Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Syrian And Palestinian Syrian Refugees In Lebanon: The Plight Of Women And Children, Lorraine Charles, Kate Denman

Journal of International Women's Studies

The humanitarian crisis resulting from the Syrian conflict is estimated to be the worst so far of this century. The recent influx of refugees has now reached a point where they are equal to one quarter of Lebanon’s population, causing evident strains on its fragile economy and social structure. Syrians in Lebanon have fled from their home to seek safety, however their vulnerability is now in question as women’s and children’s rights continue to be under threat. This paper investigates the plight of Syrian and Palestinian Syrian refugees in Lebanon with an emphasis on women and children. While there are …

Living In The Garden Of Perhaps: Ordinary Life As An Obstacle To Political Change In Israel, Katherine Natanel

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article explores how gender in part shapes the contours of small worlds or ‘elsewheres’ (Haraway 1992), constructed by Jewish Israelis as they pursue ‘ordinary lives’ in a context of conflict and sustained political violence. Situating as central the experiences, perceptions and behaviours of the dominant sector in Jewish Israeli society—middle-class Ashkenazi Jews living in Israel’s urban centres—the article appraises the work done by the production and maintenance of dual worlds, what lies at stake in their loss and their implications for political change. By building upon the work of feminist and queer theorists who consider the centrality of intimacy …

South Asian Fiction And Marital Agency Of Muslim Wives, Hafiza Nilofar Khan

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay deals with the treatment of wifely agency as delineated by three South Asian women writers: Ismat Chughtai, Tehmina Durrani and Selina Hossain. It tries to prove that the Muslim wives as projected in the fiction of these writers from the patriarchal societies of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are not uniformly oppressed victims of socio-religious discourses. Though often their bodies are subjected to rigorous discipline, docility and even battery, these wives still demonstrate sufficient agential powers to resist the status quo and chalk out a fresh trope of identity for themselves. Their domestic agency, sexual agency and decision-making powers, …

Race, Gender And Performance In Grace Nichols’S The Fat Black Woman’S Poems, Maite Escudero

Journal of International Women's Studies

From the Article:

In a world of diverse cultures and societal beliefs, marginalized groups often share common experiences. Recurrent themes in the literature of black peoples include anti-imperialism, racism, sexism, exile, ‘cultural schizophrenia’, language, otherness and home to ancestors, just to name a few. Yet, there is no single black voice: black writing can come from everywhere in the world – America, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and Britain. As a result, an individual may become torn between conflicting expressions by others within the same cultural group. What is at issue here is the recognition of extraordinary variation of subjective positions …

Migration And Cultural Change: A Role For Gender And Social Networks?, Sara R. Curran, Abigail C. Saguy

Journal of International Women's Studies

From the Introduction:

To incorporate the insights from the literature on gender and migration, we focus upon three key concepts that have emerged regarding the role of social networks, households, and communities for affecting migration processes. The three key concepts we interrogate are: “social embeddedness” (Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993), “circular and cumulative causation” (Massey 1990), and “relative deprivation” (Stark 1991). We propose considering these three concepts through the lens of a third area of research, the sociology of culture, and we draw upon ideas about identity formation, trust, and normative expectations. Our empirical examples come primarily from Thailand where we …

Family Obligations Or Cultural Contraints? Obstacles In The Path Of Professional Women, Marie-Josée Legault, Stéphanie Chasserio

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper provides an account of our research on balancing private life and work among highly qualified information technology (IT) professionals. The authors basically present the findings of an empirical research on balancing private life and work among highly qualified information technology (IT) professionals (mostly engineers and few managers), comparing small loosely structured high-tech firms and big bureaucracies. Authors here build on theories regarding gender and commitment, appraisal and promotions and link these to work time behavior to show up consequences of gendered work time patterns on engineers’ careers.

Briefly, to sum up the rationale, women and men behave differently …

A History Of Women In Afghanistan: Lessons Learnt For The Future Or Yesterdays And Tomorrow: Women In Afghanistan, Huma Ahmed-Ghosh

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this paper, through the history of women in Afghanistan, I want to locate the position of women in the future by lessons learnt from the past. Given Afghanistan’s current situation of poverty, political disenfranchisement and social disarray, I argue that these very deficiencies could be maneuvered to favor the empowerment of women by redefining her role in the family and the community. Afghanistan’s social development can only be ensured through democracy and the reduction of poverty, the success of both being assured through full participation of women, especially in rural Afghanistan. In this paper I would like to trace …

Cooking Soup To Writing Papers: A Journey Through Gender, Society And Self, Zenobia Chan

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper describes my roles as a housewife, previously, and a doctoral student, currently. It examines crossing the border from the family domain to the university domain from a gender perspective. When I was a housewife, I was stigmatised by society and without any prospects. As a doctoral student, I am considered a worthy woman and my life has been romanticized. The analogy of cooking soup represents my life as a housewife, while writing papers represents my life as a doctoral student. Describing this dramatic transition from seven years as a soup-cooking housewife, to a third-year, paper-writing, doctoral candidate, I …

Heresy And Orthodoxy: Challenging Established Paradigms And Disciplines, Marion Hersch, Gloria Moss

Journal of International Women's Studies

A brief survey of the literature on interdisciplinary work and a discussion of issues relating to orthodoxy and heresy are presented to introduce a questionnaire on current interdisciplinary practice and the effects of engaging in research of this kind. Preliminary results of the survey are presented and it is suggested that women may have a greater tendency than men to engage in interdisciplinary research. They may also encounter more obstacles in their research than men. A number of hypotheses, including the relationship of interdisciplinary work and heresy, are proposed and a plan of further work to investigate them put forward.

My, Is That Cyborg A Little Bit Queer?, Esperanza Miyake

Journal of International Women's Studies

This piece of work is a response to the following question: ‘Critically assess the importance, or otherwise, of Donna Haraway’s “manifesto” for early twenty-first century feminists’. Based on Stein and Plummer’s outline of queer theory in their essay, “I can’t even think straight”: “Queer” Theory and the Missing Sexual Revolution in Sociology (Stein and Plummer 1996). This piece compares and contrasts different aspects of queer theory (sociological, ideological, political and ontological) with Haraway’s ‘manifesto’ in order to investigate the possibilities of a cyberqueer theory: to ‘queer’ (as a verb) the ‘cyborg’. Whilst attempting to interrelate both the notion of the …

The Prisoner Of Gender: Foucault And The Disciplining Of The Female Body, Angela King

Journal of International Women's Studies

The work of Michel Foucault has been extremely influential amongst feminist scholars and for good reason; his meditations on discipline, power, sexuality and subjectivity are particularly pertinent to feminist analysis. Yet despite his preoccupation with power and its effects on the body, Foucault’s own analysis was curiously gender-neutral. Remarkably, there is no exploration or even acknowledgement of the extent to which gender determines the techniques and degrees of discipline exerted on the body. Although this exposes serious flaws in Foucault’s work, I don’t believe it negates his entire theoretical framework. Rather it can be adopted and adapted; his glaring omissions …

An Exploration Of Quaker Women’S Writing Between 1650 And 1700, Caroline Baker

Journal of International Women's Studies

Throughout the tumultuous period that was the English Civil War, there was a great change in society’s values and beliefs resulting in the establishment of many new political and religious groups. Quakerism, established in the 1640’s, appealed to women as it gave them freedom to prophesy and to proclaim the gospel. This study explores the role of Quaker women’s writing specifically between the years 1650 and 1700, a period of increased religious prominence. Texts from this time are examined including the journal and the epistle to the prophetic tract. The presence of women as preachers and missionaries is explored in …

The Royal Abbey Of Fontevrault: Religious Women & The Shaping Of Gendered Space, Gabrielle Esperdy

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines the religious and architectural history of the Royal Abbey of Fontevrault, in the French province of Anjou, investigating the active and deliberate role women played in shaping the physical and symbolic space of this female monastic community. Founded in the early 12th century and active until the French Revolution, the abbey was a rare institution in which administrative power was in the hands of women, enabling them to exert almost complete control over the built environment. The nature and impact of this control is examined by tracing the development of the abbey from an initial settlement of …

From Sociability To Spectacle: Interracial Sexuality And The Ideological Uses Of Space In New York City, 1900-1930, Elizabeth Clement

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper addresses inter-racial sociability and sexuality in New York City before and after the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to northern US cities. Using space and the arrangements of objects in space as my primary evidence, I argue that spatial relations both reflected and created race relations in the urban North and that these practices shifted dramatically over the course of a twenty-year period. While the black proprietors of clubs in Hell’s Kitchen in the 1910s used space to make transgressive interracial sociability possible, by the 1920s, the white-owned clubs of the Harlem Renaissance did the …

‘The Truth Is A Thorny Issue’: Lesbian Denial In Jackie Kay’S Trumpet, Ceri Davies

Journal of International Women's Studies

The focus of this paper is Jackie Kay’s novel, Trumpet, the fictionalised account of a woman (Josephine Moore) who lives her life as a man (Joss Moody). This paper looks at how Joss’s identity is constructed, as well as the impact this has on the identities of other people. In particular, the paper examines the difficulties faced by Joss’s wife, Millie, as she tries to help him keep his secret, and protect her own identity as a heterosexual wife. Her attempts to defend herself and her husband from accusations of lesbianism lead to an examination of the power of …

Integration, Clarification, Substantiation: Sex, Gender, Ethnicity And Migration As Social Determinants Of Women’S Health, Bilkis Vissandjee, Ilene Hyman, Denise L. Spitzer, Alisha Apale, Nahar Kamrun

Journal of International Women's Studies

The aim of this paper was to examine, via a scoping review, how the literature focusing on immigrant women’s health, based on selected criteria, has been able to capture not only sex and gender differences but also the other socially grounded determinants of health. Using selected health databases as well as a diversity of keywords, a final sample of 59 was obtained after a number of steps to increase validity and credibility of the process were taken. Since “women” was one of the main keywords, all of the studies included women either by themselves (n=20/59) or along with men (n=39/59). …

Gender In The Bamako Polycentric World Social Forum (2006): Is Another World Possible?, Aurelie Latoures

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper explores a gender analysis of the Bamako Polycentric World Social Forum, 2006. Thus far, gender has been marginalized in the World Social Forum process, despite the progressive tone of the project for “another world,” indirectly alluding to gender equality. The Bamako WSF 2006 is an interesting case study to assess gender institutionalisation, as for the first time African women activists were massively integrated into the discussions. Additionally, national organizers dedicated a specific venue for gender issues, the Women’s World. What was the impact of these two features for the “engendering” of the WSF?

Parallel Or Integrated ‘Other Worlds’: Possibilities For Alliance-Building For Sexual And Reproductive Rights, Barbara Klugman

Journal of International Women's Studies

The author proposes that the paradigms within which struggles for reproductive and sexual rights are waged fail to engage with those dimensions of sexuality and reproduction that are inscribed into the broader organization of social and economic life nationally and globally. In the case of reproductive rights she argues that the possibility of delivering quality reproductive health services is determined not only by ideological struggles regarding people’s right to control their sexual and reproductive selves but also by the extent of the state’s commitment to delivery of services as well as global factors influencing state capacity, such as debt, or …

Feminism And The Politics Of Representation: Towards A Critical And Ethical Encounter With “Others”, Amy Hinterberger

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay begins from the position that a speaking subject in feminism occupies a place of power and authority which requires a commitment to an ethical involvement in the representation of ‘others.’ Specifically, this essay will address feminist concerns of speaking for others and the concerns raised by the dangers of representing across differences of race, sexuality, gender and cultures. First, it will critique feminist claims to political effectivity as a solution to ethical representation. Second, it will look at how hierarchies of oppression and privileged ontological positions are inconsistently represented in feminist discussions. Lastly, it will briefly examine how …

The Lady In The Looking-Glass: Reflections On The Self In Virginia Woolf, Stephen Howard

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay addresses Virginia Woolf’s exploration of the concept of the self through reference to a range of her prose writings. In these writings, Woolf questions whether the self is unitary, constant and finally knowable, or fragmented, unstable and inscrutable; whether the self is merged with other people, and constructed from interactions with the world; and whether or not a durable and fixed self-image is a necessary prerequisite for successful social interaction. Woolf’s engagement with the conventions of biography is examined primarily through the lens of two short stories: ‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass’ and ‘An Unwritten Novel.’ I argue …

The Missing Rhetoric Of Gender In Responses To Abu Ghraib, Alexandra Murphy

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper explores Western responses to the torture inflicted upon Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib facility near Baghdad. More specifically, however, this paper examines responses to photographic representations of this torture, which began to surface in the April of 2004. The analysis that follows engages closely with the status of the photographs as images, arguing that existing critical interpretations fail to account for the particular issues and problems that the visual image presents. Through detailed reference work by Judith Butler and Susan Sontag, this paper will also interrogate the limitations of recent theoretical approaches to the …

Unbending Gender Narratives In African Literature, Charles C. Fonchingong

Journal of International Women's Studies

The last century has witnessed an upsurge in literature triggered by the feminist movement. This unprecedented event has transformed the various literary genres that are being deconstructed to suit the changing times. African literature has not been spared by the universalized world order. The paper attempts a re-analysis of gender inequality from the pre-colonial to post-colonial period from the lenses of literary narratives. Male writers like Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, and Cyprain Ekwensi in their literary mass are accused of condoning patriarchy, are deeply entrenched in a macho conviviality and a one dimensional and minimalised …

A Gender-Based Analysis Of Performance Of Small And Medium Printing Firms In Metro Manila, Milagros F. Malaya

Journal of International Women's Studies

The objective of the paper is to present a comparative analysis of the performance of men-owned and women-owned businesses. The study uses a multidimensional framework of entrepreneurial success, where the indicators refer to the financial, non-financial and personal goals indicated in literature as being important to entrepreneurs. Economic performance was measured as change in sales and profitability for a period of one year and over three years. Data were obtained from printing firms based in Metro Manila, Philippines, a country in Southeast Asia. That no variations attributed to gender were found in firm performance on the short-term scale further support …

Male Identity And Female Space In The Fiction Of Ugandan Women Writers, Abasi Kiyimba

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article focuses on the voices of protest by Uganda women writers against age-old discriminative habits, and on the rebuttal made by women on questions of social and political power. The article particularly assesses the way women writers approach generally assumed positions on the power relations between men and women, a theme that runs through all the writing by Ugandan women. As part of the discussion, the paper inevitably pays particular attention to the presentation of male characters, and on the prominence given to issues of male dominance, injustice and discrimination against women, which take place at several levels of …

The Sita Syndrome: Examining The Communicative Aspects Of Domestic Violence From A South Asian Perspective, Archana Pathak Bhatt

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay explores the communicative aspects of domestic violence by articulating the Eurocentric components of domestic violence research. Utilizing a post-colonial ethnography, this essay reconceptualizes domestic violence from a South Asian perspective, articulating the ways in which relational violence, its acceptance and its social function are gendered.

Effects Of Protégé-Mentor Gender Mix On Organisational Commitment, David E. Okurame

Journal of International Women's Studies

This study examined the interaction effects of protégé and mentor gender on organisational commitment in the Nigerian work setting. Data was collected from one hundred and sixty-one dyads in four gender combinations through a survey of a large government owned health institution. Results revealed that mean scores of all-male, all female, and the female protégé-male mentor dyads were comparable while that of male protégé-female mentor was significantly low. Whereas organisational commitment was better for male protégés when their mentors were males, it was better for females when mentors were females. The study narrows the gap created by the dearth of …

Gender Discrimination: Beliefs And Experiences: A Comparative Perspective Of Women And Men In The Delhi Police, Punam Sahgal

Journal of International Women's Studies

Gender roles are learnt through the socialization process and subsequently extend to the work context where women and men are believed to have different characteristics and are therefore treated differently. The pervasiveness of workplace gender differences influence hiring practices, salaries and career growth opportunities for women. Gender-based work behavior differences are perceived to be much greater in male dominated professions like the police. While research suggests that there is no evidence that policewomen perform differently from their male counterparts in their day-to-day activities of police, negative male attitudes towards women in police significantly obstruct the advancement of policewomen. Induction of …

Virginia Woolf’S Answer To “Women Can’T Paint, Women Can’T Write” In To The Lighthouse, Daniela Munca

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay addresses Virginia Woolf’s personal stand in her answer to “women can’t paint, women can’t write”, a reflection on the Victorian prejudice of the role of women in the family and society shared by both her parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen. By bridging a close textual analysis with the most recent psychological critical analysis, I argue that apart from the political, social and artistic implications, Woolf’s attitude to the Victorian stereotypes related to gender roles carry a deeply personal message, being undeniably influenced and determined by the relationship with her parents and her need to lie to rest some …

Empowering, Degrading Or A ‘Mutually Exploitative’ Exchange For Women?: Characterising The Power Relations Of The Strip Club, Katy Pilcher

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper seeks to characterise the gendered and sexualised power relations of both female and male strip clubs, and to signal what this means for establishing positive definitions of female desire. It is argued that while it is not useful to present female strippers, or female patrons of male strip clubs as purely passive victims of male heterosexism within these venues, it is equally damaging to assume that these venues represent a whole-scale challenge to conventional oppressive gender and sexual relations for women. Some research has even suggested that both strippers and their patrons are engaged in a ‘mutually exploitative’ …

Fighting For Subjectivity: Articulations Of Physicality In Girlfight, Katharina Lindner

Journal of International Women's Studies

The analysis of Girlfight (Karyn Kusama, 2000) in this paper is framed by critical discourses surrounding physically active female characters in the action genre, the conventions of the boxing film ‘genre’, the relationship between bodily spectacle and narrative structure, as well as the more general significance of the female boxer’s challenge to normative and binary notions of bodily existence and subjectivity. With a particular focus on the interrelationship between narrative structure and boxing sequences (‘numbers’), this paper explores notions of the (gendered) subjectivity constructed around the film’s female boxing character, Diana (Michelle Rodriguez). I will argue that the boxing ‘numbers’ …