Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Housewives And The Sex Trade - A Desperate Strategy To Save The Household: A Study Of Housewives Of Industrial Workers, Harasankar Adhikari

Journal of International Women's Studies

The present paper examines the household economies of male industrial workers of India after their sudden retrenchment. They had been victims of a defective industrial policy, and they did not get compensation as per the recruitment policy of the Government of India. As they were ill-prepared for retrenchment, they have struggled over extended periods. In a desperate attempt at household survival, their wives chose the sex trade. These women used a brothel in Kolkata to ply the sex trade as floating sex workers. They operated in a clandestine manner as the brothel was restricted to daytime use. They used their …

Women And Information Technology: How Do Female Students Of Education Perceive Information Technology, And What Is Their Approach Toward It?, Rachel Baruch

Journal of International Women's Studies

Researchers and scholars consider the Internet today to be the most far-reaching technological tool, in regards to its implications for our present-day society. Its development and usage has, among other things, implications for gender perceptions, as well as for education and studies. The main purpose of the study was to examine attitudes held by female education students toward information technology in general and studying within an Internet-environment in particular, as well as the way they perceive themselves in such a changing world.

Twenty interviews with students of education were analyzed during the course of this study. Results of the study …

The Global Family Begins At Conception: Reconfiguring Feminist Theory To Include Intentionally Unmarried Heterosexual Women Who Choose Not To Become Pregnant, Kimberly Petrovic

Journal of International Women's Studies

The global family begins at conception. Every person born into this world enters into a global society in which beliefs and ideas about the meaning of life and its purpose are shared, regardless of one’s country of origin or the demographic characteristics of one’s birth parents. Ultimately, we are related to one another. Our genetics do not differ significantly; there is no gene for race. If the global family begins at conception, then how might the meaning of a ‘global family’ cause us to rethink our antiquated ideas about conception, marriage, and parenting, particularly for heterosexual women who choose to …

Women In American Energy: De-Feminizing Poverty In The Oil And Gas Industries, Lauren E. Mckee

Journal of International Women's Studies

Women have historically been excluded from work in the male-dominated American oil and gas industry due to unfavorable working conditions and industry hiring biases. However, due to recent developments in on-land drilling techniques and increased overall production, this gender discrimination is slowly beginning to change as more women are being hired for energy industry jobs. In the short term, this means a greater distribution of wealth in what can be a lucrative field. Greater access to employment with security and room for advancement could also mean a long-term structural change in industry hiring norms, granting women greater access to energy …

Rhetoric And Politics Of The Female Body And Sex In Two Contemporary Chinese Tv Drama Serials: The Place Where Dreams Start And Blow The North Wind, Cai Shenshen

Journal of International Women's Studies

The discourse of body and sex has long been a taboo subject for Chinese females from time immemorial, and despite the Chinese Communist Party’s stated policies and legislation of “female equality”, the situation for females after the communist takeover improved only marginally and was most often just ‘window-dressing’. However, with the end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of reforms to ‘open up China’ and the growing importance of modern Western cultural thought, there appeared a gradual change in the Chinese people’s attitude towards discussions on body and sex. People began to understand the ideas of femininity, female desire …

Women's Political Participation In China: Improved Or Not?, Benxiang Zeng

Journal of International Women's Studies

Continuous rapid economic growth has made China one of largest economies in the world. Chinese women have been playing an important role in many aspects of socio-economic activities. However, in recent decades overall women’s political participation in China has not been significantly improved. The spindled shape of women’s representation in the power structures will not support a sustainable improvement in women’s political participation in China. This paper argues that high-profile women politicians would contribute to political gender equity, but a broader participation in politics from the grassroots female population is more important and fundamental. Therefore, a proactive policy in women’s …

Stealing Women, Stealing Men: Co-Creating Cultures Of Polygamy In A Pesantren Community In Eastern Indonesia, Bianca J. Smith

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article explores how the practice of polygamy is maintained in a Sasak pesantren (a traditional Islamic boarding school for the study of the Qur’an, Hadith and classical texts) in Lombok, eastern Indonesia. Pesantren are patriarchal institutions that are managed by male Muslim teachers and preachers known in Lombok as tuan guru. I demonstrate how tuan guru play critical roles in the reproduction of polygamy in Sasak society by implicating women in the co-creation of polygamous marriage and simultaneously teaching strategies for resisting it. By situating Muslim women’s experiences in wider Indonesian and local Sasak discursive contexts, and based …

Work-Life Balance, Family-Friendly Policies And Quality Of Work Life Issues: Studying Employers' Perspectives Of Working Women In Oman, Shweta Belwal, Rakesh Belwal

Journal of International Women's Studies

Family-Friendly Policies (FFPs) aim to help employees manage their family responsibilities, create flexible-work conditions and enable women to perform better on both domestic and work fronts. In comparison to other countries in the Gulf, women in Oman are joining the workforce in large numbers. This trend continues as educational and vocational institutions within the country consistently enroll a higher proportion of women. Currently, women comprise 55% of the total workforce in Oman and contribute significantly in education, health, media, banking and other business sectors. Challenges such as work-life balance (WLB) constrain their Quality of Work Life (QWL). Omani Labor Law …

"You Keep Yourself Strong": A Discourse Analysis Of African Women Asylum Seekers' Talk About Emotions, Maria Clare, Simon Goodman, Helen Liebling, Hannah Laing

Journal of International Women's Studies

The current study investigates how asylum-seeking African women use talk about emotion to construct empowered roles for themselves. A discourse analysis was conducted on interviews with African asylum-seeking women. Participants used two interacting repertoires, ‘rejecting pity’ and ‘being strong’, to resist inferior positions. By constructing themselves as strong and not needing pity, participants positioned themselves as in control of their lives, and thus presented as responsible and capable mothers, a role they are accountable for. Clinical implications and findings for future research are discussed.

Re-Inscribing The Indian Courtesan: A Genealogical Approach, Meenal Tula, Rekha Pande

Journal of International Women's Studies

Women historiography has been one of the major concerns of the feminist movement particularly since 1960s. Looking at the figure of the courtesan in India–its histories, representations, repression and re-emergence, the paper seeks to problematize discourses of both Universalist and minority history writing that have been built around these women. In the context of Post-Colonial theory, and in the light of the dynamic nature of the categories of Truth, Power, Knowledge, and Discourse, the paper seeks to salvage Foucault’s methodology of writing a genealogical history as opening new avenues within the history of the courtesan in India in particular and …

Pinched Lives And Stolen Dreams In Arab Feminist Short Stories, Rula Quawas

Journal of International Women's Studies

The short fiction of Arab women writers epitomizes their penetrating feminist voices and contributes to our understanding of the diversity of Arab women short-story writing in the second half of the twentieth century. This fiction, which should be read with an open mind and with a nod to the culture and social context in which it is born, cradled and bred, deals with family relations in the Arab world and the ways in which the members of these families show each other love, or perhaps neglect to do so, with social and cultural dominion that emphasizes the collective and downplays …

The Palestinian Women's Movement Versus Hamas: Attempting To Understand Women's Empowerment Outside A Feminist Framework, Sara Ababneh

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper asks whether–and if so, how–Islamic groups such as Hamas that clearly define themselves outside a feminist framework can be studied in terms of women’s empowerment. The material discussed is based on fieldwork conducted with Hamas-affiliated female Islamists, as well as women’s rights activists in general, in the occupied Palestinian territories in 2007. Centrally, this work debates whether it is possible to think of women's empowerment in non-feminist terms. The significance of this study lies in two critical contributions to questions of women’s empowerment in Muslim societies: Firstly, the case of Islamism exposes the hegemony of feminism–religious and secular–as …

Educating And Mobilizing The New Voter: Interwar Handbooks And Female Citizenship In Great-Britain, 1918-1931, Véronique Molinari

Journal of International Women's Studies

British women’s access to the electorate in 1918 and 1928 triggered off a series of efforts to reach out to the new voters both on the part of political parties and of women’s groups. New organisations were created, the role of women’s sections within political parties was reassessed and a wealth of propaganda material was published at election times that specifically targeted women. While some of these efforts were avowedly aimed at mobilizing the female vote in favour of a political party or around an ideological (feminist) agenda, others were seemingly simply intended to arouse women’s interest in politics and …

The 'New Woman' Gender Roles And Urban Modernism In Interwar Berlin And Shanghai, Carol Schmid

Journal of International Women's Studies

During the interwar period, urban modernism was connected to opposing ideals of womanhood. On the one hand, women’s participation in a culture of leisure, consumption and body consciousness created images of the New Women in Berlin and Shanghai during the 1920s and early 1930s. On the other hand, women in Weimar Berlin and Republican Shanghai were both desired and feared for their role in the significant changes in these two metropoles. This article analyzes the emergence of the neue Frau and modeng xiaojie. The growth of the cities, industrialization and changes in the work force provided new opportunities for …

My (Not So) Angry Vagina, Mary E. Maloney

SURGE

Why is feminism a dirty word? Why are celebrities from Susan Sarandon to Lady Gaga and Katy Perry explicitly rejecting the feminist label? And why is Carrie Underwood saying, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say I am a feminist, that can come off as a negative connotation.”

Since when was there a negativity surrounding feminism? Well, basically since forever. [excerpt]

"We're Taking Slut Back": Analyzing Racialized Gender Politics In Chicago's 2012 Slutwalk March, Aphrodite Kocieda

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examined bodied activism in Chicago's Slutwalk 2012 march, a contemporary movement initiated in Toronto, Canada that publicly challenged the mainstream sentiment that women are responsible for their own rape and victimization. Adopting an intersectional approach, I used textual analysis to discuss photographs posted on the official Chicago Slutwalk website to explore the ways this form of public bodied protest discursively engages women's empowerment from movement feminism as well as third wave and postfeminisms. I additionally analyzed the overall website and its promotional materials for the Slutwalk marches as well as how Chicago's photographic representations privilege the white female …

Drinking Bourbon With Cupid, Joseph L. Kirkenir

SURGE

It was Valentine’s Day, and rather than enjoying the suspiciously commercial holiday with a romantic partner, I was alone watching reruns of “How I Met Your Mother,” from a cozy armchair with a cigar in one hand and a glass of bourbon in the other. The show prompted me to examine the nature of relationships; specifically, how the media portrays them vastly different than reality and the implications that arise as a result. Romantic relationships in film and literature appear to be idealized to a ridiculous degree. Unfortunately for us, this means that we create unrealistic expectations for our partners …

Family Affairs Newsletter 2014-02-15, Zack Paakkonen

Family Affairs newsletter (2004-2016)

FAMILY AFFAIRS was a free, twice-a-month, social activities newsletter for the GLBTQI (gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans/queer/intersex) community, sent out around the 1st and 15th of each month. It covered the State of Maine only. The list was begun and maintained for many years by Jean Vermette in Bangor, and later operated by Zack Paakkonen of Portland. Over the years it evolved from a social activities newsletter into a business directory, classified ad service, and community bulletin board.

Fearless: The Vagina Monologues, Center For Public Service

SURGE

Performed annually around the world to celebrate womanhood, empower survivors of sexual assault and abuse, and create an open forum for challenging cultural attitudes toward women, the Vagina Monologues will be performed by Gettysburg College students next Thursday and Friday (February 20 & 21). [excerpt]

What’S Queer About Remy, Ratatouille, And French Cuisine?, Laure Murat

Cinema & Media Studies

This chapter appears from the book, What’s Queer about Europe: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms, Edited by Mireille Rosello, and Sudeep Dasgupta.

"What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine?" focuses on Ratatouille (2007), the story of Remy, a rat who becomes a chef. This spectacular animated movie could be read as a coming-out story, where the rat embodies the symbolic lonely gay, refined as an object of disgust, excluded and successful. Ratatouille is also a story about race, species and nationality in contemporary France. In this context, Queer studies is an appropriate tool to address a series of …

Narratives Of Violence: The White Imagination And The Making Of Black Masculinity In “City Of God”, Jaime Alves

Publications and Research

The article explores the representation of young-black men in the 2002 film City of God. The film deploys “pathological scripts” of Black masculinity in Brazil as criminal and deviant. The controlling image of Black men’s bodies as a source of danger and impurity sustains Brazilian regime of racial domination, and the narratives of violence make explicit the ways in which the Brazilian nation is imagined though a racial underpinning. Blackness is consumed as an exotic commodity, yet is also understood as a threat to national harmony. The nation is, then, written and re-imagined as a racial paradise, but mostly by …

Pink & Baby Blue, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Pink & Baby Blue (2013), directed by Catrin Hedström.

Family Affairs Newsletter 2014-02-01, Zack Paakkonen

Family Affairs newsletter (2004-2016)

FAMILY AFFAIRS was a free, twice-a-month, social activities newsletter for the GLBTQI (gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans/queer/intersex) community, sent out around the 1st and 15th of each month. It covered the State of Maine only. The list was begun and maintained for many years by Jean Vermette in Bangor, and later operated by Zack Paakkonen of Portland. Over the years it evolved from a social activities newsletter into a business directory, classified ad service, and community bulletin board.

For Love And For Justice: Narratives Of Lesbian Activism, Kelly Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the role of lesbians in the U.S. second wave feminist movement, arguing that the history of women's liberation is more diverse, more intersectional, and more radical than previously documented. The body of this work is five oral histories conducted with lifelong activists and public intellectuals for the Voices of Feminism project at the Sophia Smith Collection: Katherine Acey, former Executive Director of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice; Dorothy Allison, author and sex radical; Suzanne Pharr, southern anti-racist organizer and author; Achebe Powell, activist and diversity trainer; and Carmen Vázquez, LGBT activist and founding director of the …

Maniera Devota/Mano Donnesca: Women, Virtue And Visual Imagery During The Counter-Reformation In The Papal States, 1575-1675, Patricia Rocco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The history of women's participation in religious movements during the Early Modern period in Europe has long been less commented upon in modern scholarship than that of their male counterparts. This project will enlarge our understanding of the participation of women in the visual program of the Counter-Reformation in the Papal State of Bologna. The study focuses on Bologna since the city had an unprecedented large group of active women artists as well as being a crucial site of Catholic reform. Knowledge of Bologna's women is still incomplete; therefore this dissertation is structured as a series of interlinked case studies, …

We Work, We Eat Together: Anti-Authoritarian Mutual Aid Politics In New York City, 2004-2013, David Spataro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

New York City's neoliberal restructuring has fundamentally transformed the city's labor market and privatized many important aspects of a once robust municipal welfare system. In this research I examine one radical response to these changes: anti-authoritarian mutual aid groups that blend Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture with direct action politics. These are projects where activists attempt to build strong communities of resistance by organizing collective forms of social reproduction. I find that these projects are a threat to neoliberal urbanization because they reorganize reproduction beyond the household scale while simultaneously criticizing the social relations of capitalism as the root of household insecurity. …

Acts Of Belonging: Perceptions Of Citizenship Among Queer Turkish Women In Germany, Ilgin Yorukoglu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how people who have multiple identifications develop a sense of belonging. It focuses on those with politicized, romanticized, and stigmatized identifications which are assumed to be in conflict with one another. My particular case is that of "queer" women of Turkish descent in Germany with Berlin as my main study site.

These people embody what is considered to be an oxymoron: being queer yet also Turkish, being a lesbian yet having a Muslim background, being of immigrant origin yet also German. In short, they are between all worlds and thus, seemingly, do not belong anywhere. Their ambiguous …

Performing Modernity In Turkey: Conflicts Of Masculinity, Sexuality, And The Köçek Dancer, Brittany Giselle Haynes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis reexamines the history of the köçek dancer in Turkey and thereby opens modern heteronormative constructs of masculinity and sexuality to contestation, particularly as they have been symbolically embodied by the rural population of Anatolia. It traces the evolution of the köçek dancer from the early modern Ottoman Empire when the dancer embodied notions of divine love and the ideal of beauty as a young male object of adult men's desires. In the nineteenth century, perceptions of the köçek began to change, primarily among Ottoman elites, whose modernization efforts were influenced by the European gaze and travelers' Orientalist interpretations …

Collective Memory, Women's Identity And The Church, Jo Ana Elise Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Christianity, Judaism and Islam share a deliberative subjugation of women through ideologies, hierarchical structures and performative practices that effectively relegate women to an inferior position. The Christian tradition has one of the longest-standing and most consistent iconographies with regard to the characterization and status of women in society. The Christian church is prototypical of a religious institution iterating an ideology of women's inferiority through various mechanisms that lodge and preserve it in societal collective memory. This study examines three mechanisms used by the Church to preserve collective memory about women's inferior status in society: doctrine, liturgical practices and visual images …

Changing Gender: Gender Role, Class And The Experience Of Chinese Female Immigrants, Doris Cheung

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes gender role identity development in Chinese female immigrants from diverse work and education backgrounds. This study focuses on Chinese female immigrants, bakery salesladies and social workers, to addresses a gap in the existing literature, which has previously emphasized factory workers and students, on gender role identity development at the interface of social context and activity system dynamics. To understand further the Chinese female immigration experience, this research investigates how gender role identity is manifested across different social contexts and institutions. I administered questionnaires and conducted interviews with Chinese female immigrants residing in New York City. The sample …