Construction Of Gender Roles Research Articles

Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition: A Linguistic Analysis of Old and New Story Telling (review)

Reviewed by: Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition: A Linguistic Analysis of Old and New Story Telling Jeana Jorgensen (bio) Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition: A Linguistic Analysis of Old and New Story Telling. By Alessandra Levorato . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 230 pp. In Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition, Alessandra Levorato utilizes a linguistic approach to analyze the ideologies at work in fairy tales, namely "Little Red Riding Hood" (AT 333). Levorato examines both traditional and radical versions of the tale in the light of how ideologies are embedded in texts at various levels and thus produce meaning. Her book is a refreshing examination of how linguistic and formal qualities of fairy tales are not only [End Page 316] significant components of the tales in their own right but also influence the construction of fairy-tale gender roles and sexuality in a way that is inextricably linked with the production and expression of ideological biases on the part of both readers and writers. Levorato outlines her methodological approach and her data choices in the first chapter, "Introduction: Exploring Gender Issues in Fairy Tales." She considers her book to be unique for its melding of complementary critical (though not folkloristic) strategies. Levorato names as her primary theoretical influences M. A. K. Halliday's functional grammar, based on the notion that "every choice regarding the structure of a text is a choice about how to signify" (3); Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional framework of analysis, which views a text as simultaneously "a discursive practice, text and social practice" (3); and Theo Van Leeuwen's theory of social actors, founded upon a "set of sociological categories" that "investigate the way social actors and social action are represented in discourse" (4). Levorato also cites computer-based quantitative analysis as one of her main tools. Her use of quantitative analysis reveals, for instance, that "ideological standpoints are passed on not just by means of single words but also, and especially, in grammatical and lexical patterns" (12). This standpoint is reflected in the progression of her analysis from the simplest constituent of fairy tales, the word, to the more syntactically and semantically complex relational clauses and social roles within the tales. Next, Levorato gives synopses of twelve versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" spanning three hundred years, ranging from Paul Delarue's reconstruction of a French oral version to literary versions, some overtly patriarchal, such as the versions of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, and some radically feminist, such as versions written by Angela Carter and the Merseyside Fairy Story Collective. As The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, the latter is a useful companion volume to Levorato's book. In chapter 2, "Words, Gender, and Power," Levorato shares the results of the quantitative analysis she performed, filtered through terminology belonging to linguistics. The insights obtained from comparing word counts and collocations (the habitual co-occurrence of words) in different versions of the tale demonstrate that "patterns of co-occurrence, the frequency and distribution of items, and even the syntactic structures in which words are embedded deeply affect meaning" (31), to the point that the underlying assumptions of various words can be used to develop different meanings. Also, this type of analysis shows "how a word which in itself is not in the least sexist can indeed become so if used asymmetrically" (31). Attention to asymmetries continues to inform Levorato's analysis in chapter 3, "The Representation of Social Practice." After a somewhat unwieldy explication of Van Leeuwen's terminology that she uses in this chapter, Levorato [End Page 317] launches into an analysis of how the authors of the dozen tales represent their respective characters. Her analysis demonstrates that the characters' identities are often described in radically different ways according to gender; for instance, female characters are likely to be situated only in relationships to other characters, whereas male characters are more likely to be portrayed with independent identities. At the end of this chapter, Levorato summarizes her findings to show how the writers of these tales all make choices through which "they have variously contributed to the maintenance of patterns of subordination...

Migration of same-sex couples

The trailing wife literature finds that migration harms the employment of married women for at least several years following a move. The bulk of empirical evidence also suggests that this is due to the social construction of gender roles within the family. This research tests the gender role argument by examining the effect of moving on a family type in which those heterosexual married couple gender roles are assumed to be absent: gay and lesbian same-sex couples. The hypothesis is that, in the absence of traditional gender roles, the effect of moving on men and women will be the same. The empirical analysis uses data from the Public Use Microdata Sample of the 1990 US Census, identifies a sample of same-sex couples, and estimates models of labour-market status and hours worked. The results indicate that the migration of same-sex couples has no effect on the labour-market status and hours worked of men and women in gay and lesbian couples. This provides indirect evidence in support of the gender role argument. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Household and family characteristics of street children in Aracaju, Brazil

Aims: To describe the family background of street children in Aracaju, Brazil, their parents’ perception of street life, and the reasons for the high prevalence of males observed among street...

Social Roles, Gender Inversion, and the Heretical Sect: The Case of the Guglielmites

This article investigates the relationship between two leaders of a thirteenth-century Milanese heretical sect named the Guglielmites. The Guglielmites believed a woman named Guglielma of Milan was the female incarnation of the Holy Spirit, and with her predicted Second Coming there would be a new church with a female pope at the helm. Andrea Saramita, the primary disseminator of these heterodox ideas, and Maifreda da Pirovano, the chosen future pope, worked together to organize the activities and beliefs of the sect divided upon gender lines. The inquisitorial process reveals that they had a complementary but unequal partnership: Maifreda’s power gradually surpassed Andrea’s, leading to some resentment on Andrea’s part. It is precisely because the sect was heretical, the article argues, that Maifreda was able to invert socially constructed gender roles and become the supreme authority for the group.

Hitler's heroines: stardom and womanhood in Nazi cinema

Ascheid, Antje. Hitler's Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. 288 pp. $19.95 paperback. In 1943, Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels decreed that all beauty salons in the Third Reich would be shut down. According to his official reasoning, beauty salons were a waste of valuable human and resources. At the same time, the shutdown was a logical step in the Nazis' campaign to manage femininity by purging the glamour and fashionability associated with Weimar and American culture in order to promote a natural German womanliness linked to motherhood and domesticity. Yet this campaign was far from successful, and Nazi culture in fact continually accommodated diverse, sometimes incongruous, and often conflicting representations of femininity, as Antje Ascheid shows in her important contribution to the burgeoning body of recent scholarship that has sought to reevaluate the film culture of the Third Reich. A study of three of Nazi cinema's biggest stars, Hitler's Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema examines the divergent models of femininity embodied by Kristina Soderbaum, Lilian Harvey, and Zarah Leander. Hitler's Heroines uses the example of stardom as the basis for a feminist investigation of the ideological construction and interpellation of gender and gender roles in National Socialism. At the same time, Ascheid argues for a more nuanced and heterogeneous understanding of Nazi culture, particularly in its popular dimensions: If we accept the idea that German spectators harbored notions of the popular that did not correspond to those of National Socialist ideology, we can account for much of the period's cultural phenomena, including many of its female film stars (22). As Ascheid suggests, film spectatorship in the Third Reich was not simply a unidirectional experience, in which viewers were passive vessels. By problematizing the unidirectional model of Nazi culture and shifting the focus of analysis away from film production and toward stardom and spectatorship, Ascheid uncovers the ambiguities and contradictions of gender ideology in the Third Reich. While oppressive Nazi policies on women's education, employment, marriage, motherhood, and sexuality-and decrees such as Goebbels's closure of beauty salons- point to the ways in which the regime sought to police women and undesirable constructions of femininity from the top down, many of the Third Reich's most popular and widely disseminated images of femininity ran counter to the dominant ideology. Kristina Soderbaum, the star most closely identified with the Nazi conception of ideal womanhood, became popular for tragic performances that epitomized women's struggles to contend with loss, disaster, and deprivation. …

The national woman: Constructing gender roles in Estonia

The article analyzes the way in which nationalism generates specific gender roles through which national culture is experienced. The textual construction of gender roles for women in Estonia serves as a case study for how roles are created and reproduced. Recent social, political, and economic changes have forced women to confront several gendered roles at once: the “return” of the traditional role within the family, the legacy of Soviet ideological equality, the sexualized role emblematic of Estonia's incorporation into the global economy, and the return of ideological equality via the influence of the European Union.

Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture, and: Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (review)

Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture examines a variety of food-related discourses of the first half of the twentieth century. Inness effectively argues that "such popular cooking literature provided a recipe for women's (and men's) behavior" (12). In eight analytical chapters, Inness examines everything from men's cookbooks to promotional materials for children's cooking lessons to women's magazine discourses on international cuisine. The chapters are relatively short (15-21 pages) and provide engaging and very readable discussions of how these various discourses contributed to constructions of U.S. femininity and masculinity over a broad span of time. The analysis is heavily descriptive, but a generalizeable argument about the contribution of each discourse to gender role construction can be easily traced throughout the eight chapters. Because of its lack of jargon, its use of ample specific examples from the discourses examined, and its coherent yet not overly theoretical argument, this book would make a fine supplementary textbook for an advanced undergraduate or introductory graduate course in gender roles, history of American women, or consumerism/advertising.

What's in a Picture? Comparing Gender Constructs of Younger and Older Adults

To identify tacit gender role constructs, 192 younger adults ( M age = 21.1) and 126 older adults ( M age = 70.1) were given a series of six drawings unrelated to gender, asked to create a brief description of the person who made each drawing, and then asked to guess the person's age and sex. Using the Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR) system as a guide, gender prototypes were developed. Three findings were significant. First, there was widespread agreement across generations and across sexes on the central features of prototypical femininity (low self-esteem, restricted/oppressed, emotional distress) and on prototypical masculinity (successful/accomplished, risk-taking, strong/determined, problem-solving, and emotional distress). Second, significant intergenerational differences regarding masculinity were found (younger adults citing more role strain and more emotional expressiveness). Third, one within-generation difference was found (younger men versus younger women regarding prototypical femininity). Implications of these findings are discussed.

Gender Differences and Gender-Related Constructs in Dating Aggression

This study examined frequency and severity of physical, symbolic, and psychological aggression between college men and women in 85 heterosexual dating relationships and the extent to which gender role constructs predicted reports of aggression. Although there were no differences on self-reports of perpetration, men reported higher victimization levels than women and higher physical and psychological victimization levels than perpetration levels, whereas women reported higher symbolic perpetration levels than victimization levels. As a result, averaging reports from both partners suggested that women in existing college dating relationships are more aggressive than men. For both genders, stereotypically negative masculine (i.e., instrumental) characteristics were the best predictors of aggressive acts. Perpetrators’ positive masculinity and femininity predicted self-reports of decreased aggression that were not confirmed by their partners. Whereas men’s traditional attitudes about the male role predicted greater male aggression, women’s less traditional attitudes predicted increased severity of female physical aggression.

The contribution of gender-role orientation, work factors and home stressors to psychological well-being and sickness absence in male- and female-dominated occupational groups

The associations of work stress, types of work and gender-role orientation with psychological well-being and sickness absence were investigated in a questionnaire survey of 588 male and female nurses and 387 male and female accountants. We hypothesised that health might be impaired among women working in the male-dominated occupation (accountancy), and men in the female-dominated occupation (nursing), but that effects might be moderated by job strain (perceptions of high demand and low control), work and home hassles, and traditional male (instrumentality) and female (expressivity) psychological characteristics. Responses were analysed from 172 female and 61 male nurses, and from 53 female and 81 male commercial accountants. Female accountants were more likely than other groups to have high anxiety scores on the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scales, while male nurses had the highest rates of sickness absence. Male nurses and female accountants also reported more work-related hassles than did female nurses and male accountants. Men and women in the same occupation did not differ in job strain or job social support, but nurses reported greater job strain than accountants, due to higher ratings of demands and lower skill utilisation. After adjusting for age, sex, occupation, paid work hours and a measure of social desirability bias, risk of elevated anxiety was independently associated with higher job strain, lower job social support, more work hassles, more domestic responsibility, lower instrumentality and higher expressivity. The association between sex and anxiety was no longer significant after instrumentality had been entered into the regression model. Sickness absence of more than three days over the past 12 months was independently associated with higher job strain, more work hassles, lower instrumentality and higher expressivity. The results suggest that when men and women occupy jobs in which they are in the cultural and numerical minority, there may be adverse health effects that are gender-specific. Psychological traits related to socially constructed gender roles may also be relevant, and mediate in part the differences in psychological well-being between men and women.

Shifting sex differentials in mortality during urban epidemiological transition: the case of Victorian London

AbstractUnlike some forms of mortality inequality, sex differentials in England and Wales increased unequivocally during the Victorian era. A gradual reversal of this trend was observed only recently. The origin of the widened mortality gap between males and females lies in the transformation of the epidemiological landscape during the second half of the nineteenth century, from one where epidemic and endemic infectious diseases dominated, to one where chronic, degenerative conditions began to prevail. This so‐called ‘epidemiological transition’ had differential impacts on males and females through time and in space, partly because mortality change was mediated by socially constructed gender roles. Research on rural and urban contrasts has shown consistent excess female mortality in youth and early adulthood. But because London did not exhibit this particular sex bias in the Victorian period, examination of internal variations in the capital offers an opportunity to explore the influence of factors that varied within the urban environment. Using life table decomposition, the article reveals that contrasts in cause‐specific mortality between boys and girls and elderly men and women contributed most forcefully to overall male/female differences in life expectation at birth. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The good soldier: who is s(he)?

AbstractThis paper examines how perceptions of Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCBs) are affected by socially constructed gender roles. We argue that gender roles are important for the perception, categorization, and consequences of OCBs. We suggest that the dimensions of OCBs (altruism, courtesy, sportsmanship, and civic virtue) are related to gender stereotypes. Combining social identity theory with gender role theory suggests that the ‘gender’ of these behaviors, the job, the job incumbent, and the gender identity of the observer interact, potentially broaden the breadth of requisite job behaviors defined as either in‐ or extra‐role. Implications are discussed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

FIN-DE-SIÈCLE WORK ON VICTORIAN AESTHETICISM

IN MASCULINE DESIRE:The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, his study of the role of male same-sex attraction among Victorian aestheticist writers, Richard Dellamora refers to Elaine Showalter’s claim that Gerard Manley Hopkins was one of a series of writers who tried to reclaim male literary dominance from women writers in the wake of George Eliot’s death in 1880. Dellamora proposes instead what he thinks a more likely source of creative anxiety: “Insofar as he may appear at times to regard literary creativity as a male prerogative, his anxieties are better referred to a celibate homosocial environment than to the creative ascendancy of Victorian women writers” (56). But these two anxieties may not be entirely separate. Recent critical studies have shown that the mid-Victorian novel, whether written by women or men, was a form dominated by domestic and marriage plots, by the depiction of the bourgeois family and the construction of gender roles as principles of social regulation. Thus the emergence from the shadow of Eliot and the turning of aestheticist literature and art toward various alternative constructions of gender and desire — not merely new claims of masculine prerogative but also articulations by women writers of positions resistant to Victorian gender regularities — would be intimately connected.

Women voters and the rhetoric of patriotism in the British general election of 1918 ⊃1⊃

The analysis of the public political rhetoric of the British general election of 1918 can offer important indications of the construction of gender roles in the immediate post-war context. The partial enfranchisement of women presented a challenge for all political parties, which needed to secure the votes of nearly 8.5 million women voters. The article explores the electoral rhetoric of 1918 in two constituencies in Plymouth, and argues that a gendered language of patriotism was employed particularly successfully by the Coalition Conservatives in opposition to potentially fracturing languages of class and gender. No attempt was made to develop a new feminine politics around consumer and food supply issues; rather, Women's experience of the War was constructed in terms of their relationships to men, and women voters were urged to cast their votes largely as proxies for their absent husbands, brothers or sons

"Participation in the Creative Work of the Nation:" Polish Women Intellectuals in the Cultural Construction of Female Gender Roles, 1864-1890

This article discusses Polish women intellectuals' ideas about womanhood and women's emancipation in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Kingdom of Poland (part of Poland under Russian control). It focuses on two women's periodicals, traditionalist Bluszcz (Ivy) and progressive Swit (Dawn), in which women writers debated female gender roles in the context of national ideologies, Polish tradition, economic and political changes, and liberal Western trends, and shows how cultural models of womanhood were constructed on an everyday basis. Liberal intellectuals associated with Swit , such as Maria Konopnicka and Eliza Orzeszkowa, often envisioned the role of women differently from the conservative editor of Bluszcz , Maria Ilnicka, who stressed patriotic motherhood and homemaking. Progressive women emphasized women's rights and promoted the diversity of women's contributions to the national community. In the final account, however, both conservative and liberal women adjusted their ideas to national goals and abstained from establishing separate women's organizations or formulating a distinct feminist agenda.

The Qur'an in Indonesian Daily Life: The Public Project of Musical Oratory

n Indonesia, amidst a plethora of unique Southeast Asian popular and folk music, Western music, and traditional gamelan styles, the recitation of the Qur' n pervades daily life as an archetype of Muslim authenticity. Removed by thousands of miles and hundreds of years from the source of Islam, Indonesians perform and experience the Qur'an in allegedly the same way as Muslims did during the time of the prophet, Muhammad. This article distills eight months of research as a student of professional male and female reciters of the Qur'an in Jakarta, Indonesia, the capital city of the country that is home to more Muslims than any other in the world. It is a work in progress that foregrounds issues pertaining to: historical process; music learning, conceptualization, and performance; the role of ritual specialists in a community; the social construction of gender roles; and the congruence of political ideology and religious practice in contemporary Indonesia.' How has the system of Arab musical modes that are employed for religious performance, been transmitted and perpetuated in Indonesia for nearly 400 years? What are the roles of professional male and female reciters (Qari' and Qari'ah) as they enable the continuity, through space and time, of this religious art? Why in Indonesia are women-school girls to national champions-participants in the public project of recitation when in the global Islamic umma (community) women's participation in religious life is often segregated and limited to the private domain? How has the project of New Order nationalism served to support and create social and cultural structures that officially institutionalize the recitation of the Qur'an, and how will the dynamic current of Reformasi (Reformation) effect this support? Each aspect of the investigation is seasoned with and limited by my own experiences as they were lived in the course of my work with those in Jakarta who practice seni baca al-Qur'an, the art of reciting the Qur'an.

The Politics of a Country Culture

The Politics of a Country Culture

Testing a model of socially desirable and undesirable gender-role attributes

A recently outlined model of gender-role attributes (K. Korabik, 1999; D. R. McCreary & K. Korabik, 1994) incorporates two complimentary notions: (1) that possessing too little agency or communion (i.e., undersocialization) is undesirable and (2) that too much agency or communion unmitigated by the other (i.e., oversocialization) is undesirable. The present study sought to confirm the relationships proposed in this model between desirable agentic and communal characteristics and these undesirable gender-role constructs. A group of mostly Caucasian undergraduates completed measures of socially desirable and undesirable gender-role attributes. Structural equation modelling was used to confirm the proposed gender-role model. Results showed that the socially desirable gender-role trait components were related to the undesirable components in the manner predicted by the differentiated multidimensional gender-role model.

‘Now a New Kingdom of Femininity is Begun’

Abstract Though it has been virtually ignored by historians of political thought, Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies(1405) is the first work of political theory on the grand scale by a woman. It is a serious analysis of the nature of political reality, and it offers a remedy common in the Western political tradition the creation of a kallipolis, a utopian “city in words,” to serve as a guide to political thought and practice. Though written in the form of a medieval allegory, The Book of the City of Ladiesis remarkably modern in its elevation of individual reason, its analysis and critique of the social construction of private and public gender roles, and its hard-headed analysis of the use of power in political life. The book functions as a manual for princesses, in fact as a manual of empowerment for all women, and in its substance and its use of esoteric literary techniques can be fruitfully compared to Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince.

Joseph as Mother, Jutta as Pope: Gender and Transgression in Medieval German Drama

Joseph as Mother, Jutta as Pope: Gender and Transgression in Medieval German Drama* Stephen K. Wright (bio) I It is one of the fundamental axioms of performance theory that there is always a dialectical relationship between a fictional character and the living actor who represents him or her upon the stage. As Peter Thomson formulates it, the disembodied dramatic character imagined by the playwright must always contend with the bodily presence of the indispensable actor who brings the role to life. 1 The sacred drama of the Middle Ages provides an especially interesting case in point. Because women were prohibited from acting in German religious drama throughout the Middle Ages, all female roles were played by men. 2 Under these circumstances, two closely related questions become particularly acute: How were women embodied on the all-male stage? And how was the notion of gender itself perceived by a diverse audience comprising both women and men? On the one hand, some historians have adopted the view that the conventions governing female impersonation in the early European theatre were so ubiquitous and so deeply ingrained that the male actor simply disappeared within the role he played. As the Kabuki theatre still demonstrates, even non-illusionistic stage conventions can be so powerful as to cause spectators to suspend their disbelief and thus minimize the [End Page 149] distinction between character and actor to the point where it becomes inconsequential. 3 The maleness of the actor becomes invisible as the audience perceives only the female character that his costumed body represents. Conversely, other critics contend that the discrepancy between the actor’s own anatomy and his cross-gendered role could never be completely obscured. Stephen Orgel’s analysis of the effects of boys playing women’s parts on the Elizabethan stage, for example, considers theatrical cross-dressing to be “virtually identical to transvestism” and takes this customary stage practice as a point of departure for “investigations of sexual identity and misogynistic and homoerotic tendencies in Elizabethan society.” 4 According to this view, spectators always perceive at least a residual dissonance between character and actor, resulting in either pleasure or anxiety as the case may be. In what follows, I hope to shed new light on this vexed problem by approaching the representation of gender in medieval German religious drama from a somewhat different point of view. This essay reformulates the traditional question of what happens when male actors impersonate women in order to ask what happens when dramatic characters on the stage, whether they be portrayed as male or female, imitate the behavior of the opposite sex. Do male characters who imitate women and women characters who imitate men disappear within the fictive roles that they choose to play, or is the audience expected to perceive the tension between the identity of the original character and the cross-gendered role which the character temporarily adopts? At the same time, the essay also poses a second question that is necessarily entailed by the first: To what extent does the deliberate transgression of traditional gender categories on stage indicate an awareness of the social construction (and hence the mutability) of gender roles in everyday life? In the end, I wish to argue that the success of at least some medieval plays must have depended upon the audience’s ability to recognize that principal characters (whether male or female) could re-invent themselves by imitating aspects of the stereotypical behavior of the opposite sex. For the plays to have worked at all, spectators must have been able to conceive of a gender role (be it masculine or feminine) as something provisional, that is to say, as a kind of per-formance in its own right. In this respect, public performances of church-sponsored drama could pose destabilizing alternatives to the prevailing conceptions of gender-appropriate social behavior for both women and men. [End Page 150] I take as my starting point two separate but complementary dramatic traditions intended for broad popular audiences in pre-Reformation Germany, both of which feature a principal character who successfully mimics the behavior of the opposite sex. The first is the role of Joseph in the so-called Kindelwiegen (cradle-rocking) episode...