Contributions Of Feminist Theory Research Articles

The value of women coming together: Effects and practices of a gender-focused community intervention funded by a government agency.

The gender focus has been incorporated into public policies as a strategy to reduce gender inequity and overcome discriminatory stereotype behaviors. However, the state or institutional feminism has been questioned for being uncritical and not very transformative, where the critical and transformative nature of community psychology offer valuable opportunities. In this context, effects and practices of a community intervention funded by a government agency and aimed at the de-naturalization of gender stereotypes and its consequences in everyday life with vulnerable women, mostly older adults, are analyzed. Using a qualitative methodology, interviews and focus groups with women who participated in the intervention, community leaders, and key actors were conducted. A total of 46 people took part in the investigation. Data were analyzed using Grounded Theory. Facilitating and hindering factors influencing the gender-focused community intervention implemented were identified. Furthermore, effects linked to community participation among women are regarded as affirmative acts in response to social vulnerability, with self-care, co-care, and empowerment regarding gender stereotypes standing out as the main results. Finally, the value of women's gatherings in community spaces, linking them with the contributions of feminist theory, and outline points of tension and challenges facing gender-focused community interventions are discussed.

Relations of Freedom and Law's Relations

One of the most important contributions of feminist theory is the rethinking of core concepts, such as freedom and autonomy. While the inspiration for this rethinking is often the way traditional concepts fail women, the constructive project of reconstruction routinely goes beyond a focus on the particular significance for women—or gender or sexuality. For example, the canon failed to recognize not only the centrality of care work in women's lives but also the underlying issue of dependence as characteristic of human life (MacIntyre 1999). Integrating this dependence into conceptual reformulation has then led to the argument that theories of justice must include the distribution of care work (Kittay 1999) and to the rejection of independence as a key element of autonomy (Nedelsky 2011a). Of course, these reconceptualizations have important consequences for women's lives and for our collective understandings of gender and sexuality. But those important consequences are not the focus of every theoretical contribution.

Embodiments: An Introduction

Embodiments:An Introduction Anne Golomb Hoffman Feminist theory works against the objectification of women, by insisting on inquiry into the place of women in culture. Slowly and persistently, this inquiry discloses and thus unsettles what might otherwise remain in place and unquestioned, exposing the myth of the "natural" as itself a cultural construct, an effect of signification. Examining readers' resistances and discomforts forms an important part of this effort, opening up space in which to think through gender, as we study the alignments of male and female that belong to the past and those we find in the present. We find ourselves thus at a moment of change in which it becomes possible to reflect on what we know about the "terrain" we call gender. As readers and scholars, we can approach the texts of our predecessors and our own, to study the mapping of gender in the writing. Whether or not the "ground" itself changes, our maps do. The essays in this special issue of Prooftexts explore the cultural uses of gender in biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern texts. Reading through the lens of gender, as practiced by all our contributors, addresses issues of danger, purity, contamination, boundary, permeability, lack, and wholeness. These issues play themselves out corporeally and in terms of corporate identity as well, on the level of the individual and the collective, yielding a set of fruitful encounters in which Jewish studies meets gender studies through the attention each gives to bodies and borders. The readings in this issue of Prooftexts belong to this historical moment in their examination of gender as an organizing category in our understanding of the world. Growing out of feminist research, gender studies addresses embodiment, a fraught question for each of us. What is that "body," the locus for sensations from without and from within, permeable and yet intact? One's experience takes in a [End Page 1] sense of the body whole and the body in fragments. Body whole: the coherence of body parts into an image of a whole, a corporate unity, that yields a working sense of identity. Body in parts: the imaginary coherence that is produced out of a fragmented disarray of body parts and sensations that Jacques Lacan likens to a painting of Hieronymus Bosch.1 As a form of resistance to detached abstractions or universalizing trends that erase differences and disembody utterances, an insistence on embodiment can be considered a major and lasting contribution of feminist theory that alters reading practices and our understanding of texts. Thus might we work toward an embodied knowing, one that acknowledges the realm of bodily experience without necessarily assuming that "the body" is a stable object, there to be known. While the terrain addressed by our essayists takes in texts from biblical to contemporary, each participates in the present moment of speculation in which economies of power and knowledge, desire and aggression, open to our scrutiny. Borrowing from Luce Irigaray, I would expand the concept of speculation into "specularization," a neologism that invites us to think of the risk-taking of economic speculation, to question where one makes one's intellectual investments, and to keep in mind the notion of the specular, the visible, with particular attention to the "spectacle" of femininity. (Irigaray goes even further in her associative inquiry, invoking "speculum" as a mirror, a philosophical instrument, and as a gynecological tool for probing the hidden recesses of a woman's body.)2 Consider as an example of "specularization" the subversive feminism of Orly Castel-Bloom, in Sippurim bilti-retsoniyim, counterstories with a feminist edge that respond with an abundance of satiric verve to cultural assumptions as to woman's place.3 As my own gesture toward introducing this journal issue, I suggest reading Castel-Bloom's Sippurim bilti-retsoniyim (a title that might be translated as "unwanted" or "unwilled" stories) as if they were a reply to Agnon's Sefer hamaʿasim (The book of deeds), where maʿasim (deeds) evokes associations of the Yiddish mayses or tales, but carries as well as the sense of action contained in the Hebrew maʿasim, a sense that is rendered ironic by the very lack of action that characterizes...

Sex, Lies, and Statistics: Can Rural Sociology Survive Restructuring? (or) What Is Right with Rural Sociology and How Can We Fix It1

Abstract Rural Sociology faces increasing threats of marginalization from social and economic restructuring of academia and of the larger society in which it is embedded. Contrary to some recent analyses, the problem lies more in the inadequacies of data conceptualization, production, and collection than in the theoretical vitality of the discipline. The failure to match theoretical and conceptual advances with appropriate data leaves sociologists grappling with “modern data to study a postmodern world.” Research on the impact of restructuring on social and spatial divisions of labor and the contributions of feminist theory and research to the conceptualization of work and household illustrate the theoretical advances and the empirical deficiencies faced by the discipline. Disciplinary survival and development depend on meeting the challenge of matching theoretical progress with an appropriate empirical base.

Counselling for women: The contribution of feminist theory and practice

Abstract Much of the literature on the theory and practice of counselling is gender-blind, the assumption being that the emotional worlds of women and men are the same. This view is challenged, the author reviewing the work of feminist theorists and practitioners. Central to this discourse is the argument that to understand the internal psychic structures of women, her concepts of se& we have to acknowledge the effect of external and oppressive structures on her psychological development. This can assist us in our understanding of how the therapeutic relationship might address women's needs and provide the ‘space’ for her to grow and change.

Introduction

This paper reviews the.major contributions of feminist theory in rethinking the family, discusses ways in which the introduction of gender as structural category of social relations has transformed sociological understanding of family life, and suggests how transformations in gender are transforming family life. A central question asked is whether the development of feminism has altered the traditional family ideal. While there is no single feminist ideal for the family, the feminist movement in the US has encouraged and reflected major structural transformations that have altered family life across racial and class groups. Yet, ideologies about the family persist. This paper also examines how the persistence of family ideology in the culture blocks the development of effective social policies to solve family problems.