Atlantic archipelagic women’s narratives as fractal models of resistance: The case of The Mermaid of Black Conch

Racial microaggressions are racial slights and subtle insults aimed at people of color. Such affronts, though often unintentional, have been documented to come at great psychic, emotional, and physical cost to the targeted individuals. The term microaggression is also applied to women or other groups in society who experience oppression. These insults have been documented in the context of education for years. Though it has been established that students of color often face racial microaggressions on their home campuses, this phenomenon has not been explored in the context of study abroad. How this experience is further complicated by the intersection of gender, race, and other aspects of social identities was the premise of the following study that utilized the Black feminist construct of intersectionality to explore the experiences of 19 African American women who studied abroad through community college programs in three regions: the Mediterranean, West Africa and the British Isles. Findings include experiences of microaggressions by U.S. peers, in-country hosts and in several instances, situations of sexual harassment. Implications and recommendations for study abroad practitioners include discussion of the diversity of community college students, the extension of campus climate to the study abroad program, and the urgent need for critically reflexive staff and faculty equipped to respond effectively to microaggressions.

This chapter uses the lessons gleaned throughout the book from the intersections of religion and gender to confront the conundrum raised in the introduction: Mary Ward’s harsh treatment by the papacy considering the good work the English Ladies were doing to bolster Catholicism in the British Isles. By focusing upon the language contained in critiques of Ward, the prominence of Catholic concerns about women—and, indeed, any layperson—assuming apostolic and priestly activities come to light. The Church drew the line at compromising its core doctrine of apostolic succession, protecting the clergy’s sacramental powers. Such issues are then integrated into contemporary discussions not only about gender but about the nature and limits of divine authority itself and to whom it gets given, including women’s ordination to the Catholic priesthood and greater roles for laymen and women in liturgy and sacrament.

This chapter applies an intersectional feminist lens to unpack a social perspective on the role played by gender and sexuality in African cultures. Placing heterosexual dominance and heteropatriarchal sexual desire at the center of African cultures, the chapter reveals complex interlocking forms of gender and sexual oppression and privileges. This chapter presents some examples of African cultures, and exhibits a radical form of cultural resistance against the gendered African cultural systems that dictate heterosexuality and patriarchy as cultural and social norms. Using secondary data as a part of qualitative research, the chapter applies a textual and narrative analysis from various sources, broader epistemologies, and experience-centered observations to understand the intersectionality of gender and sexuality in African cultures, including the meanings attached to the social and cultural construction and socialization of gender and sexuality. The chapter also applies intersectionality theoretical thinking based on feminist and sociological perspectives to unpack how the intersectionality of gender and sexuality is part of African cultures.

Feminist research on non-Western/non-white women's sexual relationships and romantic desires for white Western men suggests they strategically engage a discourse glorifying white masculinity to resist ‘ethnic patriarchy’. In this paper, I offer an intersectional method for analysing the limits of this form of resistance within the matrix of gender and racial oppression by posing the question: where is the complicity with racism in this resistance to male domination? An analysis of interviews with 128 second-generation Korean and Vietnamese American women finds those who express a desire for white men invoke racialised gender stereotypes of masculinity that idealise white Western men as romantic ‘egalitarian knights’ and denigrate Asian American men as inferior, domineering partners. Those respondents who prefer white men see it as a strategy for resisting Asian American men's gender oppression; however, they overlook white men's gender oppression and some Asian American men's commitment to gender egalitarianism. The analysis finds respondents commonly draw on four widely circulating ideologies promoting white men's racial and gender domination in explaining their romantic preferences, they are a belief in: (1) essential racial differences, (2) white male supremacy, (3) ‘Orientalism’ and (4) pro-assimilationism. These findings suggest that the intersectionality of gender, racial and other forms of domination requires the rejection of simplistic either/or models of resistance and complicity and the need to consider how resisting one form of domination can inadvertently reproduce another form.

We, African American women professionals in higher education, make visible the continued presence of race and gender oppression, and the hegemony that supports systems of oppression the academy (Dillard, 2000; Patton, 2004ab). Race and gender differences in patterns of employment, rank, and personal experiences academic units are illustrative of the interlocking nature of race and gender oppression that have multiple influences (Combs, 2003; Wright Myers, 2002), including pathways to doctorate studies, institutional hiring practices, tenure and promotion processes, organizational behavior, and professional relationships. Further, Black women are more likely to report organizational barriers to advancement and have more negative views of academic or departmental climates. They also are less likely to indicate that their scholarship is valued, that they are respected by their colleagues, and that they are viewed as legitimate scholars compared to White women, men of color, or White men (Thomas & Hollenshead, 2001).Because career advancement and greater retention rates are among the most reported benefits of mentoring, mentoring is one form of resistance to systems of oppression, organizational barriers, and other negative dynamics experienced by Black women faculty. Mentoring also reduces social isolation and helps one to manage different academic roles (Bova, 2000; Holmes, Land, & Hinton-Hudson, 2007), making it one of the most viable coping and resistance strategies. Yet, a discussion of mentoring without acknowledging the intersections of race and gender, their implications predominately White institutions, and forms of resistance would not address fully the needs of Black women in the academy, beckoning the use of a cultural-inclusive approach to working with African American women in the academy.Therefore, to frame the current discussion on mentoring, we use core themes of Black Feminist Thought (Hill Collins, 1986; 1991) to situate Black women faculty in the academy. Part of our framework includes three sites of tension and resistance: (a) the Mammy-Sapphire continuum of existence, (b) inequality without reverence to credentials, expertise, and professional experiences, and (c) White privilege that dismisses the intersecting realities of racism and sexism. We then suggest a model of peer mentoring that allows for the careful integration of the socio-political tensions, such as race and gender as critical factors when mentoring African American women faculty (Benishek, Bieschke, Park, & Slattery, 2004). Inside the current article, we offer a few biographical narratives to place a face on the issues presented.Black Feminist Thought: Articulating the Outsider WithinPatton (2004a) argues that rather than the university being a place to explore diversity and to embrace diversity, universities often become complicitous in domination and oppression (p. 190). The fracturing between the politics, language, and practices of liberal universities is the uncomfortable nexus inhabited by Black women, which positions us as the academy (Dillard, 2000; Patton, 2004ab). Patricia Hill Collins (1986), in her classic essay on learning from the outsider within, argues that African American women scholars have the potential to use insight from their experiences at the intersections of race, gender, and class to ask new research questions, and to bring a new lens that reflects a Black woman's standpoint. Consistent with the promise of diversity and inclusion, Black women in higher education have the potential to challenge, innovate, and make evident that which was unseen by conventional disciplinary lens. Hill Collins (1986), however, acknowledges the status of outsider academe is inherently problematic if there are no transformations in institutions in which are a part of, and if the meanings assigned to Black women faculty remain unchanged. Thus, African American women as outsiders within the academy is a metaphor that not only evokes transformative promise but also exclusion, isolation, and subordination where one's work and contributions are viewed as less valued, less critical, and less deserving of compensation and recognition. …

This chapter provides the outline of British woodland history and discusses the historical stages and processes of change. The chapter also describes the traditional and improved woodland management, as well as revival and restoration of native woodland, and enumerates some consequences of differences in regional history.

Medical experiences offer valuable insight into how medical power can operate to subjugate bodies and subvert wills, revealing the patriarchal nature of institutional medical practice. Such revelations can inform anthropological understandings of power, resistance, and refusal at the intersection of gender and large bureaucratic structures, such as the medical industrial complex. This article explores the subversion of maternal will in the context of cesarean birth and practices around vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) as a form of resistance and refusal of biomedical power. Cesarean sections are the most common major surgical procedure in the United States, with one in every three births delivered surgically. For many birthing people, cesarean delivery was neither desired nor expected. Through the birth story narratives of 25 predominantly white women who pursued VBAC, this article proposes the concept of maternal vanishing to describe the process by which birthing people are disempowered during birth. I argue that women who pursued VBAC were engaged in an attempt to reconstitute themselves in subsequent births through a series of tactics that, in some ways, replicate hegemonic notions of neoliberal subjectivity and medical consumerism at the same they resist and refuse them.

Reviewed by: Monstrous Women in Comics ed. by Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody Candida Rifkind (bio) Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody, eds. Monstrous Women in Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. 296 pp, $99, $30. Why are comics full of monsters? What can these monsters who lurk in the dark and on the margins tell us about a specific moment in history or the particular fears of a culture? Why are so many of the monsters in comics coded as female? In this collection, Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody assemble an impressive group of comics scholars working on representations of monstrous women across a range of sources, from US superhero comics to Bolivian Chola comics to snake women in Chinese comics and animation. The fifteen essays are highly readable and richly varied in approach, accompanied by thirty-five illustrations for readers who may not know the comics first-hand. This is a landmark volume in transnational feminist comics studies that needs to be on the shelf of every comics scholar. It will be a touchstone for future comics research thanks to its rigorous discussions of how femininity, sexuality, disability, maternity, ethnicity, race, nationality, and even childhood are potential sites for both monstrous othering and monstrous empowerment in comics. Langsdale and Coody's introduction situates the volume within popular culture studies and feminist theory, explaining that "the authors of this volume are specifically interested in patriarchal cultural contexts, wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject such that women frequently become monsters" (3). Moreover, as the subsequent chapters illustrate, coding the female as monstrous is "overwhelmingly exacerbated by the intersection of gender with other markers of identity like sexuality, race, nationality, and disability" (4). Over the course of the volume, it becomes [End Page 126] clear that monstrosity is often an embodied transgression of sociocultural norms and hierarchies, through which comics artists register specific anxieties about the unregulated, non-normative female body. At the same time, as the editors explain, "it is crucial not to collapse a study of monstrous women into nothing more than a survey of degradation and marginalization" (4). Accordingly, many of the chapters consider characters who reclaim monstrosity as a source of empowerment and thereby challenge the gendered systems that relegate difference to the realm of the monstrous other. While the introduction establishes a broad thematic context for the volume, each chapter delineates specific social, cultural, economic, political, and aesthetic formations of monstrosity in particular comics texts. These detailed discussions, framed by broader critical analyses, work individually to variously reframe familiar texts and introduce less familiar ones, and the shared methodology provides the collection with a welcome unity and coherence. A number of thinkers appear frequently throughout, providing the volume with a conceptual unity: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Barbara Creed, and Margrit Shildrick are referenced by multiple authors to ground the comics analysis in theories of monstrosity, alterity, and femininity. References to Sara Ahmed, Donna Haraway, and Julia Kristeva will also make this volume of interest to feminist scholars working in other fields. Likewise, the chapters draw on comics theory to offer formal as well as thematic readings, such that fans and scholars of the specific works will find a satisfying attention to breakdowns, layouts, caricature, color, characterization and visual rhetoric. The book is divided into five thematic sections of three chapters each, beginning with the origins and types of monstrous representations of women in comics and ending with female characters who take on the role of monster as a form of resistance and retaliation. Part 1, "The Origins, Agency, and Paradoxes of Monstrous Women," sets up the collection's central insight that monstrous women produce fear because they are paradoxical creatures: they "are neither wholly empowered nor entirely disenfranchised, but often they are both" (6). In chapter 1, Elizabeth Rae Coody explores how the multiple origin stories of Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman, and Mary Magdalene refect the various storytellers' anxieties about these characters' subversive powers. As a religious studies scholar, Coody first analyzes the comics characters and then brings her findings about their boundary-crossing monstrosity to the cultural discomfort around Mary Magdalene's origin story, skillfully highlighting how transdisciplinary...

With the emergence of the Covid-19 global pandemic, the questions of gender and sect have been reintroduced in Bahraini media as examples, spectacles and objects of critique. The pandemic does not only carry a health risk, but it has also become a means of social-conditioning, surveillance and the reification of difference for Bahrainis. In the cases of Ania and Fatima, the pandemic was a time that defined key moments in their lives: their ability to name and shame their abusers online. However, as these women bravely shared their stories, they were confronted by social and cultural forces that attempted to silence them. Although these two testimonies are not representative of all women’s experiences in Bahrain, they shed light on the various legal, familial and social structures that affect women’s lived experiences. This research will further explore the legal and social silencing of women’s lived experiences through the lens of the Covid-19 pandemic. This research aspires to carve an academic space that brings some justice to these women, by sharing their experiences in light of the emerging sociopolitical, sociolegal and cultural contexts of their society. In this research, I answer the following questions: (1) to what extent does Law No 19 of 2017 on the Family Law (also known as the Unified Family Law of 2017) perpetuate silencing on the grounds of gender and sect throughout the pandemic in Bahrain? And (2) to what extent has the Covid-19 pandemic amplified the expectations ascribed to women on the grounds of gender and sect in Bahrain? The focus on the Unified Bahraini Family Law of 2017 is vital to understanding the social expectations that frame women’s lived experiences in Bahrain. It complicates the lives of women, as the state imagines unification, but the reality suggests that women are found at the intersection of gender, sect, structures of kin, trauma and, lastly, the sociopolitical implications of the Covid-19 pandemic. Keywords: digital space; marginalization; Covid-19 pandemic; Bahraini family law; sect.

Reproductive Politics in the United States is a concise, accessible, and engaging introduction to what continues to be a contentious and polarizing topic in the United States. Focusing on the current debates, controversies, and realities of reproductive justice, this text seeks to examine the historical, social and cultural forces that shape those politics. Making use of an explicitly feminist framework, the book analyzes how the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and other markers of difference are implicated in protest and policy. This is a primer for Women’s and Gender Studies students, and for those coming to the topic for the first time.

To avow that gender is more than an independent--or dummy--variable is to posit the centrality of gender (as well as race and class) in economic analysis. Conventional economic methods tend to neglect the process by which gender interacts with and shapes other social forces and institutions. The basis for a feminist alternative is the assertion that the social construction of gender permeates men's and women's labor market experiences. A feminist definition of discrimination is proposed which emphasizes process as well as outcomes; measurable as well as unquantifiable repercussions. Labor market discrimmation is a multidimensional interaction of economic, social, political, and cultural forces in both the workplace and the family, resulting in differential outcomes involving pay, employment, and status. Several propositions toward developing feminist approaches to labor market discrimination are illustrated with examples of feminist research. These propositions delineate feminist work on: the importance of praxis-based research; the necessity for methodological pluralism; the role of power in wage-setting within the firm; the impact of macro-social institutions; and the intersections of gender, race, class, and other social forces.

The feminization of care migration in transnational contexts has received a great deal of attention. Scholars, however, have been slow to investigate a similar trend in intranational contexts. This article expands existing research on global care chains by examining the gendered emotional labor of migrant domestic workers pertaining to China’s intranational care chains. While the former often foregrounds “racial or ethnic discounting,” the latter is characterized by “citizenly discounting” whereby migrant domestic workers are subject to an overarching system of alienation, subordination, and exploitation owning to their second-class rural hùkŏu (household registration) status. Drawing on a participant-observation study of nannies, this article highlights how the intersection of gender and rural-urban citizenship is the key to grasping China’s migrant domestic workers’ experiences of extensive alienation at the nexus of work, family, and wider society. By delving into a particular set of political, economic, and cultural forces in the Chinese context, the article makes a distinctive contribution to a more nuanced and context-sensitive understanding of the interface of gender, emotional labor, and care migration.

Applying and advocating a transdisciplinary ethnographic approach, this chapter critically explores the intersectionality and friction of race and gender within the racialised context of hegemonic- and counter discourse in the Netherlands.

Focus of Study This article investigates how teachers’ relationships with boys can be central in bolstering boys’ resilience and connection to their work in schools. Specifically, we examine how teachers understand the ways that their relationships with boys shape their teaching practice as well as their understandings of boys’ learning in school. As school violence perpetrated by boys continues to make the headlines, and as many boys’ achievement continues to lag behind that of girls, especially boys of color and boys in the lower socio-economic classes, we must engage the question of how teachers come to know the boys they teach. Context Recently, boys’ development and performance in school have taken center stage in educational research on gender and schooling. Building on a significant history of research on classroom relationships as well as current findings that reveal the centrality of relationships in children's learning, this article seeks to investigate the ways that socio-cultural forces of gender both shape teachers’ conceptions of relationships with boys as well as teachers’ capacity to connect with the boys they teach. Methodology In order to examine the prevailing research questions, a Teaching Boys Study Group was formed, comprised of thirteen pre-K-12 teachers. Teachers presented detailed descriptions of individual boys to each other and then examined questions of pedagogy, gender and identity. The data were analyzed using a qualitative voice-centered relational method that required multiple listenings or readings of the data in order to surface the central tensions that the teachers confronted when considering their relationships with the boys they teach. Findings Our findings revealed two central tensions that teachers confront when considering the intersection of gender and the relational context of teaching and learning. The first tension encompasses teachers’ efforts to locate, appreciate and preserve boys’ individuality while at the same time confronting the pressures that teachers face to act as forces of enculturation. The second tension focuses on the complexity involved in locating teachers’ teaching identities—especially the ways that gender shapes their teaching identities—while at the same time identifying the meanings that boyhood holds for their male students. This tension became particularly acute when examining issues of boys’ resistance to school and to teachers. Conclusions These findings suggest that the ways teachers come into relationships with boys shape and are shaped by the teachers’ identity, the extent to which the boys express resistance to the school and classroom culture, and the forces of the school culture on both the teacher and the boy. When teachers can become aware of these forces, they have the capacity to investigate their own life histories, seek insight and support from colleagues, and revisit and hone their practice. Such awareness allows teachers to enter into relationship with the boys they teach, resist the forces of relational disconnection, and ultimately support their students’ learning. The findings suggest the essential need for and careful planning of professional development contexts that can support teachers’ inquiry into issues of gender, identity, teaching and learning.

In this paper, I examine how agricultural diversification and food security are transforming wetland environments in The Gambia. With irrigation schemes being implemented in lowland swamps to encourage year-round cultivation, agrarian relations are rife with conflict between men and women over the distribution of work and benefits of increased household earnings. Economic change gives rise to new claims over the communal tenure systems prevalent in lowland environments and allows male household heads to enclose wetlands and thereby control female family labor for consolidating their strategies of accumulation. The forms of female resistance are detailed in this paper.