relative to family activities. These processes highlighted gender stratification: Women's labor power was devalued just as the value of paid employment increased, (...) and women were increasingly excluded from work just as women's family roles seemed to lose value for society. This study suggests that feminists should conceptualize postsocialist transitions not only as changing labor market conditions and state policies but also as shaping gender relations through changing the meanings and experiences of work and family activities. (shrink)

In this article, we frame men’s club football as an “extremely gendered” organization to explain the underrepresentation of women leaders within the industry. By analyzing women’s leadership work over a 30-year period, we find that women’s inclusion has been confined to a limited number of occupational areas. These areas are removed, in terms of influence and proximity, from the male players and the playing of football. These findings reveal a gendered substructure within club football that maintains masculine (...) dominance in core football leadership roles and relegates women to a position of peripheral inclusion in leadership roles. Through a discourse analysis of gender pay gap reports, we show that men’s football clubs legitimize women’s peripheral inclusion by naturalizing male dominance at the organizational core. These findings are significant because they demonstrate that men’s football clubs, as masculinity-conferring organizations, have excluded women from core roles to maintain their masculine character while superficially accepting women into roles that do not challenge the association of football with hegemonic masculinity. Therefore, organizational change may be possible only if women are granted greater access to core organizational roles. Here, we offer a new theoretical framework for “extremely gendered” organizations that can be applied to other sporting and male-dominated contexts to analyze women’s access to core leadership roles. (shrink)

The role of state in the contemporary global system is greatly shaped by its inner or domestic strength that include economic resilience, socio-political harmony and a stable constitutional political order. These attributes cannot be achieved by a state unless it assigns the highest priority to human and societal development and promotion of egalitarian socio-economic arrangements that provide equal opportunities to all citizens irrespective of ethnicity, language, religion, caste, region or gender. The focus is on transforming human resources into (...) human capital through education, learning of technology and skills, and health care. There is now a greater emphasis on good governance and a fair and transparent political management and delivery of basic services to the society. This covers policy making and implementation regarding a host of key issues. It is also important to ensure that the fruits of economic growth are fairly distributed in the society. The state must work towards removing socio-economic inequities and disparities among people and regions. This paper examines the major factors responsible for the growing emphasis in state policy on human and social development as well as the historical evolution of this change. It is argued that the political developments in the 1990s and later contributed most in creating a global awareness about human and societal developments. These include, inter alia, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of some states, the rise of religious and cultural extremism and terrorism and the efforts of the various organs and agencies of the United Nations to promote human development and social stability. The paper also identifies the major obstacles in the developing countries, especially in Pakistan, to socio-economic development and distributive justice. (shrink)

Men's gender ideologies have changed more slowly than women's since the 1970s; this article analyzes the period and cohort processes that underlie men's attitude change and how the individual-level characteristics of conservative men differ by birth cohort. Using multidimensional measures of gender role attitudes from the 1974-1998 General Social Surveys, the author finds that changes in men's attitudes have been brought about both by period influences, especially during the 1970s, and by cohort replacement. Analyses of multivariate (...) interaction effects demonstrate that education has become a much less significant predictor of attitudes for men born after 1945. (shrink)

Social and cultural contexts influence power dynamics and shape gender perceptions, roles, and decisions regarding the management of agrobiodiversity for dealing with and adapting to climate change. Based on a feminist political ecology framework and a mixed method approach, this research performs an empirical analysis of two case studies in the northern of India, one in the Himalayan Mountains and another in the Indian-Gangetic plains. It explores context-specific influence of gender roles and responsibilities on on-farm agrobiodiversity management (...) gendered expertise and knowledge related to agrobiodiversity and gendered preferences for practices and institutional arrangements for agrobiodiversity conservation linked to adaptation to climate change. In the Himalayan mountains women actively participate in crop and seed management decisions and tasks, and maintain informal institutions for seed and services exchanges in the case of crisis, which simultaneously favours high levels of agrobiodiversity and enhances women’s social status. By contrast, in the Indio-Gangetic plains, where women from better-off households are socially secluded and women from poorer households work mainly as labourer to respond to high out-migration of men, they exercise less public control over agrobiodiversity, with their role being mainly invisible at the homestead and related to post-production tasks. We finally discuss as improved understanding of the links between gendered spaces, crops, tasks, social status, and agrobiodiversity management can facilitate the design of gender-sensitive policy interventions for conservation and adaptation to climate change. (shrink)

The article discusses Berlin’s Poor Relief Policy from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century, posing the question: how can premises of theoretical and political feminist discussion be put into practice? In analysing the shift in poor relief, I have taken up three essential aspects: (1) power relations must be examined in a context that cannot be reduced simply to the opposition between ruler and subject or men and women; (2) when does gender become a principle of (...) social order?; and (3) gender as a construct and women’s way of action need to be linked. I show how a method that combines the different statements made by the texts as conflicts and discourse is useful, in that it facilitates working out the diversity of poor relief politics and historicizing the term ‘poor women’. At the same time it can show how social change in everyday life was structured and established. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.3 (2003) 325-327 [Access article in PDF] Introduction John F. Donahue The present special issue of the American Journal of Philology takes as its focus dining in the Roman world. It grew out of the APA/AIA Joint Panel on that subject, which was part of the annual meeting held in Philadelphia in 2002. The topic is both timely and engaging. Indeed, owing largely to its (...) perishability, its diversity, and the ease with which it can be manipulated for any number of social or political ends, food has proven to be an especially amenable topic for scholarly analysis of all sorts.The articles gathered in this special issue further illuminate the nature and function of this elemental yet highly complex social practice, offering a variety of approaches—historical, sociological, literary, cultural, and material—to food and dining in the Roman world.In the first article, "The Way We Used to Eat: Diet, Community, and History at Rome," Nicholas Purcell shows clearly that food and dining can be profitably approached from a cultural perspective. Here, Purcell explores Roman self-consciousness about nutrition and the way in which diet (and implicitly agriculture) were transformed into a narration of historical change. The process is evident in the "comestible historiography" of the elder Pliny, in which the simple foods associated with earlier Roman history provide insight into the ways in which the Romans thought about time and change by focusing on food. Especially influential in this type of approach was Varro and, before him, Dicaearchus. Thus for the Romans, food played a notable role in the relationship of the present to various pasts; in the process it becomes an important marker in helping us to map the intellectual and cultural history of the Republican period.Turning to Roman literature, John Wilkins, in "Land and Sea: Italy and the Mediterranean in the Roman Discourse of Dining," reminds us that Roman dining was linked both to the ideology of the early Imperial period and to the mythography of the agricultural base of Republican politics. The result is a body of texts that moralize against luxury and excess, however much this viewpoint may be at odds with actual Roman practice. In a refreshing departure from the Latin texts that typically treat these themes, the author points to the Greek writers of the second [End Page 325] century C.E., namely, Athenaeus and Galen. Both were interested in eating and dining, but from a much broader perspective than the moralizing approach typical of so much of Roman dining literature.While approaches of this sort help to illuminate both the universality of the dining experience and its uniquely Roman aspects, the sharing of food also intersects in interesting ways with gender and the body. Matthew Roller, in his article "Horizontal Women: Posture and Sex in the Roman Convivium," examines literary texts, Roman urban funerary monuments, and Campanian wall painting in order to understand more completely the complexities of female posture at Roman convivia. On a historical level such evidence argues for women assuming a reclining posture; on an ideological level, the reclining woman symbolizes many of the same things that a reclining posture symbolizes for men—otium, privilege, and pleasure. Even so, the matter of female sexual propriety is never far below the surface, especially in the non-literary sources.John Donahue, in "Toward a Typology of Roman Public Feasting," examines public banqueting during the Principate against the background of modern typologies of commensality in order to understand not only the form but also the deeper social function of public dining. Donahue assembles a wide cross section of Roman testimonia and weaves them into a coherent (if imperfect) framework of festal typologies, while employing a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach, in this instance from French sociology. The Roman evidence is categorized into useful typologies, which, in turn, enrich our understanding of public dining and its place in Roman daily life.Not to be overlooked within the Roman festal landscape were servants, the "human props" of the elite-sponsored banquet, as John D'Arms appropriately characterized them. 1 Here, in the final entry, Katherine M.D. Dunbabin... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 278-282 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Buddhist Women Across Cultures: Realizations Buddhist Women Across Cultures: Realizations. Edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. viii + 326. This collection of essays on women in Buddhism largely succeeds in fulfilling Tsomo's goal of documenting "Buddhist women's actual involvement" in the Buddhist tradition (p. 1). Her (...) introduction provides a very informative and well-supported description of the history and current status of Buddhist women around the world, focusing on Asia but including the West as well. In the introduction and in her essays on women in the Tibetan and Himalayan region and in Buddhist and Christian traditions, she provides a feminist critique of gender discrimination in the Buddhist tradition as well as prescriptions for transforming the existing tradition in ways that would make it more egalitarian. These include "consciously validating women's accomplishments," reinterpreting religious texts with gender sensitive lenses, and the ordination of women (pp. 256-257). The essays in the volume as a whole carry forward Tsomo's examination of both sides of the equation of women and Buddhism--that is, how the Buddhist tradition has treated women overall as well as how women have responded to and are working to alter Buddhism, what Tsomo characterizes as "the ongoing process of women transforming and being transformed by, the tradition" (p. 1). The essays highlight a number of dichotomies in the experiences of Buddhist women, the primary one being that of gender disparities in the status and experience of women. Several essays in the collection detail the hardships that Buddhist women encounter because of gender inequalities that persist to the present day, even in Western cultures. Tsomo's essay comparing the experiences of Buddhist and Christian women in particular illustrates that in most areas, gender-based inequalities are more pronounced in Buddhist contexts than in Christian ones. Tsomo observes that [End Page 278] both traditions have fallen short of their egalitarian ideals, expressed within Christianity as the imago dei (creation in the image of God) and in Buddhism as tathagathagarbha (the seed or essence of Enlightenment present in all sentient beings). While noting that both traditions in general permit women to participate in religious practices on an equal basis with men, that neither legally mandates an inferior status for women, and that the highest stage of religious attainment is the same for both genders, Tsomo finds gender discrimination still functioning in both religions: both Buddhism and Christianity traditionally have assigned subordinate roles to women (especially with respect to monastic life), depict females negatively in scriptures, and generally ignore women's contributions to religious life.Despite these similarities, Tsomo thinks that in most respects Christian women have made more progress in securing equal rights to participate in the religious life of their faith than have Buddhist women. The only reason she provides for the greater extent of change in Christianity is that "Christian women have been far more active than Buddhists" (p. 253). Yet she fails to probe the possible reasons for this disparity in respect to the broader cultural, social, and economic differences in Christian and Buddhist contexts that have fostered a more activist and socially acceptable feminism in the former. The greater gender discrimination in Buddhist cultures has less to do with differences between Christianity and Buddhism per se than it does with other aspects of culture. Unfortunately, Tsomo does not develop the thesis she presents in the introduction to this essay that "Christian women have much to learn from the Buddhist tradition with respect to meditation and that Buddhist women have much to learn from Christian women with respect to service to society" (p. 241). Indeed, it is difficult to understand the basis for the latter claim, given Buddhist women's primary roles as service providers in most Buddhist cultures, unless she is speaking of the so-called socially engaged religious movement. If so, then as other scholars have noted, there are impediments to social action within certain interpretations of the Buddhist teachings themselves that would need to be resolved first. A... (shrink)

Women generally report greater religiosity and justify morally debatable behaviors less than men. This study examined if personal religiosity mediates the relationship of gender and justification of different types of morally debatable behaviors across societies with diverse religious heritages. We also explored how a society’s endorsement of preferred qualities in the socialization of children would moderate the links between personal religiosity and justification of morally debatable types of behavior. Using the World Values Survey Wave 7 data (47 societies; (...) 66,992 respondents), we identified three types of justifiable behaviors, namely, behaviors threatening human life and family values, dishonest-illegal, and interpersonally violent behaviors. Controlling for age and education, women scored higher in personal religiosity and justified dishonest-illegal and interpersonally violent behaviors less than men, but behaviors threatening human life and family values more than men. Personal religiosity only partially mediated the link between gender and the justification of behaviors threatening human life and family values, indicating that factors other than personal religiosity account for gender differences in justifying types of morally defensible behavior. The linkage strengths of personal religiosity to behaviors threatening human life and family values and dishonest-illegal behaviors were moderated by societal endorsement of preferred qualities in the socialization of children. Thus, both gender and the socialization of a society’s human capital impact on how different types of morally debatable behaviors are justified around the world. Possible explanations for these results are offered and future research directions suggested. (shrink)

This article contributes to the debate about the role of affect in transformative change towards gender equality, by comparing the building of affect in two recently founded women’s networks in Italian and Dutch universities. By conceptualizing networking as a social and cultural practice that organizes a collective body through the building of affect between specific groups of organizational stakeholders, we reveal the emotional, dynamic and context-dependent character of transformative change. We found that similar women’s networks build (...) affect with organizational stakeholders in different ways, shaping boundaries of different collective bodies through emotions and adapting to the cultural meaning attributed to earlier actions. By bridging bottom-up and top-down approaches to gender equality and tailoring the building of affect to the local context they potentially contribute to transformational change towards gender equality. (shrink)

Changes between 1977 and 1985 in women's and men's attitudes toward women's familial roles were examined using National Opinion Research Center General Social Survey data. Despite speculation that a backlash against feminism occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and evidence from past studies of a possible slowdown in gender-role attitude change, the data show a significant increase in profeminist views of the wife and mother roles among both women and men. More of this (...) change occurred within cohorts than through cohort succession. With the exception of college-graduate women, whose support for gender equality was high at both periods, the profeminist trend occurred about equally in all sociodemographic subgroups of the population, although even in 1985, men were less feminist in orientation than women. (shrink)

Bosnian refugee women adapted more quickly than their male partners to their host environments in Vienna and New York City because of their self-understanding and their traditional roles and social positions in the former Yugoslavia. Refugee women's integration into host societies has to be understood through their specific historical experiences. Bosnian women in exile today continue to be influenced by traditional role models that were prevalent in the former Yugoslavia's 20th-century patriarchal society. Family, rather than self-fulfillment (...) through wage labor and emancipation, is the center of life for Bosnian women. In their new environment, Bosnian refugee women are pushed into the labor market and work in low-skill and low-paying jobs. Their participation in the labor market, however, is not increasing their emancipation in part because they maintain their traditional understanding of zena (women) in the patriarchal culture. While Bosnian women's participation in low-skill labor appeared to be individual families’ decisions more in New York City than in Vienna, in the latter almost all Bosnian refugee women in my sample began to work in the black labor market because of restrictive employment policies. In contrast to men, women were relatively nonselective and willing to take any available job. Men, it seems, did not adapt as quickly as women to restrictions in the labor market and their loss of social status in both host societies. Despite their efforts, middle-class families in New York City and Vienna experienced substantial downward mobility in their new settings. Women's economic and social downward mobility in (re)settlement, however, did not significantly change the self-understanding of Bosnian women. Their families’ future and advancements socially and economically, rather than the women's own independence and emancipation remained the most important aspect of their being. (shrink)

This article deals with public manifestations of Catholic religious officials, members of the hierarchy and recognized laity, in the context of the discussion of the National Education Plan - PNE. The focus of the analysis is a condemnation of what they call "gender ideology", present in the proposal document. Such manifestations are the reaffirmation of a conception of human beings as subject to the inexorable "laws of nature" that determine a social order marked by the rigid distinction of (...) roles assigned to women and men. The texts published at the time reveal changes and continuities in the Catholic discourse in its reference to "nature", understood in its biological materiality, as an unswerving fact of human reality, consisting in two sexes must unite under the "natural order". Gender theories are blamed by family disintegration, for providing support to new understandings of humanity, no longer based on bipolarity: men / women. A non extensive dossier of these texts formed the basis for the proposed analyzes. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper connects geography, gender studies, and the histories of science and empire. It uses the framework of geography, exploration, and adventure travel to shed light on the interplay of gender, nationalism, and space in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British society. During this period, the extent of the British Empire reached a peak, as did its sponsorship for exploration, and scores of men and a few women scrambled to fill in the world’s remaining blank spaces. Drawing (...) on archival sources, travel accounts as well as contemporary scholarship, this study investigates the shifting identities of Victorian explorers. It connects British exploration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to broader societal norms of gender and nationalism, then it shows how female explorers both reaffirmed and challenged these traditional Victorian values. This investigation demonstrates that Victorian explorers were often self- described outsiders in British society who deliberately chose their profession as a vehicle for liberation or escape. Space played a critical role in these agents’ ability to both reaffirm and evade British national identity. British nationalist rhetoric celebrated such figures as quintessential Britons who expanded their nation’s influence and modeled its prestige, strength, dignity, and grace. Yet agents of British exploration operated primarily on the physical, social, and ideological frontiers of British society. On these margins of empire, British understandings of gender and national identity were formed, reaffirmed, challenged, and ultimately transformed. This study contributes to contemporary scholarship by highlighting the value of a spatial lens in histories of science, gender, and empire. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze the patterns of culture of honor within Spanish families. Each member of 271 Spanish four-member families completed a questionnaire containing scales for the culture of honor and for sociodemographic variables. The results show that intra-family similarities emerge. However, path analyses show that the gender and birth order of the child are relevant in predicting this similarity. In particular, the first-born child converges with their mother to a higher extent than the father regardless of their (...) gender. However, for the second-born child both parents instill their ideas about culture of honor in a gender congruent way. Furthermore, there are higher similarities within younger families, indicating a stronger influence from parents to children. Results are discussed in view of social role and gender social learning theories. (shrink)

The existence of current feminist thought in Africa is tainted by colonialism. Colonial and postcolonial anthropological thought and Eurocentric scholarship have misrepresented Africa as a society where social and gender roles were largely lopsided. Hence, current feminist thought (which are largely Western) on oppression of women, subjugation and suppression were imposed on the historicity of Africans. In this article, we argue that the misrepresentations of feminism of the indigenous societal order in Africa should be ignored. We (...) bring to the fore some ideas that advance the view that precolonial African society was not anchored on biology or ordered by gender, but was organised by age or seniority, and provided both men and women a sense of equality. Furthermore, we contend that embracing indigenous cultural values in the 21st century provides, on the one hand, a valuable tool for solutions to issues that women face currently, and, on the other hand, a viable means of detaching feminism from Eurocentric misrepresentations. (shrink)

The evolution of the Ladies’ Circle into the Mother’s Union in the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe (COCZ) holds great significance in that circles in Africa symbolize collectiveness and consensual decision-making. The Ladies’ Circle emerged as a response by white women influenced by the Victorian Womanhood Cult with regard to the discontent they felt with patriarchy in the church. Black women supported white female missionaries in leadership roles, when they (black women), continued to face oppression due to (...) (white and black) male resistance to change, as well as fear of losing male-privileges. Empirical evidence in the COCZ suggests that black women in Zimbabwe made significant progress in the secular world compared to their progress in church. This study uses a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a theoretical framework to examine how the transformation of the Ladies’ Circle into the Mothers’ Union empowered African women to deal with their own oppression. It aims to understand how white women overcame restrictive Victorian norms and the Womanhood Cult, which promoted submissiveness and domesticity as defining aspects of womanhood. The study further notes that inconsistencies in addressing race and gender differences in the church perpetuated the dominance of African men on women within the church. This study thus acknowledges that the Women’s Unions, like the Mothers’ Union, have the potential to empower COCZ women and challenge racial and gender oppression within that church.Contribution: The study reveals that denying women’s involvement in church can have debilitating effects on gender equality in Zimbabwe. The Ladies’ Circle, a platform created by the Church of Christ, provides women with a space for social and religious participation. The intersection of gender, race, and religion used by religious and cultural authorities to control women, call for a re-examination of the COCZ’s theological foundations on these subjects. (shrink)

According to the perspective developed in this article, widely shared, hegemonic cultural beliefs about gender and their impact in what the authors call “social relational” contexts are among the core components that maintain and change the gender system. When gender is salient in these ubiquitous contexts, cultural beliefs about gender function as part of the rules of the game, biasing the behaviors, performances, and evaluations of otherwise similar men and women in systematic ways (...) that the authors specify. While the biasing impact of gender beliefs may be small in any one instance, the consequences cumulate over individuals’ lives and result in substantially different outcomes for men and women. After describing this perspective, the authors show how it sheds newlight on some defining features of the gender system and illustrate its implications for research into specific questions about gender inequality. (shrink)

The article analyses the process of transformation and reinvention of patriarchal gender order at times of radical changes caused by violent conflict and life in emigration. The case study draws a comparison between younger and older generations of Chechen women in Austria, Poland and Germany and their radically different gender practices. The analysis shows that the turn towards more conservative gender relations, which can be observed among the younger generation, cannot be explained by a reference to (...) the Chechen culture as inherently patriarchal. Nor can it be ascribed solely to the insufficient reception and the lack of recognition experienced by refugees in the receiving countries. Rather, it is an outcome of women’s different conditions of socialization that have affected their hierarchy of values and continue to exert significant influence on their adaptation strategies in exile; most notably, on how the women perceive and make use of the opportunity structures in the receiving contexts. (shrink)

Transformation in the discipline of Social Sciences is a global phenomenon but in the post-colonial societies it means two things. First, far reaching societal changes resulting into the emergence of new fields in Social Sciences fulfilling new conditions and requirements of society. Second, the growing need and relevance of Social Sciences research so as to address issues which cause serious societal changes. Marginalization of Social Sciences and social scientists in case of Pakistan is (...) not a new phenomenon. There cannot be any time line which can be given for modernizing Social Sciences in Pakistan which can meet the criteria and standards of 21st century. Yet, those who teach and do research in different subjects of Social Sciences must come forward and play a leadership role in this regard. This would require a paradigm shift in the arena of admitting students and appointing faculty so that the best stuff both at the student and faculty level is motivated to join the subjects of Social Sciences in order to ensure quality control and standard which seem to have deteriorated in the last four decades is restored. By attracting the best talent in the subjects of Social Sciences one can expect positive transformation in the state and societal patterns of Pakistan. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface Within the current context in the United States, we tend to think of “choice” as the leading slogan of the liberal movement to expand women’s reproductive rights, particularly the right to elective abortion. But choice depends on context: on what is available, what is mandated, what is prohibited or discouraged, and what has not yet been imagined. This issue of Feminist Studies expands our thinking about available (...) and potential choices, both individual and social. The issue opens with Stephanie Yingyi Wang’s ethnographic study of companionate marriage in China, in which she describes cooperative marriage partnerships that look heterosexual and appear to fulfill traditional familial expectations, but that facilitate same-sex liaisons and so create new family structures. Other essays in this issue describe the kinds of choices available to those who seek nontraditional or less conventional family and erotic bonds. Leila J. Rupp discusses the “queer dilemmas of desire” that perplex undergraduate queer women in US colleges, and Sonny Nordmarken opens possibilities for new trans epistemologies that disrupt and produce new gender practices, claiming that queer instability provides “infinite possibilities” for individual and social change. More traditional choices and families take differing shapes in other historical and cultural contexts. Carla Pascoe Leahy compares the levels of maternal satisfaction felt by three historical cohorts of Australian women: those of the immediate post-World War II generation, the later generation of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the current generation. Miriam Kienle examines how two designers, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, decided to explore alternatives to big data by sending each other weekly postcards that quantified their lives according to “small/slow data” points. Other essays and poems emphasize constraint rather than choice about the kinds of identities that take shape within current social structures. Bettina Judd ponders the effects on herself and others of her own rage at racial injustice and of the stereotype of raging black women perpetuated by a society that has chosen not to 8Preface deal with its endemic racism. Similarly, Vivyan Adair’s memoir on the stigmata of growing up in poverty exposes the limitations of individual choice in the context of violence, a theme echoed in the poems by Elisabeth Blair, which dramatize her experiences in an abusive institution for troubled teens. Trysh Travis reviews four books published in 2017 that together, but differently, tackle the difficult situations of the “drug-using woman” and her recovery. Marilyn Strathern and Jade S. Sasser review Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway’s edited volume Making Kin, Not Population : Reconceiving Generations, with responses from multiple authors featured in the book. Finally, a short story by Mary Anna Evans and poetry by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Abigail G. H. Manzella voice other individual dilemmas related to choice. We end the issue with a News and Views piece by Sonja Thomas that offers more context on the recent Women’s Wall protest in Kerala, India. In “When Tongzhi Marry: Experiments of Cooperative Marriage between Lalas and Gay Men in Urban China,” Stephanie Yingyi Wang frames cooperative marriage in mainland China between gay men and lalas (same-sex loving women), or tonghzi marriage, as an experiment in queer kinship. Such marriages appear to fulfill traditional roles on the surface, providing women and men who desire same-sex relationships a sanctioned institution—marriage—within which to fulfill these desires. According to Wang, these relational strategies are shaped simultaneously by China’s heteronormative policies and by the global circulation of gay rights narratives, “transforming the heteronormative family institution from within.” In this ethnography, Wang describes relationships as varied as those in which married partners are mutually supportive close friends who confide in one another about their same-sex relationships, to others in which subjects suffered from differing expectations between the partners, sometimes with gay husbands expecting deferential behavior from their lala wives, or between the couples and their parents and in-laws. Wang suggests applying a “decolonizing feminist methodology” to go beyond dichotomies of public/private, local/global, and success/failure and thus to better understand tongzhi marriage and critical queer subjectivities at this global juncture. Wang’s article is a co-winner of the 2018 Feminist Studies Award for the... (shrink)

The article discusses some of the major issues which need to be examined in a gendered reading of citizenship. However, its basic claim is that a comparative study of citizenship should consider the issue of women's citizenship not only by contrast to that of men, but also in relation to women's affiliation to dominant or subordinate groups, their ethnicity, origin and urban or rural residence. It should also take into consideration global and transnational positionings of these citizenships. The (...) article challenges the gender-blind and Westocentric character of many of the most hegemonic theorizations of citizenship, focusing in particular on the questions of membership in ‘the community’, group rights and social difference and the ways binaries of public/private and active/passive have been constructed to differentiate between different kinds of citizenships. The article argues that in order to be able to analyse adequately people's citizenship, especially in this era of ethnicization on the one hand and globalization on the other hand, and with the rapid pace at which relationships between states and their civil societies are changing, citizenship should best be analysed as a multi-tiered construct which applies, at the same time to people's membership in sub-, cross- and supra-national collectivities as well as in states. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This issue of Feminist Studies explores the ways institutions—legal, governmental, medical, educational, and household—participate in the gendering of bodies and are themselves gendered. At any given historical moment, dominant and resistant meanings of “women,” “gender,” and “sexuality” are socially and politically constituted in institutions through cultural struggles. The authors in this issue discuss how birth control, assisted reproduction, transsexual transition, hegemonic masculinity, abortion, and domestic (...) violence are each articulated and contested in imperial law and economic discourses (Sreenivas), in medical procedures (Whitehead et al. and DasGupta), in university research regulations (Barnes and Munsch), and in the official practices of presidents (Mattingly ). Our authors elucidate how such institutions are gendered, not just in terms of staffing by males, females, and nongender conforming people, but also in the ways they constitute gender relations in their everyday operations. The articles point to the continuing need for institutional histories and ethnographies that are feminist in conception and design. They also provide openings into more progressive gender and sexuality politics by underscoring the contradictions within all institutions. Mytheli Sreenivas’s “Birth Control in the Shadow of Empire: The Trials of Annie Besant, 1877–1878” visits the contradictory history of institutions of reproduction control. She traces Besant’s contraception advocacy in the 1870s, reminding us of its intimate and unsavory entanglements with the politics of empire. Annie Besant is a complicated figure. South Asianists familiar with her later campaign against British colonialism in India might well be surprised by this earlier incarnation, but Sreenivas demonstrates how and why the early Besant held contradictory positions. As an individual, Besant questioned gender norms and challenged the inequality of women in marriage and divorce. She recognized sexual desire as “natural” (albeit only properly expressed via heterosexual marriage). Yet a signature feature of her political writing 504Preface was an embrace of neo-Malthusianism. Over the course of her activist life, Besant redirected her attention from poverty and women’s health in Britain to contraception as the solution to starvation and overpopulation in India. She did so in “a broader context in which a defense of empire and class-race hierarchy enjoyed far greater legitimacy than a critique of gender and sexual norms.” The repercussions of her actions were global: “Besant’s efforts rendered contraception into a sexual technology that claimed to address the economies of impoverishment in an emerging imperial world. Birth control thus emerged as both an imperial responsibility and as a demonstration of British humanitarianism in support of starving colonized populations.” Sreenivas explicates what the Besant trials reveal about the multiple histories of reproduction control and the conditions under which birth control continues to be both a technology for large-scale population control and “a vehicle for women’s reproductive freedom and gender justice.” Institutions are saturated with power, but they are also arenas where political struggles between different social groups are staged. This is especially evident in White House politics in the United States. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter appointed a large number of women to bureaucratic offices. Many were feminists. Why did they fail to deliver gender justice? This is the puzzle Doreen J. Mattingly seeks to answer in “The Limited Power of Female Appointments: Abortion and Domestic Violence Policy in the Carter Administration.” The article is set in the broader context of a moment in history when the US feminist movement was moving from the streets to state bureaucracies, when women of color had broadened the movement’s mandate, and when the need for government programs to support poor women was a clearly articulated feminist goal. There was an excitement about transforming gender relations as feminists populated multiple organizations and came together to collaborate. However, two important legislative efforts—government funding for abortions for poor women and a national anti-domestic violence bill—failed. Mattingly traces the back and forth between Carter and his Assistant Secretary for Public Liaison, Margaret “Midge” Costanza, drawing on new archival sources. Mattingly’s article underscores how women in public office can be discursively valorized as symbols of change even while politically powerful men oppose meaningful policy that would provide women greater autonomy over their reproductive or violently transgressed bodies. Mattingly’s careful reconstruction... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private LifeDavid FredrickKristina Milnor. Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life. Oxford Studies in Classical Literature and Gender Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. xii + 360 pp. Cloth, $99.It is the often-difficult task of social history to explain how a given institution (e.g., marriage, education, the army) changed across different types of (...) cultural expression (e.g., legal and moral prescriptions, representation in visual art and literature) and in lived experience. In this fruitful and sometimes brilliant study, Kristina Milnor explores the repositioning of women during the Augustan period with respect to the distinction between public and private life. Over the course of an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, she develops the argument that the Augustan period "invented" private life or, more precisely, new strategies for representing private life, in order to make the imperial system look like a return to traditional Roman family values. In making this argument, Milnor looks back to the Republic and forward to Nero; she assembles a wide range of literary and material evidence and makes judicious use of theory. Milnor is primarily concerned with textual representation; as she puts it at one point, the volume is "a study of representation rather than reality" (40–41). However, she does include substantial sections on architecture and space, and in the end it is not clear whether Milnor sees architecture in the Augustan period as a mode of representation or as something that by reshaping behavior necessarily transformed private life in lived experience.The introduction uses Vergil's simile of the housewife spinning in Aeneid 8 to set up the much-debated distinction between "public" and "private" in Roman culture. Milnor notes that the original meaning of privatus during the republic is narrowly oppositional, "a man without a political or military position," but broadened during the empire to mean more generally, "anyone... who did not hold the ultimate 'public' role of emperor" (20). Hence privatus and "domestic" do not mean the same thing: "privatus is necessarily a political word," while "the domestic... functions as a kind of moralized privacy, a concept whose strength lies in its allegiance to supposedly transcendent and apolitical ethical truths" (27). Women emerge during the Augustan period as the preferred symbols of this "moralized privacy," and while the physical and social circumstances of Roman women were highly disparate, the representation of female virtues remains consistent: "the domestic ideal was a construct which did not 'truthfully' represent any woman's life, even at the same time as it purported to represent them all" (38).In the first chapter ("Reading and Writing Gender on the Augustan Palatine"), Milnor argues that Augustus' Palatine complex is "engendered" by the prominence of Niobe, Cleopatra, and the Danaids in its decorative program, pointing to the problematic display of female virtue in the princeps' house. Because of Augustus' unprecedented political position, the "private" behavior of the women in his house became a kind of public performance, a tension that persists in Augustus' larger treatment of the city. In Tristia 2, Ovid addresses Augustus as a fellow author whose "text" is the city of Rome, and just as women [End Page 605] have misread Ovid's poetry licentiously, they frequently appropriate Rome's temples and porticoes for sexual liaisons. Milnor observes that this disingenuous argument at least recognizes women as active and resisting readers of texts, noting further that imperial women (Octavia and Livia) are paradoxically empowered as "authors" of significant public spaces precisely because they were seen to be expressing politically disinterested virtues. The chapter concludes with a look back at Cicero's de Domo Sua, which casts Clodius as a feminized abuser of public space in his appropriation of the Portico of Catulus for his shrine of Libertas; the restoration of Cicero's house, meanwhile, represents the restoration of the Roman state. Milnor argues that this anticipates Augustus' use of his own house as a symbol for Rome, and thus as the site for a paradoxically public performance of the traditions of Roman domesticity.The second chapter, "Domesticity and Display in Vitruvius' de Architectura," begins with two significant questions. Why, if... (shrink)

Constitutions around the world have overwhelmingly been the creation of men, but this book asks how far constitutions have affirmed the equal citizenship status of women or failed to do so. Using a wealth of examples from around the world, Ruth Rubio-Marín considers constitutionalism from its inception to the present day and places current debates in their vital historical context. Rubio-Marín adopts an inclusive concept of gender and sexuality, and discusses the constitutional gender order as it has (...) been shaped by debates such those around same-sex marriage and the rights of trans persons. Covering a wide range of themes, from reproductive rights to political gender quotas and violence against women, this book offers a comprehensive feminist account of constitutional law. Truly international in scope and ambitious in subject matter, this is an invaluable resource for students and scholars working on gender within multiple disciplines. (shrink)

The use of gender in print media is poorly understood both at the level of the post-Soviet journalism studies and in the general context of social research. A similar situation is observed with regard to the study of the gender sphere of concepts, and at the postmodern stage of development of periodicals. Postmodern convergence of methodology and research objects of the humanities will make it necessary to study social and mass media phenomena from the point of (...) view of linguistics, sociology and journalism. This makes it relevant to study media issues of gender through links with language. The purpose of the work is to clarify the gender sphere of concepts in the study of Ukrainian periodicals for women and men. The article implements a combination of concrete-historical, structural-typological, system-functional methods. Descriptive and comparative methods, typology, modeling methods are used at different stages of work. The study used the method of content analysis to study the gender content of modern gender-labeled magazines. The article proves that the gender sphere of concepts is based on the basic gender macroconcepts “woman” and “man”. They are used in the periodicals under study in various proportions, depending on what roles are played by a woman or a man in society. It is from the balance, thoughtfulness, responsible selection of gender characteristics that are presented in gender-labeled periodicals that modern and future gender images are formed, the idea of ideal women and men, their needs, opportunities, responsibilities in the family, at work, and in general in all spheres of life. (shrink)

Emerging out of increased attention to gender equality within violence and HIV prevention efforts in South African society has been an intensified focus on masculinities. Garnering a deeper understanding of how men respond to shifting gender relations and rights on the ground is of urgent importance, particularly since social constructions of gender are implicated in the HIV/aids epidemic. As social scientists collaborating on a rights-based HIV and antiviolence program, we sought to understand masculinities, rights, and (...) gender norms across six high HIV/aids seroprevalence provinces in South Africa. Drawing on focus group research, we explore the ways that men who are engaged in HIV and antiviolence programming can often be simultaneously resistant to and embracing of changes in masculinities, women’s rights, and gender relations. We use our findings on men’s responses to changing gender relations to make suggestions for how to better engage men in HIV and antiviolence programs. (shrink)

This article finds firmer evidence than has previously been presented that men are more left-wing than women in older birth cohorts, while women are more left-wing than men in younger cohorts. Analysis of the European Values Study/world Values Survey provides the first systematic test of how processes of modernization and social change have led to this phenomenon. In older cohorts, women are more right-wing primarily because of their greater religiosity and the high salience of religiosity for (...) left-right self-placement and vote choice in older cohorts. In younger, more secular, cohorts, women’s greater support for economic equality and state intervention and, to a lesser extent, for liberal values makes them more left-wing than men. Because the gender gap varies in this way between cohorts, research focusing on the aggregate-level gap between all men and all women underestimates gender differences in left-right self-placement and vote choice. (shrink)

Mainstream theory and research in the field of social movements and political sociology has, by and large, ignored the influence of gender on social protest. A growing body of feminist research demonstrates that gender is an explanatory factor in the emergence, nature, and outcomes of all social movements, even those that do not evoke the language of gender conflict or explicitly embrace gender change. This article draws from a case study of the postpartum (...) depression self-help movement to outline the relationship between gender and social movements. Linking theories of gender to mainstream theories on social movements allows us to recognize gender as a key explanatory factor in social movements and, in turn, to identify the role that social movements play in the social construction of gender. (shrink)

Purpose Online violence has been rampant in the past decade, intensifying the victims’ suffering owing to its rapid dissemination to vast audiences. This study aims to focus on online gender-based violence directed against young Bedouin women who have left their male-dominated home territory for academic studies. This study examined how the backlash against these students, intended to stop changes in traditional gender roles, is reflected in offensive TikTok videos. Design/methodology/approach This research is based on a qualitative-thematic analysis (...) of 77 questionnaires and 30 semistructured in-depth interviews with first-year female Bedouin students aged 18–21 years. Findings The backlash was widespread, with young Bedouin men using offensive videos as “proof” that women have violated codes of honor and morality. The videos exhibited four types of gender-based violence: claims of immoral behavior, aggressive captions that take the footage out of context, allegations of immodest clothing and digital photo editing that produced fabricated results. Examining participants' reactions to the videos, this study revealed two patterns of response: passive acceptance of the situation and an active approach that included reaching out to powerful Bedouin men for solutions. Originality/value This research enriches the literature on online gender-based violence, particularly against women in traditional societies, and suggests practical steps: developing online media literacy in traditional societies, adopting a proactive approach and nurturing social self-competence in women who have been victims of online gender-based violence. (shrink)

This book reassesses theories of agency and gender identity against the backdrop of changing relations between men and women in contemporary societies.

Feminist thought characterizes women's sexuality as both a source of freedom and a source of exploitation. Central to the feminist research agenda on women's sexuality is the analysis of strategies that women use to increase their sexual autonomy and reduce their sexual constraints. One such strategy is the sexual liaison between single women and married men. In this article, liaisons between single women and married men are examined from the perspective of the single woman. Data (...) come from intensive interviews with 65 single women who have been or are involved with a married man. Gender norms play a significant role in transforming a platonic relationship into a sexual one, but once a liaison is established those norms can be curtailed. In these liaisons, single women experience greater control over their sexuality than they do in socially approved relationships because they feel freer to repudiate their sexual repressions, to abstain, to have safe sex, and to explore their sexual preferences. The article concludes with a discussion of these liaisons as strategies women adopt to achieve sexual autonomy within the constraints of androcentric institutions. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is necessary to focus on gender rather than exclusively on women in discussions on global poverty eradication. It argues firstly, that the drivers of poverty are complex and multifaceted leading to a least two different forms of deprivation – transitory and structural poverty – each requiring different forms of analysis and treatment. Transitory poverty can arise as a consequence of an event or shock that would diminish an individual’s capacity to retain or secure (...) employment and where a State lacks an appropriate form of social protection. Structural poverty, on the other hand, arises where groups are excluded from the workforce on a more permanent basis due to a wide variety of factors of discrimination such as sex, race, ethnicity, and age. Focusing on the sex of an individual alone cannot explain why some are more likely to experience different forms of poverty than others. Policies that protect women against transitory poverty, such as care related allowances, are not sufficient to eradicate structural poverty. Secondly, structural poverty prompts an examination of gender roles and relations. Unlike the category of ‘women’, the concept of gender demands consideration of a wider range of intersecting factors that influence life chances. The structure of contemporary gender relations, where women continue to experience higher levels of violence, and carry the greatest burden of responsibility for non-market based production activities, create the social conditions where domination and dependence thrive, and where persistently high rates of poverty seem inevitable. Such circumstances are generated by human agency. Thus, thirdly, it argues that these circumstances can and should be changed through human action. Knowledge of these circumstances gives rise to moral obligations for both men and women to avoid upholding values and practices that lead to domination and dependence as a matter of basic justice. (shrink)

The postmodern era can be defined as a period in which absolute truths are questioned, realities are differentiated and these differences make them-selves felt strongly in social, cultural, economic, religious, etc. areas, and tech-nology is at the centre of individual and social life. In this period, con-ventio-nal lifestyles, social and cultural values, and traditional understan-dings of religiosity are being reshaped as a reflection of the search for a new reality. However, artificial intelligence, which is rapidly developing as (...) a result of the change and transformation in technological possibilities, is tho-ught to feed concerns in the context of both the opportunities it offers and the threats it poses to human values. Therefore, it is of great importance to examine the relationship between religion, which plays an important role in shaping social life, and religiosity, which is its form of practice, and the level of anxiety arou-sed by artificial intelligence, which is becoming increasingly visible in all areas of our lives. In this framework, the aim of the research is to examine religio-sity and artificial intelligence anxiety in the postmodern period in terms of various variables and to reveal the relationship between these two concepts. The study, which used the relational survey model, one of the quantitative research methods, was carried out on 450 individuals between the ages of 17-49 residing in Polatlı district of Ankara province. The data obtained as a result of the research were analysed through SPSS 22.0 statistical software. As a result of the analyses, it was determined that the participants' levels of religio-sity and artificial intelligence anxiety in the postmodern period were above the medium level. At the same time, it has been revealed that the levels of religiosity in the postmodern period are sta-tistically significantly higher for women than men, for individuals between the ages of 17-29 than those in other age groups, for single people than mar-ried people, for students, salaried employees in the public sector and sala-ried employees in the private sector than housewives, for bachelor's, mas-ter's and doctorate graduates than pri-mary, secondary and high school graduates, and for those who are interested in technological products than those who are uninterested and moderately interested. According to the monthly income level, the level of knowledge about artificial intelligence and the frequency of following the developments related to artificial intelli-gence, it was determined that the religiosity levels of individuals in the postmodern period did not differ statistically significantly. In addition, it was determined that artificial intelligence anxiety levels of the participants differed significantly according to their gender and women had higher anxiety levels than men. Again, it was determined that those with low level of knowledge about artificial intelligence had statistically significantly hig-her levels of artificial intelligence anxiety than those with medium level of knowledge and those who never follow the developments related to artifi-cial intelligence and those who rarely follow the developments related to artificial intelligence were statistically significantly higher than those who frequently and always follow the developments related to artificial intelli-gence. Similarly, it was concluded that artificial intelligence anxiety did not differ statistically significantly according to age groups, marital status, oc-cupational type, educational level, monthly income and frequency of fol-lowing technological developments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Cycle of Violence and Feminist Constructions of Selfhood Jennifer L. Rike University ofDetroit Mercy Violence is the heart and secret soul ofthe sacred" (Girard 1977, 31). René Girard reaches this shocking conclusion by tracing the dynamics ofthe generation ofviolence in history, and the ingenious ways in which humanity has learned to funnel violence into ritual sacrifice to avoid apocalypse. His argument pivots upon his understanding ofhumanity as inherently (...) flawed, as fated to conflict in the struggle to survive. Ifthe sacred mechanism of ritual sacrifice is not deployed, violence takes on a power and personality all its own: "If left unappeased, violence will accumulate until it overflows its confines and floods the surrounding area. The role ofsacrifice is to stem this rising tide... and redirect violence into 'proper' channels" (10). Girard's theory about the violent origins ofthe sacred institutions of ritual sacrifice, law, and myth highlights perhaps the chief paradox of religion: it has been used to promote as much as to oppose violence. Today, as feminists explore how women in particular have been the objects ofsuch violence, they too have turned to Girard to understand this paradox, and yet most have ended up criticizing Girard for falsely universalizing typically Eurocentric and androcentric conceptions of humanity, violence, and religion (Shea, Kirk-Duggan, Nowak 24-6).' While they may be right on certain points, it is also possible that the rush offeminist scholars to charge 1 Nancy Jay has also criticized Girard for androcentrism, in particular because "he still grounds all community and culture on male control of male violence" (130). 22Jennifer L. Rike Girard with androcentrism reflects their own refusals to confront how the dark face of violence appears in women as well as in men. Rather than evaluating specific feminist criticisms ofGirard in this regard, I propose a more global approach—to delineate in greater detail how feminist constructions of selfhood need to be informed by Girard's theory of the violent origins ofthe sacred in order for feminism to achieve its own goals. In Girard's view, the ritual ofsacrifice and the law are generated out ofthe socio-psychological mechanisms ofacquisitive mimesis and scapegoating as the sacred's way of controlling violence. In ways he leaves largely implicit, these mechanisms reflect the devastating cyclical effects of violence upon its victims. Girard stops short of reflecting on the roles gender plays in the cyclical processes of violence, and yet, as my subsequent analyses shall demonstrate, there can be little doubt that women participate in these processes in ways both like and unlike men. Women have been scapegoated throughout history, but not all women end up as victims ofviolence and the rituals constructed to appease it. Nor do many women remain simply victims of the tides of violence: many repeat the cycle of victimization and themselves become perpetrators. Moreover, some escape the cycle ofviolence by a variety ofmeans whose patterns are well worth scrutinizing. My point is that women's modes of participation in the processes through which violence makes and remakes itself are far more complex than has been recognized, and merit our full attention. From the perspective of feminist constructions of selfhood, the question then becomes, how does gender affect one's experience of acquisitive mimesis and scapegoating, victimage and perpetration? To claim that only women are victims and only men—and the women they have co-opted—are perpetrators may be politically correct, but that claim ignores some hard but ultimately helpful truths about what women must do to bring about the changes necessary for revolutionizing our society by transforming its violent ways into peaceful ones. My plan, then, is to suggest how Girard might be used to advance the theory and praxis of feminism further by delving into the psychological mechanisms underlying acquisitive mimesis and scapegoating. I shall argue that using object relations theory to understand the ways in which violence splits the human psyche complements Girard's conception of acquisitive mimesis and scapegoating to disclose the complete dynamics ofthe cycle ofviolence. Such understanding is essential to feminist reconstructions of selfhood, because it makes the defeat of sexism and violence possible by exposing them at their roots. Feminist Constructions ofSelfhood23 My project has four steps... (shrink)