Digital Commons Network^™

Entrenched Fissures: Caste And Social Differences Among The Devadasis, K. A. Geetha

Journal of International Women's Studies

The religiously sanctioned Devadasi system in India exemplifies intersectional oppression of gender, caste, and sexuality. Historically, Devadasis, or “servants of God,” were women wedded to God who performed temple duties and were considered sacral women with ritual powers. As part of her duties, the Devadasis offer sexual services to her patrons, invariably the economically and socially powerful patriarch/s in society. The Devadasis were not a monolithic community; there were caste-based segregations within the Devadasi community which delineated their social positions. Devadasis were drawn from castes lower in the hierarchy (non-Brahmins) and the Scheduled castes (Dalits). To distinguish the two categories, …

Societal Security Of Iranian Women: A Challenge Of Subjectivity Vs. Objectivity, Hamid Sajadi

Journal of International Women's Studies

Critical theories in the field of security have revealed the incompatibility of government-based approaches to security studies and the nature of domination and repression structures in society. The Copenhagen and Welsh Schools of security studies have made many attempts to reconceive the concept of security and security studies by criticizing the neglect of domestic security issues and the ignorance of the community and individuals. The formation of the concept of societal security, and in particular women's security, is one of the achievements of these theoretical developments. Assuming that the acceptance of new approaches in developing societies is strongly influenced by …

Women's Studies: The Possibility Of Rethinking And Designing The Foundations Of Modern Culture, Hamid Sajadi

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Gender Disparities In Witchcraft Beliefs: A Challenge To Nigerian And African Historiography, Uche U. Okonkwo, V.O Eze, Victor Ukaogo, Stella Okoye-Ugwu, F.O Orabueze

Journal of International Women's Studies

The understanding of how gender roles are assigned to abstract issues like witchcraft beliefs, remains a challenge to contemporary African historians. Witchcraft as a significant area of humanistic study, has not sufficiently engaged historians and literary critics. Scholars in Religious and Cultural Studies in Nigeria have made efforts to interpret witchcraft as an aspect of the tradition of various Nigerian groups. In this paper, witchcraft is examined as a phenomenon and a historical assumption based on gender disparity. Combining primary sources from the National Archives of Nigeria and secondary sources in books and journals, this research dissects witchcraft stigmatizations in …

Out Of Place: Racialized Bodies At The Usa-Canada Border, Mobólúwajídìde D. Joseph

Undergraduate Review

The United States of America and Canada have a strong bilateral relationship that spans trade and national security concerns made necessary by their geographic proximity to one another. However, this is not one that equally impacts both states. This article maps out how marketization and securitization as dual forces shape much of Canada’s immigration policy framework. This framework is in response to American post-9/11 national security discourses which resulted in the reification of racial discrimination at the border (Crocker et al. 2007). It will do so by grounding these arguments in a theoretical framework that critically examines neoliberalism as the …

What I Learned From Anthropological Linguistics: Implications For Teaching, Autumn Strickland

Undergraduate Review

In this article, I explore the connections between linguistic anthropology and education through a summer course at Bridgewater State University (BSU) framed by Laura M. Ahearn’s Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (2021) as well as my personal experiences in courses at BSU and my 2021 summer internship at a private school focused on students with learning disabilities. The purpose of this article is to highlight some of the ways in which both education courses and educational experiences in the field unknowingly reproduce western ways of thinking and being, specifically in terms of language use and ideologies. To frame …

Including The ‘Invisible Middle’ Of Decoloniality, Su-Ming Khoo, Anique Vered

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article traces a conversation around how to theorise and approach the inclusion of experiences, concepts and bodies situated in the ‘invisible middle’ of decoloniality. If coloniality is an immense, lengthy process resulting in colonial/modern structures (Mignolo 2007) comprising the ‘colonial present’ (Gregory 2004), ‘decoloniality’ requires surfacing, baring and bringing to bear the invisibilities and erasures of bodies that exist and resist with, through and in spite of colonial extraction and appropriation.

We explore and connect different ideas of ‘being in the middle’ of decoloniality, paying particular attention to the notion of ‘the invisible middle’ in embodied practices of solidarity …

Decolonizing The Womb: Agency Against Obstetric Violence In Tijuana, Mexico, Ester Espinoza-Reyes, Marlene Solís

Journal of International Women's Studies

Obstetric violence is a human rights violation that consists of actions or omissions of healthcare personnel that harms people during pregnancy, childbirth or puerperium. Some practices through which it is expressed are the mistreatment, unnecessary procedures, denying of medical attention or provoking damage either physically or mentally. In particular, we understand obstetric violence as the result of a colonization of the womb, that is, of the occupation of the concept of motherhood by the dictates of patriarchal ideology (Fineman, 1991; Ehrenreich, 1993) and of the Colonial/Modern Gender System, proposed by Lugones (2007). The objective of this paper is to analyze …

“Valli” At The Border: Adivasi Women De-Link From Settler Colonialism Paving Re-Enchantment Of The Forest Commons, Deepa Kozhisseri

Journal of International Women's Studies

The forests of Attappady Hills part of the Western Ghats in Kerala homeland to Adivasi people is a frontier region where a settler population is now predominant. This paper aims to bring the concept of borders as a heuristic device to interpret gender-ecology-indigeneity in Attappady. The conversations among Adivasis, between Adivasis and settlers, between Adivasi women and their children become in media res dialogues of their border subjectivity. This was an empirical study in Attappady in which life experiences, oral history and myths were studied using narrative analysis. The paper discusses four findings: First how land dispossession disproportionately impacted Adivasi …

Decolonizing The Anti-Extractive Struggle: Amazonian Women’S Practices Of Forest-Making In Ecuador, Andrea Sempértegui

Journal of International Women's Studies

In October 2013, a group of indigenous women from the southeastern Ecuadorian Amazon started the “March of Life”. This 250-km long march – organized and led entirely by female representatives from the Achuar, Shuar, Zapara, Kichwa, Shiwiar, Andoa, and Waorani indigenous organizations – proceeded from the Amazonian city of Puyo to the capital city of Quito and was a response to the 11th oil licensing round in their territories. After this symbolic and arduous march, Amazonian women have continued to organize as a network and as active members of their indigenous organizations against renewed attempts by the government of licensing …

A New Genealogy For Critical Oa Publishing: Towards A Politics Of Intersectional Transnationality, Rebekka Kiesewetter

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this article, I suggest opening out from the digital genealogies critical strands within the Open Access (OA) movement usually associate themselves with: I propose a genealogy of OA publishing that takes into consideration feminist and decolonial transnational publishing initiatives that have been active in non-digital realms before, and in parallel to what these critical strands have highlighted as their digital origins. The ways in which these pre-digital initiatives organised and mobilised feminist and decolonial transnational struggle through publishing might offer new insights for contemporary critical OA – specifically, with regards to questions around how to confront uneven hierarchies of …

The Salon Is Now In Session: A Reflection On Unisa’S Decolonial Reading, Motlatsi Khosi, Lenka Vráblíková

Journal of International Women's Studies

How can we – those who are involved in institutions of higher education as researchers, students, educators and administrators – contribute to the decolonial project? How can we dismantle colonial structures in ways that speak to and from our practices of teaching and learning? And how are we to engage with what has become known as ‘Decolonial Theory’ in our everyday practice inside the university? As follows from the work of thinkers and educators such as bell hooks, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, the control of the means of producing and reproducing knowledge is key for sustaining coloniality but …

Negotiating Afro-Jewish Identity In The Cabo Verdean Diaspora, Alma Gottlieb

Journal of Cape Verdean Studies

In this paper, I explore how diasporic Cabo Verdean-Americans with Jewish ancestry (especially those living in the New England region of the U.S.) experience their racially and spiritually mixed (and doubly or even triply stigmatized) identity. Being African in (racist) North America presents enormous challenges. Being Jewish in (increasingly anti-Semitic) North America presents different but somewhat parallel challenges. To account for unexpected identity crossings, I combine critical race theory with a Geertzian approach to understanding social worlds. In chronicling the experiences of Cape Verdeans who embrace divergent components of their multi-layered racial and spiritual heritage, I consider whether Cabo Verdeans …

Whose Independence? Cabo Verdean-Americans And The Politics Of National Independence Of Cabo Verde (1972-1976), Abel Djassi Amado

Journal of Cape Verdean Studies

In this paper, I argue that anti-colonial politics in the late colonial period of Cape Verde had an important diasporic content. During the 1960s, Cabo Verde began a long, increasingly violent effort to attain independence from Portugal (finally achieved in 1975). Diasporic Cabo Verdeans in the US responded in surprisingly variable ways to the political resistance claiming their national homeland. In this paper, I focus on responses by two political groups that emerged as central in the Cabo Verdean diaspora: the PAIGC-USA Support Committee and the Juridical Congress of World Cape Verdean Communities. I argue that these two groups constituted …

Journal Of Cape Verdean Studies, Vol. 5 Special Edition On Migration

Journal of Cape Verdean Studies

No abstract provided.

Editor’S Note, Joao J. Rosa

Journal of Cape Verdean Studies

No abstract provided.

The Cape Verde Jews: An Identity Puzzle, Marco Piazza

Journal of Cape Verdean Studies

The American historian and epistemologist Hayden White said that «there can be no ‘proper history’ which is not at the same time ‘philosophy of history’» (1973, p. XI). But it could also be argued that one cannot make history of philosophy or history of ideas without working on historical data. The data on which I would like to draw attention in this contribution are seemingly reducible to a small thing: they refer to a micro-history that has left few traces, some tombs, surnames, oral memories, and a couple of toponyms. In these pages I will try to show how emblematic …

Incidences Of Return Migration: International Students From Cape Verde, David Almeida, Joao Rosa

Journal of Cape Verdean Studies

No abstract provided.

Violence And Motherhood In Kashmir: Loss, Suffering, And Resistance In The Lives Of Women, Shazia Malik

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper examines the social and political context of aggrieved mothers in Kashmir through personal narratives collected by the author. The theme of motherhood as a counter-piece of feminist analyses has re-emerged in recent years for example in the works of Ellen Ross (1995), Elleke Boehmor (2005) etc. Studies on motherhood, as Ellen Ross (1995) contends, are in the process of moving from the margins to the centre of feminist discussion, the mother increasingly a subject rather than a distant, looming object2. The context for this analysis is contemporary Kashmir positioned precariously in geo-politics. The paper attempts to reconstitute the …

Gendered Narratives Relating To Women In The Information Technology Department Of A South African Organisation, Errolyn Long

Journal of International Women's Studies

In South Africa, there is an underrepresentation of women in senior management positions and industries requiring “masculine”-typed duties. The study aimed to explore the gendered narratives relating to women in the Information Technology (IT) Department of a South African organisation using a feminist interpretivist framework. A qualitative design informed by feminist methodology and narrative inquiry outlined by Gilligan et al. (2003) was used for this study. Two females and four male participants participated in the study and data collection involved in-depth semi-structured interviews. The Gillian et al. (2003) approach of data analysis was used (Listening Guide). The listening guide assisted …

​The Case Of The Melting Pot: How Does Opinion Bias Affect One’S Understanding Of Immigration In The Us?​, Mary Ankomah

Honors Program Theses and Projects

In such a delicate political climate the complete acceptance of legal immigrants in the United States seems too often to be a challenge carried to many native-born Americans. Feelings of displeasure, annoyance and anger are repeatedly cultivated by many American citizens towards immigrants. News media and social media platforms have displayed this kind of negative behavior towards legal immigrants, in which they are often accused of “stealing jobs,” “trying to suppress a certain ethnic population,” or “infesting” the area. This study analyzes the political-psychological reason behind this learned reaction, while focusing on factors that have sponsored this level of intolerance …

The Pussyhat Project: Texturing The Struggle For Feminist Solidarity, Katja May

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article moves beyond binary conceptions of the Pussyhat Project as “good or bad activism”, or indeed as good or bad feminism (Zouggarri, 2018, p. 1). Instead, I use the concept of texture as a lens through which to trace the different threads that have shaped and continue to shape the Pussyhat Project and its reception, while simultaneously paying attention to the entangled nature of these threads. Attending to the different textures of the process of making as well as the finished object serves to question or, at least, complicate dominant narratives and concepts of feminist solidarity, protest and craft. …

Postfeminist Hegemony In A Precarious World: Lessons In Neoliberal Survival From Rupaul’S Drag Race, Phoebe Chetwynd

Journal of International Women's Studies

The popularity of the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race is often framed as evidence of Western societies’ increasing tolerance towards queer identities. This paper instead considers the ideological cost of this mainstream success, arguing that the show does not successfully challenge dominant heteronormative values. In light of Rosalind Gill’s work on postfeminism, it will be argued that the show’s format calls upon contestants (and viewers) to conform to a postfeminist ideal that valorises normative femininity and reaffirms the gender binary. Through its analysis of RuPaul’s Drag Race, I further intend to develop our understanding of the relationship between neoliberalism …

Unending And Uncertain: Thinking Through A Phenomenological Consideration Of Self-Harm Towards A Feminist Understanding Of Embodied Agency, Veronica Heney

Journal of International Women's Studies

Agency has been much discussed in both popular and academic feminist discourse, particularly in the context of empowerment and sexual practices. Following a third-wave emphasis on women’s ability to respect women’s choices and ability to exercise agency free from domination, postmodern feminist scholars have critiqued such a view as thoroughly implicated in discourses of neoliberal individualism and compulsory self-discipline. However, these critiques have not entirely succeeded in providing convincing alternative approaches for incorporating concepts and experiences of change and intentionality within frameworks which emphasise the governmentality of discourses of empowerment. Thus, this essay explores the benefits of shifting the frame …

In Perennial Oppression: Internalized Ideologies Of The Devadasis, K A. Geetha

Journal of International Women's Studies

The Madras Anti-Devadasi Act was passed in 1947 with the primary objective of liberating women from the oppressive norms of the Devadasi system. Sanctioned by religion, the institutionalization of the Devadasi system within the Hindu community legitimated women from certain caste groups to become ‘servants of god’. Through ritualistic norms, the Devadasis were wedded to God and the caste Hindu patriarchs were authorized to control the sexuality of the Devadasis. Given their vulnerable status in terms of caste, class, and gender, women from the castes lower in hierarchy were forced into the system. Despite the legislative intervention of the Anti-Devdasi …

Moroccan Women’S Writings: Rethinking Their Female Body And Sexuality, Hanane El Aissi

Journal of International Women's Studies

The nineteen eighties and nineties marked a turning point in Moroccan women’s campaign against gender discrimination and patriarchal hegemony. During this period, Moroccan women’s writings moved beyond the archaic subjects that had been dominating the literary scene during the sixties, such as the call for women’s education, women’s work in the public sphere and women’s domesticity issues, having as a goal to start addressing some of what was considered taboo issues such as the question of the female body, sexuality, and teenage pregnancy. The emergence of such writings heralded an awakening of a feminist consciousness that reflected new and revolutionary …

The Understanding Of Women’S Movement Activists On The Necessity Of Critical Analysis Of Television Content In Iran, Kobra M. Kachalmi, Lee Yok Fee

Journal of International Women's Studies

Iranian TV tries to legitimize and reinforce sexism and male domination with oppressive gender representation. The current study investigates how critical analysis of media is necessary for Iranian women from the viewpoints of Iranian feminist activists. Using a qualitative approach of semi-structured interviews with 15 Iranian feminist activists, this paper contends that critical reading of media messages is essential for Iranian women. The findings reveal that critical reading of media messages could empower Iranian women to understand how Iranian TV reinforces and naturalizes gender stereotypes and roles. In addition, the Iranian feminist activists believe that because media has a purpose, …

An Ecofeminist, Comparative Reading Of Moniru Ravanipor’S The Gypsy By The Fire And Ntozake Shange’S Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, Elahe Khafi

Journal of International Women's Studies

Binary oppositions are the concepts that graft many approaches like feminism, postcolonialism, ecocriticism, African-American, and zoo-poetics. Considering one race, gender, or nationality as superior is what constitutes the dichotomies like, white/black, man/woman, and European/non-European. Ecofeminism, the focal point of this paper, deals with the connection between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature. Oppositions such as culture/nature, human/animal, and male/female culminate in a myriad discrimination. Among many writers around the world whose concerns are the marginalized, one African-American and one Iranian female novelist are selected to be surveyed in this study. Both Ntozoke Shange (1948-2018) and Moniro Ravanipor …

Extending Bell Hooks' Feminist Theory, Hazel T. Biana

Journal of International Women's Studies

In Feminist theory: from margin to center, feminist theorist bell hooks questioned the existing feminist discourses during her time by pointing out the lack of a solid definition of feminism and the predominance of white, privileged feminists in the movement. Although several other feminist theorists have made the same criticisms, what sets hooks apart is her invitation to a revolutionary feminist outlook, which uses a pluralistic lens to recognize the absence of oppressed groups and the interrogation of cultural representations. Even before “intersectionality” became a buzzword in feminist circles, hooks has already been talking about the interlocking webs of …

The Role Of Culture In Cross-Cultural Marriage Among Minangkabau Women, Susi Fitria Dewi, Maria Montessori, Randi Ade Saputra, Sintia Farsalena, Fatmariza Fatmariza, Rika Febriani, Febri Yulika

Journal of International Women's Studies

Marriage is the strongest relationship in terms of controlling human behaviour. There are various reasons why men and women want to be tied through marriage, such as religious, economic, social and cultural factors, and even politics. Cultural factors have special characteristics because they are the product of creativity, human feelings and intentions brought from birth that are passed down from generation to generation. This paper aims to describe the cultural values that affect the lives of the Minangkabau ethnic women who marry other ethnic men. This study is based on interviews with 37 women in 7 districts in West Sumatra …