Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Women's Place In The Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology, Mary E. Wilhoit

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Laura Méndez De Cuenca: Mexican Feminist, 1835-1928, Stephanie Mitchell

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Demanding Justice And Security: Indigenous Women And Legal Pluralities In Latin America, David Carey Jr.

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

La Descolonización Del Discurso Feminista Latinoamericano En (E)Stereotipas, Nancy Gómez, Maria Lozano

Journal of International Women's Studies

En este ensayo examinamos el discurso feminista del colectivo latinoamericano (e)stereotipas. Nuestra reflexión se sitúa desde una perspectiva decolonial que busca explorar los retos y posibilidades que enfrentan las jóvenes feministas latinoamericanas en la deconstrucción de los feminismos hegemónicos occidentales. Para ello, revisamos el contenido de 10 vídeos de (e)stereotipas disponibles en YouTube. La revisión de los productos audiovisuales nos permitió determinar la forma en que el colectivo contribuye a la búsqueda de una identidad propia del movimiento feminista en América Latina. Reconocemos el potencial que encuentra (e)stereotipas en YouTube para generar contenidos a partir del contexto cultural e histórico …

Hacia Una Mirada Feminista Del Rol De La Mujer En El Posconflicto Colombiano, Angélica María Anicharico González, Héctor Martinez Ortega, Claudia Cristina Cerón Ruiz, Katherine Rengifo Agudelo

Journal of International Women's Studies

El debate sobre los diferentes roles que las mujeres han sido forzadas a asumir en el Conflicto Armado Colombiano ha generado que, en el último proceso de Justicia Transicional, se haya reconocido la necesidad de rupturar el arquetipo histórico de las mujeres visibilizado en categorías rígidas y desiguales. Este artículo, basado en 50 entrevistas a mujeres víctimas del conflicto armado registradas en la Fiscalía General de la Nación de la República de Colombia (FIS), devela que son pocos los avances en investigación sociojurídica sobre la forma en que las mujeres podrían transformar su rol en una época de posconflicto, para …

Comadre Work: Grassroots Feminism In A Kaqchikel Maya Town, Joyce Bennett

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay analyzes indigenous women’s collective action that improves indigenous women’s lives and increases their agency in a Kaqchikel Maya town. The women whose work I consider come together under the structures of a patriarchal organization, the Principe de Paz evangelical church. I extend Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of motherwork and Nancy Naples’ concept of activist mothering to what I call comadre work, or care work that women enact for each other through creative kin networks. Women practice comadre work as they pool physical and financial resources, teach each other to read and write in Spanish, and speak for themselves …

The Diffusion Of Gender Policy In Latin America: From Quotas To Parity, Adriana Piatti-Crocker

Journal of International Women's Studies

Diffusion may be seen logically as both an external and internal processes. In the first case, external factors influence the domestic affairs of a state. In the second it is a subfield of linkage politics, where both internal and external events interact within a state (True and Mintrom, 2001; Piatti-Crocker, 2011). Thus, an appropriate explanation of diffusion should be given in terms both of the unit of analysis (e.g. states, individuals, or groups of individuals) and the social structures in which these units are embedded (e.g. world or regional systems). This research claims that since the 1990s two policy waves …

Feminisms, The Environment And Capitalism: On The Necessary Ecological Dimension Of A Critical Latin American Feminism, Verónica Schild

Journal of International Women's Studies

Latin American women are on the move today, taking their demands to the streets throughout the region in unprecedented numbers. What these demands reveal is a growing frustration and anger among women with the distance between official democratic promises and protections and the limited gains in basic rights, even the reversal of minimal achievements in places like Central America and Brazil. Feminists are weaving together different struggles into an intersectional movement explicitly linking gender demands to the end of a neoliberal capitalist model of development and its devastating social, economic and ecological effects on Latin America’s overwhelming majority. A critical …

Flora Tristan, Precursor Lecture By Magda Portal, Kathleen Weaver

Journal of International Women's Studies

A major figure in Latin American struggles for women's rights and social justice, Magda Portal (1900-1989) co-founded the revolutionary nationalist APRA Party of Peru and was the principal women's leader of that party. In her Chilean exile Portal discovered the nineteenth century writer and social reformer, Flora Tristan. In 1944 Portal offered her first lecture on Tristan (1803-1844)—a brilliant diarist and journalist as well as a seminal social theorist, labor organizer, champion of women's rights, and a significant precursor—arguably co-founder—of socialist internationalism. Expanding and revising her initial account, Portal continued into her later years to lecture on Tristan, whom she …

Introduction: Women’S Movements And The Shape Of Feminist Theory And Praxis In Latin America, Erin E. O'Connor, M. Gabriela Torres

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Exploring Pronatalism And Assisted Reproduction In Uk Medicine, Alexa Warnes

Journal of International Women's Studies

Globally, procreation is highly valued, and motherhood has long been seen as the normative role for women. Production of a biologically-related family in keeping with social norms is a key driver of the growing demand for assisted reproductive technologies as a ‘cure’ for infertility, which includes the provision of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) within the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).

In this paper I argue that pronatalism – a social bias in favour of biological motherhood – entrenches harmful social norms for women as a group. I will question whether assisted reproductive technologies in the form of IVF bring radical …

Scripting Resistance: Rape And The Avenging Woman In Hindi Cinema, Isha Karki

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article considers how contemporary Hindi cinema engages with traditional cinematic representations of rape and the extent to which it inscribes resistance by rewriting dominant cultural scripts. It analyses Pan Nalin’s Angry Indian Goddesses (2015) and Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink (2016) by locating them within the tradition of the avenging woman genre in 1980s Hindi popular cinema. It argues that the historical avenging woman genre was unable to successfully dismantle dominant rape scripts, and that these contemporary films, by subverting the genre, offer alternatives to the problems inherent in the visualisation of rape. It explores issues of eroticisation and spectacle …

‘Red Amazons’? Gendering Violence And Revolution In The Long First World War, 1914-23, Matthew Kovac

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article seeks to position gender theory as critical to making sense of one of the First World War’s largest remaining historical problems: the persistence of mass violence after November 1918. While Robert Gerwarth and John Horne’s pathbreaking work on veteran violence has challenged the standard 1914-18 periodisation of the war, their focus on military defeat and revolution obscures the centrality of gender relations to the continuation of violence after the formal end of hostilities. By putting their work into conversation with that of feminist theorists, I argue that countries which experienced more extreme gender dislocation or ‘gender trouble’ witnessed …

Using Technologies To Commemorate International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers In The North East Of England, Angelika Strohmayer

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article explores the use of digital technologies at the commemoration of International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers in the North East of England in 2016 and 2017. Learning from sex work research and Human-Computer Interaction literatures, this feminist exploration of the day provides opportunities for more nuanced and contextualised discussions of digital technologies that are used with, and for sex workers and sex work support services. In the paper, I provide an overview of how this day is commemorated internationally before providing a detailed overview of a hyper-localised day organised by Changing Lives, a charity supporting sex …

Walking Out Of Dualisms: Material Ecofeminism In Olivia Laing’S To The River (2011), Sarah France

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article positions Olivia Laing’s novel To The River (2011) as a feminist alternative to the patriarchally-coded concepts of psychogeography and flânerie, which, I argue, do not allow for female inclusion. By demonstrating how the text displays theories of material ecofeminism, I establish how To The River works to determine commonly accepted ontological binary divisions as, in fact, permeable. That is, instead of rejecting her female connection to the body and to nature, Laing fully embraces it, walking into nature and writing her lived experience. By walking into nature specifically, Laing is able to walk out of phallogocentric urban space, …

Far From The Factory? Investigating How Women Travel To Work In Rural Cote D’Ivoire, Rijak Grover

Journal of International Women's Studies

Sociologists have long argued that spatial mismatch, or costs for workers associated with the distance from home to work, determines the extensive margin of labour supply of urban areas in developed countries (Kain 1968; Wilson, 1987). But what about in rural contexts where labour supply vastly exceeds demand? Using data from fieldwork in Findon, Cote d’Ivoire, this article examines an unexplored aspect of spatial mismatch theory, namely, its application to a rural context in the developing world. Sociological research has suggested the best way to correct spatial mismatch is by either bringing people to jobs or jobs to people. The …

Cartographers Of Disrupted Belonging: Sudanese Mothers Drawing Maps Of Portsmouth (Uk), Charlotte Sanders

Journal of International Women's Studies

Map-making is an everyday practice for Sudanese women in Portsmouth. Arriving to the city within the last twenty-five years, women continue to work hard to reconfigure their sense of place, to reorient themselves in urban space, and to relearn the landmarks of everyday life so as to produce comfortable homes and lives for their families. Through the methodology of ‘mental mapping’, in which women sketch the city from memory, their practices of everyday cartography are revealed. This invests women’s mundane movements in unfamiliar – and frequently hostile – urban spaces with agential power. At the same time, these visual articulations …

"New Writings In Feminist And Women’S Studies Winning And Short-Listed Entries From The 2018 Feminist And Women’S Studies Association’S (Fwsa) Annual Student Essay Competition", Laura Clancy, Irralie Doel

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

An Insight To Women In Construction For Fostering Female Careers In Sri Lankan Construction Industry, Srivishagan Vijayaragunathan, Thalpage Rasanthi

Journal of International Women's Studies

The construction industry is one of the largest sectors in Sri Lanka. Since, there is rapid growth of new technologies in today’s global market, there is a need to foster human skills and knowledge related to employment in the sector. However, the Sri Lankan construction industry is facing technical and managerial skill shortages as well as worker capacity issues. Further, the industry is facing industrial issues such as delivering timely project completion, within budget and for desired quality. ‘Women in construction’ has been a topic of concern by many nations, for many years. Given the rapid growth and demand in …

Lifestyle Change Of Female Farmers Through Cpec’S Coal Power Plant Project Initiative, Komal Niazi, Guoqiang He, Shakir Ullah

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper focuses on the impact to women engaged in agriculture specific to the construction of Sahiwal Coal Power Plant project in Qadirabad, Punjab, Pakistan. The power plant was developed in relation to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) initiative. This plant was built on private [agricultural] lands. This study, relies on data collected via a field survey, judgmental sampling, and case study methods. Observations and data collected surface the changing occupational roles of women, who prior to the development of the coal plant had been employed primarily as agricultural workers. A noted adjustment of female labor to domestic service and …

Roll Up Your Sleeves: Why Is It Important To Highlight Gender In Agriculture?, Mariela Mamaril, Jinky Leilanie Lu

Journal of International Women's Studies

Gender and poverty combine to put a burden on the status of women farm workers. On top of that, women’s contribution in agriculture, albeit important to the overall agricultural chain, is commonly overlooked. This study looked into the time-use of women in agriculture, relative to men in the largest rice producing community in the Philippines. The methodology included key informant interviews of nine women, a survey questionnaire to a total of 159 individuals form the farming household, and a time-motion study of women’s work in raising livestock during a whole day. The data revealed that women are involved in all …

Pluralizing Discourses: Multinationals And Gender Equality, Marianna Leite

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article investigates the impact of multinational corporations with respect to the concept of gender equality. According to legal pluralism theory, in every society, two or more legal systems not belonging to a single ‘system’ coexist. It is, however, unknown to what extent non-state actors contribute to the ‘bending and breaking’ of rules in legal systems that are inherently pluralistic in the juristic sense. Although, the use of the language of rights has grown rapidly amongst development policy and practice, the rhetoric of formal rights as advocated by international development bodies has not always improved the everyday reality. This is …

Focus On Domestic Violence In Bangladesh: A Study From Criminological Perspectives, Khandaker Farzana Rahman

Journal of International Women's Studies

Bangladesh is a patriarchal society where powerlessness and vulnerability are associated with women’s lives, as they are often found in positions where they are dominated and subjugated by men. Women are often controlled by their father, husband and son at different phases of their lives, and due to this reason a woman commonly has risk of experiencing domestic violence within her family. Though Bangladesh is experiencing a relatively high level of gender equality for South Asia, it is still not very surprising that a husband is more likely to assault and/or batter his educated/financially solvent wife if she fails to …

Early Marriage In Nepal: Prospects For Schoolgirls, Nub Raj Bhandari

Journal of International Women's Studies

Nepal has one of the highest child marriage rates in the world; the prevalence is even higher in Terai region. There has been an observable correlation between marriage and education leading to the general assumption that girls attending school are less likely to be married at an early age compared with counterparts that have either dropped out of school or have not been in school. This paper assesses the causality between school attendance and likelihood of marriage. The study relies on a qualitative assessment conducted at 5 schools in Dhanusha, a district in Province 2 of Nepal. Participants in the …

The Taboo Of Sex Within Gender Based Violence Prevention: Localising The Gender And Development Paradigm In Cambodia, Elena Robertson

Journal of International Women's Studies

The Gender and Development (GAD) paradigm emerged out of decades of concerted effort by theorists, practitioners and feminists. GAD has attempted to bring women as individuals into the development institution and while this has no doubt contributed to considerable advances in women’s access to education, health care and employment, it has yet to greatly affect gender-based violence (GBV). GBV continues to plague development despite GAD’s best efforts. Recent research suggests that this may be linked to the paradigm’s inability to address female sexuality in and of itself. Female sex and sexuality continue to be taboo at global and local levels …

Deconstructing Theory-Practice: Re-Thinking Methodology, Swarnima Kriti

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper is based on an ‘action research’ work (in Mardapoti, a largely Gond Adivasi village in Chhattisgarh, India) on the ‘gender-labor continuum in household spaces’, where I, along with a group of young women and men (who are within the age group of sixteen to twenty-two) re-thought research as ‘co-research with community’ (and not on community) and methodology (as actioning research and researching action) in the context of transforming the extant structure of the sexual division of labor in the village and the household. Together, we worked towards a deconstructive relation with the problem of the scarcity of water …

Widows And Concubines: Tradition And Deviance In The Women Of Raja Rao’S Kanthapura, M. E. P. Ranmuthugala

Journal of International Women's Studies

Raja Rao’s 1938 novel Kanthapura depicts the impact of Gandhian thought on women and men, and this research focuses on the novel’s fashioning of female identities in terms of nationalism as espoused by Mahatma Gandhi. This analytical research paper hypothesises that although women constitute a considerable part of the narrative and have political agency, their identity is moulded by men to serve men’s nationalist interests: The paper contends that women must undergo transformation and refashioning of their identities for nationalism. The novel provides a strong argument for Mahatma Gandhi’s political ethic of empowering people and engages with diverse issues such …

Sacks Of Mutilated Breasts: Violence And Body Politics In South Asian Partition Literature, Antonia Navarro-Tejero

Journal of International Women's Studies

The partition narratives of South Asian authors are testimony to the fact that women of all ethnic and religious backgrounds were the greatest victims of the newly created border between India and Pakistan in 1947. Women’s bodies were abducted, stripped naked, raped, mutilated (their breasts cut off), carved with religious symbols and murdered to be sent in train wagons to the “other” side of the border. Taking Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man/Cracking India (1988) as a narrative example of the importance of women’s point of view and as central figures of the violent conflict, we will examine the symbol …

Violence As A Site Of Women’S Agency In War: The Representation Of Female Militants In Sri Lanka’S Post-War Literature, T. N. K. Meegaswatta

Journal of International Women's Studies

The increasing visibility of armed women in violent conflicts in the modern world has unsettled conventional beliefs of inferiority, weakness, innocence, and the resultant fragility and victimhood of women. Although in theory it is possible to conceptualize armed woman and violence as empowerment, in practice, the temporal realities that inevitably haunt any discussion of ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ in conflict ridden polarized societies severely curtail the terminology available to frame militancy in general and the ‘terror’ it generates as ‘liberatory’. However, fictional and non-fictional literary work that were published in the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s war (1983-2009) between the state forces …

Monster To Monster: Masculinity As An Invisible Major Theme In Hunter’S Run, Petra Fišerová

Journal of International Women's Studies

Taken for granted, normalized as a non-category, and thus invisible, masculinity is a topic that largely escaped public and much academic attention until the birth of men and masculinity studies. It is my belief that this discipline will play an important part in the future of gender studies, which is why my paper doubles as an appeal for more scholars to join me and learn more about this lesser known side of gender theory. In my analysis of Hunter’s Run (2007), an American sci-fi novel for mature audiences authored by George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, and Daniel Abraham, I …