Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Erotic Mourning And Post-Traumatic Sexual Desire, Gila G. Ashtor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Erotic Mourning and Post-traumatic Sexual Desire" Gila Ashtor investigates the ways Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 2000 memoir contains an alternative logic of affectivity that locates possibilities for mourning in the ambivalent directionalities of post-traumatic sexual desire. Ashtor links dominant conceptualizations of post-traumatic working-through and regimes of heteronormative sexual reproductivity in order to argue that Eggers's self-exhibitionistic spectacle of failed post-traumatic healing, precisely as a drama of undoing that replaces the cumulative acquisition of psychic cohesion with survival incoherent gestures, produces a version of what this paper will call "radical mourning." To particularize the …

Gender In Winterson's Sexing The Cherry, Paul Kintzele

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Gender in Winterson's Sexing the Cherry" Paul Kintzele examines the ways in which Jeanette Winterson's 1989 novel explores and critiques aspects of gender and sexuality. While acknowledging the importance of the performance theory of gender that derives from the work of Judith Butler, Kintzele contends that such an approach must be complemented with a psychoanalytic approach that insists on a particular distinction between sex and gender. Although some scholars map the sex/gender distinction onto the perennial nature/nurture binary and thus reduce sex to biology or anatomy, scholars of psychoanalysis such as Joan Copjec and Charles Shepherdson, read …

Nationhood And Women In Postcolonial African Literature, Elda Hungwe, Chipo Hungwe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Nationhood and Women in Postcolonial African Literature" Elda Hungwe and Chipo Hungwe, through an analysis of Pepetela's Mayombe, Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, and Ngugi's Petals of Blood discuss nationhood and nation in postcolonial African literature within the framework of the postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory negates master narratives of nation and nationhood, hence it deconstructs such narratives as problematic. Hungwe and Hungwe discuss problems associated with definitions of nation where groups or members are peripheralized. While Hungwe and Hungwe acknowledge that nationalism served a critical role during decolonization, their conclusion is that in postcolonial Africa notions of …

War And Nature In Classical Athens And Today: Demoting And Restoring The Underground Goddesses, Judy Schavrien

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

A gendered analysis of social and religious values in 5th century BCE illuminates the Athenian

decline from democracy to bully empire, through pursuit of a faux virility. Using a feminist

hermeneutics of suspicion, the study contrasts two playwrights bookending the empire:

Aeschylus, who elevated the sky pantheon Olympians and demoted both actual Athenian

women and the Furies—deities linked to maternal ties and nature, and Sophocles, who granted

Oedipus, his maternal incest purified, an apotheosis in the Furies’ grove. The latter work,

presented at the Athenian tragic festival some 50 years after the first, advocated restoration

of respect for female flesh …

Two To The Power Of Three: An Exploration Of Metaphor For Sense Making In (Women’S) Collaborative Inquiry, Louise Grisoni, Margaret Page

Organization Management Journal

This paper explores how working with metaphors provides a way to explore under the surface dynamics embedded in the practice and processes of collaborative inquiry. We argue that metaphors are a form of presentational knowing and provide a bridge between experiential knowing and propositional knowing. We have surfaced an exploration of horizontal (sibling) and vertical relations using retrospective inquiry. This paper demonstrates the reality, messiness and politics of collaborative research inquiry processes, which tend to be understudied and under-theorized. We are concerned to affirm the value of collaborative inquiry, and at the same time, break some taboos and myths concerning …

"Like A Prison!": Homeless Women's Narratives Of Surviving Shelter, Sarah L. Deward, Angela M. Moe

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Relying on field observation and twenty qualitative interviews with shelter residents, this article examines how the bureaucracy and institutionalization within a homeless shelter fits various tenets of Goffman's (1961) "total institution," particularly with regard to systematic deterioration of personhood and loss of autonomy. Women's experiences as shelter residents are then explored via a typology of survival strategies: submission, adaptation, and resistance. This research contributes to existing literature on gendered poverty by analyzing the nuanced ways in which institutionalization affects and complicates women's efforts to survive homelessness.

Institutional Structures Of Opportunity In Refugee Resettlement: Gender, Race/Ethnicity, And Refugee Ngos, Stephanie J. Nawyn

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Previous research suggests that social welfare assistance can further subordinate already disadvantaged recipients. Refugee resettlement, essentially a social welfare program, offers a diferent perspective on how welfare assistance might exert social control. Using data gathered from 60 in-depth interviews with people working in resettlement and observations at refugee non-governmental organizations (NGOs), this paper argues that refugee NGOs provide a complex institutional opportunity structure that has the potential to reproduce the gender and racial/ethnic subordination embedded in refugee welfare policy while also providing opportunities for refugees to counteract subordinating gender and racial/ethnic relations through advocacy and cultural activities. These findings refine …

Dying For Love: Homosexuality In The Middle East, Heather Simmons

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Today in the United States, the most frequent references to the Middle East are concerned with the War on Terrorism. However, there is another, hidden battle being waged: the war for human rights on the basis of sexuality. Homosexuality is a crime in many of the Middle Eastern states and is punishable by death in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iran (Ungar 2002). Chronic abuses and horrific incidences such as the 2009 systematic murders of hundreds of “gay” men in Iraq are seldom reported in the international media. Speculation as to why this population is hidden includes the …

How Does Race Operate Among Asian Americans In The Labor Market? : Occupational Segregation And Different Rewards By Occupation Among Native-Born Chinese American And Japanese American Male Workers, Chang Won Lee

Ethnic Studies Review

The effect of race in the U.S. labor market has long been controversial. One posits that racial effects have been diminished since the civil rights movement of the 1960s (Alba & Nee, 2003; Sakamoto, Wu, & Tzeng, 2000; Wilson, 1980). Even if some disparities in labor-market outcomes among race groups are found, advocates of this "declining significance of race" thesis do not attribute these disparities to racial discrimination. They, instead, understand the racial gaps as a result of class composition of racial minority groups, classes represented by larger proportions of the working-class population (Wilson, 1980, 1997) as well as unskilled-immigrant …

Chicana/Latina Undergraduate Cultural Capital: Surviving And Thriving In Higher Education, Maricela Demirjyn

Ethnic Studies Review

This study addressed the retention of Chicana/Latina undergraduates. The problem explored was one; how these women perceive campus climate as members of a marginalized student population and two; which strategies are used to "survive the system." As a qualitative study, this work was guided by a confluence of methods including grounded theory, phenomenology and Chicana epistemology using educational narratives as data. The analysis indicated that Chicanas/Latinas do maintain a sense of being "Other" throughout their college experiences and this self-identity is perceived as a "survival strategy" while attending a mainstream campus. Further analysis also showed that Chicanas/Latinas begin their college …

Orientals Need Apply: Gender-Based Asylum In The U.S., Midori Takagi

Ethnic Studies Review

Every other year I teach a course entitled "The History of Asian Women in America," which focuses on the experiences of East, South and Southeast Asian women as they journey to these shores and resettle. Using autobiographies, poetry, journal writings, interviews and academic texts, the students learn from the women what political, social, cultural, economic and ecological conditions prompted them to leave their homelands and why they chose the United States. We learn of their rich cultural backgrounds, their struggles to create a subculture based on their home and host experiences, and the cultural gaps that often appear between the …

Women Without A Voice: The Paradox Of Silence In The Works Of Sandra Cisneros, Shashi Deshpande And Azar Nafisi, Sharon K. Wilson, Pelgy Vaz

Ethnic Studies Review

Women of every culture face a similar problem: loss of voice. Their lives are permeated with silence. Whether their silence results from a patriarchal society that prohibits women from asserting their identity or from a social expectation of gender roles that confine women to an expressive domain-submissive, nurturing, passive, and domestic-rather than an instrumental role where men are dominant, affective and aggressive-women share the common bond of a debilitating silence. Maria Racine, in her analysis of Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, reaffirms the pervasiveness of this bond: "For women, silence has crossed every racial and …