Deviant Women Research Articles

Anti-Feminism: four strategies for the demonisation and depoliticisation of feminism on Chinese social media

ABSTRACT Anti-feminism and misogyny online have intensified globally over the last decade, bringing substantive challenges to feminist identification and activism. This article explores the strategies for silencing and expelling feminists via the deployment of an anti-feminist discourse online, in response to feminism’s increasing visibility in China. Data was collected via observation of 23 influential feminist accounts on Weibo. This was bolstered by data from 10 semi-structured interviews with feminist Weibo account contributors. By applying critical discourse analysis (CDA), four strategies used to demonise feminists and depoliticise feminism online in China are identified: feminists as deviant women, as betraying the nation, as connected to Islamists, and as “fake-feminists.” The article highlights a kind of intertwined anti-feminism that draws power from distinct features—nationalism and Islamophobia. It argues that by interlocking Chinese historical and structural conditions as well as cultural context, anti-feminism diverts public attention away from systematic gender inequality, and onto antagonisms between feminists and anti-feminists, which further restricts the discussion of intersectional oppressions that affect women’s lives.

Deviant Women in the Media: Between Reality and Fiction

Media has the power not only to determine the main issues, but also to reflect crime statistics. It’s common that fear of crime is constructed using eye-catching headlines and sensational narratives. This is especially the case when the crime is committed by women. In addition to its main aim - to examine how deviant women are portrayed - the article also focuses on the evolution of crime news, analyses female crime data and its treatment on the Lithuanian news portal DELFI.

Uptake of postnatal care and its determinants in Ethiopia: a positive deviance approach

BackgroundPostnatal care (PNC) services are an essential intervention for improving maternal and child health. In Ethiopia, PNC service has been poorly implemented, despite the governments and partners’ attempt to improve maternal and child health service utilization. Moreover, many literatures identified that women with no education are significantly underutilized the PNC services. Thus, this study aimed to assess the PNC service uptake among women at high risk for underutilization of PNC services and to identify the individual and community level determinants of PNC services uptake in Ethiopia using the positive deviance approach.MethodsData from the Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey 2016 were used. A total of 2417 deviant women (women with no education) were identified through a two-stage stratified sampling technique and included in this analysis. A multilevel mixed-effect binary logistic regression analysis was computed to identify the individual and community-level determinants of PNC services uptake among deviant women. In the final model, a p-value of less than 0.05 and adjusted odds ratio (AOR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) were used to declare statistically significant determinants of PNC services uptake.ResultsIn this analysis, the uptake of PNC service among deviant women was 5.8% [95% CI: 4.9–6.8]. Working in the agriculture (AOR = 2.15, 95% CI: 1.13–3.52), being Orthodox religion follower (AOR = 2.56, 95% CI: 1.42–4.57), living in the highest wealth quantile (AOR = 2.22, 95% CI: 1.25–3.91) were the individual level determinants, whereas residing in the city administration (AOR: 3.17, 95% CI: 1.15–8.71), and living closer to health facility (AOR: 1.57, 95% CI: 1.03–2.39) were the community level determinants.ConclusionThe study highlighted a better PNC service uptake among deviant women who are working in the agriculture, follows orthodox religion, lives in highest household wealth status, resides in city administration, and living closer to the health facility. The positive deviance approach provides evidences for health policy makers and program implementers to improve health behavior in specific target population, and ultimately to bring better maternal and child health outcomes, despite acknowledged adverse risk profile. Such strategy and knowledge could facilitate targeted efforts aimed at achieving national goals of maternal and newborn mortality reduction in the country.

Women’s Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914 edited by Manon van der Heijden, Marion Pluskota, and Sanne Muurling

This collection addresses women’s criminality from the perspectives of history and historical criminology, recognizing that gendered expectations have long affected the prosecution, understanding, and study of crime and criminals. The authors are confident that contextualisation is “the key to understanding female crime, its representation and its variation in time and space,” and that historians of crime must therefore pay more attention to socioeconomic factors, such as social mobility, employment, and migration patterns, than has generally been the case (4). To do so effectively requires first that female criminals be identified. Hence, the research concentrates on the lower courts, where women appeared in much larger numbers than in the superior courts. The additional records on which the authors rely give the volume a mainly urban focus, but comparisons to the male experience make the findings particularly insightful and persuasive.The chapters are organized around three main themes—violence and women, prosecution and punishment, and representations of crime. But the geographical and chronological coverage is not quite as the book’s title suggests. Three largely historiographical essays (Chapters 1, 2, and 9) cover most, or all, of the period from 1600 to 1900. The remaining eight chapters, all based on extensive archival research, tend to focus on the later nineteenth century, particularly in England (Chapters 4, 6, 7, and 10) but also in Australia (without explanation for its inclusion in a book about criminality in Europe) and the Netherlands.Only two chapters adopt an early modern perspective, both offering fascinating appraisals of male and female defendants. Sara Beam’s examination of the prosecution of adultery in Geneva shows that although gender was relevant, social status and the authorities’ concern with rooting out sin were also crucial factors. Muurling provides a carefully evidenced explanation for how and why people used the accessible Tribunale del Torrone as a strategic means of conflict resolution in Bologna.Three of the chapters set out to find the vanishing females posited by Feeley and Little in 1991.1 Van der Heijden concludes that better living standards and welfare provision had a greater impact on female crime rates than did confinement to the domestic sphere. Jo Turner uses her study of female-perpetrated assault in Stafford to suggest that when council housing was built in 1901, it reduced shared living space and thus neighborhood conflicts. Lucy Williams and Barry Godfrey utilize population data to identify prisons, asylums, and workhouses as “locations and methods through which deviant women could be dealt with throughout the life cycle” (133).The two thought-provoking chapters about release from prison that discuss recidivism in detail reveal that the experiences of women and men were significantly different. Helen Johnston and David Cox find that re-offending was higher among female ex-prisoners because re-integration into financially productive society was more difficult for them. Alana Piper et al. use a large data set of individuals returned to prison in Queensland to reach a similar conclusion: Women were more likely to be chronic recidivists because of the wide range of socioeconomic disadvantages that they faced, whereas men had a greater variety of pathways into and out of offending.Two of the three chapters about “representations” focus on newspapers. Daniel Grey’s examination of reports about child sexual assault exposes attitudes toward the gender, class, age, and sexuality of both victims and perpetrators. Clare Wilkinson quantifies accounts of domestic violence in Dutch newspapers to explain why they functioned mainly as human-interest stories rather than as subjects of debate. Sarah Auspert et al. explore a variety of European discourses about female juvenile delinquency that show institutionalization to have been the most common “solution” for criminal and problem girls since the eighteenth century.The book contains an unfortunately sizable number of minor typographical and grammatical errors, but the use of footnotes and a collective bibliography of nearly thirty pages make the volume a useful addition to the relevant literature. Scholars of women and crime, imprisonment and reoffending, newspaper reporting, and the multiple factors that influenced these matters will find much of interest and value.

Queer Korea

Queer Korea

Gendering Women’s Violence in the Quattrocento: The Case of Gregorio Correr’s Procne (c. 1429)

ABSTRACT This article widens the discourse surrounding depictions of violent women in Quattrocento Italian literature by analysing the gendering of women’s violence in Gregorio Correr’s Neo-Latin tragedy Procne (c. 1429). In adapting Ovid’s tale of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus, Correr defects from coeval alignments of women’s physical violence with masculinity and, by extension, virtue. Drawing on the Senecan Medea, Virgilian Amata, Dionysian bacchantes, and persecuting Furies, Correr enhances models of male violence with female-inspired escalations that rebel against submissive wifehood and maternity. These perversions engage with the expanded latitude afforded to Quattrocento noblewomen, whose augmenting socio-political capital, education, and courtly agency were becoming increasingly incompatible with tropes of the submissive consort. In gendering his protagonist’s violence as a feminine perversion – and, importantly, an amplification – of male models, Correr posits a novel conception of transgressive female violence that draws equally on models of deviant classical women as contemporary anxieties about gender and patriarchy.

“Have You Eaten?” Portrayals of Deviant Women in Nollywood

This paper explores filmic representations of womanhood in Nollywood, Nigeria’s largest film industry. Focusing on three different films over the span of 10 years, the essay argues that Nollywood’s engagements with Christian moral norms significantly impacts its portrayals of women, producing specific narratives around deviance and its accompanying failures of womanhood. It also shows how these narratives are differentiated through social class, as they highlight the institutionalized capitalist-sexist nature of the professional sphere women have to navigate. Traversing the public-private spheres, these narratives reveal the social pressures that simultaneously produce and disrupt ideas of womanhood. By analyzing the films, the essay posits that Nollywood’s representation of women reflects contemporary social anxieties about modernity, capitalism and morality, which are in turn refracted through the image of the deviant woman.

The Disorderly Female: Alcohol, Prostitution and Moral Insanity in 19th-Century Fremantle

ABSTRACTMary Jane Hayes was a “deviant” woman—a “drunken prostitute” who was in and out of both the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum and Fremantle Prison from 1871 to 1898. One of twelve women in the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum records to have been referred to as a prostitute, Mary Jane was particularly reviled: her alcohol consumption and unsavoury lifestyle were often blamed as the cause of her violent behaviour and insanity. Prison and asylum records reveal several arrests for drunkenness and vagrancy, with an estimated 67 convictions; newspaper articles also depict her numerous convictions for indecent behaviour, obscene language and larceny. Mary Jane Hayes’s contact with both the asylum and prison, as well as her mentions in newspapers, allows for an archival and media content examination of late 19th-century Fremantle society and its treatment of deviant women who fell into the category of moral insanity: madness caused by a moral failing, especially alcohol and sex. This article will make a wider contribution to colonial Australian history, particularly the history of Fremantle, by developing a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of women and moral insanity in the late 19th century.

Women's pathways to prison in Kenya: Violence, poverty, familial caretaking and barriers to justice

Studies undertaken on women incarcerated in African countries are limited. In this article we explore Kenyan women's (n = 49) narratives of their journeys into prison using life history interviews and a feminist pathways approach. Results show the life stories of imprisoned women in Kenya reflect those of female prisoners elsewhere. In particular, victimisation, disordered familial and intimate relationships, low levels of education, poverty and motherhood (often in teen years) characterised many women's lives. Some also struggled with addiction (usually to alcohol but sometimes illicit drugs) and poor physical health due to HIV infection. Barriers to justice were a generic problem. In addition to these broad categorical findings six different pathway experiences were identified: 1) the economically motivated pathway; 2) domestic violence pathway, 3) harmed and harming pathway, 4) deviant women pathway, 5) pathway of negligible culpability and justice inaccessibility, 6) pathway of one life changing moment.

Pathways to prison in Cambodia for homicide offending

Studies undertaken on female homicide offenders are limited in both number and breadth, particularly within South East Asia. This article has consequently chosen to explore Cambodian women’s narratives of their journeys to prison for homicide offending using a feminist pathway approach. Results show a number of common threads in the women’s stories: childhood instability, economic marginalisation, criminalisation occurring within the milieu of a relationship with a man and limited access to justice and/or ability to benefit from corrupted criminal justice practices. Additionally, six distinct pathways were identified from the narratives: 1) domestic violence pathway, 2) pathway of marital abandonment, 3) traumatic life history pathway, 4) deviant women pathway, 5) pathway of male association, 6) pathway of feminine familial sacrifice.

“She Come Like a Nightmare”: Hags, Witches and the Gendered Trans-Sense among the Enslaved in the Lower South

Abstract In the historiography of slave culture and folk beliefs in the U.S. South, the hag of African American lore has generally been more closely allied with Western European lineages than West African antecedents. Using the cultures of the upper Guinea coast in addition to Western European witchcraft discourses as interpretive contexts, this article argues that enslaved people infused the English term “hag” with beliefs about female-embodied, trans-sense power adapted from West African cosmological frameworks but indigenous to enslaved communities in the U.S. South. Moreover, among the enslaved, beliefs regarding the hag did not function as a sanction against socially deviant women as in the West African and European American contexts, but rather attested to the sociological importance of women in enslaved communities in the Lower South.

Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster. By Simone Laqua-O’Donnell. Oxford Historical Monographs. Edited by P. Clavin et al.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv+214. $99.00.

<i>Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster</i>. By Simone Laqua-O’Donnell. Oxford Historical Monographs. Edited by P. Clavin et al.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv+214. $99.00.

Mujeres fatales y desviados: nuevos deseos al asalto en el desfiladero de la literatura modernista

This essay shed light over the connection between the literary style from the works of two “modernistas” authors: Julian del Casal and Delmira Agustini, and the cultural contexts and sexual mores at the end of the 19th century. The social dynamics of the ever expansive night life, the lurid and ubiquitous tabloids of the time and the growing interests towards deviant sexual behaviors and women’s perspective in books, everything will align with certain guideline of the late Romanticism and Symbolism to shape new voices and expressions of desire. The Modernistas’ retraction from sentimentalism and their maudit pose suit the remodeling of the sexual; the rarified object from the symbolist axiom dictates an evermore rarified new object: the one of the male body and its locus in the nascent representation of women’s and deviants’ libidos.

Factors Distinguishing Positive Deviance Among Low-Income African American Women: A Qualitative Study on Infant Feeding.

Positive deviant individuals practice beneficial behaviors in spite of having qualities characterizing them as high risk for unhealthy behaviors. This study aimed to identify and understand factors distinguishing low-income African American women who breastfeed the longest (positive deviants) from those who breastfeed for a shorter duration or do not breastfeed. Seven mini-focus groups on infant-feeding attitudes and experiences were conducted with 25 low-income African American women, grouped by infant-feeding practice. Positive deviants, who had breastfed for 4 months or more, were compared with formula-feeding participants who had only formula fed their babies and short-term breastfeeding participants who had breastfed for 3 months or less. Positive deviant women had more schooling, higher income, breastfeeding intention, positive breastfeeding and unfavorable formula-feeding attitudes, higher self-efficacy, positive hospital and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children experiences, more exclusive breastfeeding, and greater comfort breastfeeding in public. Short-term breastfeeding women varied in breastfeeding intention and self-efficacy, seemed to receive insufficient professional breastfeeding support, and supplemented breastfeeding with formula. Some showed ambivalence, concern with unhealthy behaviors, and discomfort with breastfeeding in public. Formula-feeding women intended to formula feed, feared breastfeeding, thought their behaviors were incompatible with breastfeeding, were comfortable with and found formula convenient, and received strong support to formula feed. Tapping into the strengths of positive deviants; tailoring interventions to levels of general and breastfeeding self-efficacy; increasing social, institutional, and community supports; and removing inappropriate formula promotion may offer promising strategies to increase breastfeeding among low-income African American women.

Kowalsky, Sharon A Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880–1930 (review)

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 554 his religious feeling is certainly evident, but he also comes across in this volume as a man capable of independent thought, rather than a blinkered reactionary. The impression is one of considerable military competence, coupled with an increasingly subtle political sensibility; the latter was also evident in his cautious role in the civil war period, and in the emigration. This is a valuable and balanced study which increases our knowledge of a dead end in Russian history. It is well researched using archives in the Russian Federation, the United States and elsewhere, in addition to a wealth of published documents and memoir material. The text is supported by sixty pages of valuable endnotes, and accompanied by maps and photographs. University of Glasgow Evan Mawdsley Kowalsky, Sharon A. Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880–1930. Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, IL, 2009. xii + 314 pp. Tables. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $42.00. This is a book of two halves. The first is dedicated to a history of Russian and Soviet criminology, tracing the development of the field from the late Imperial period into the early years of the Soviet regime. Sharon A. Kowalsky traces the evolution of various schools of thought regarding criminality, discussing European influences, as well as Russian-specific intellectual perspectives. She also outlines the establishment of the institutions of criminology and the professionalization of this field of study. The second half is devoted to a series of case studies in which Kowalsky explores the way in which Russian and Soviet criminology was applied to understand and punish particular crimes including prostitution, illicit alcohol production and infanticide. Crossing the revolutions of 1917 and the crises of the Civil War years, the case studies make clear the continuities in explanations for women’s criminality, as well as highlight the ways in which these theories were adapted to suit the new political regime and the changed gender relations it sought to foster. The central thread of the book which unites both halves is the analysis of the gendered perspective which criminologists took towards female criminality. At its heart, women’s biology was used to explain both the low levels of women’s crimes, but also the nature of crimes which they did commit. Women were viewed as the weaker sex, physically, mentally and morally, due to their experiences of menstruation, pregnancy, child birth and menopause, and to the fact that their biological role as bearers of children confined them REVIEWS 555 to the domestic realm. As a result, it was argued, women did not experience the struggles of the public domain which led men into criminal behaviour. On the other hand, that very domesticity meant they were most likely to commit crimes against their family or crimes which could be conducted in the household, like illicit alcohol production. If women were removed from that domestic sphere by circumstances, they were more prey to the influence of other criminals, but once again most likely to commit crimes related to their sexuality, like prostitution. Kowalsky demonstrates how such expectations of women’s criminality continued into the Soviet era, but were over-layered with socialist theory and expressed in the language of the new regime. Prostitution was understood as a crime born of the last vestiges of the old economic system and, after the Civil War, of the capitalistic elements of the New Economic Policy. Illicit alcohol production was framed as a rural crime committed by backward peasant women who, due to their biological and gender-related frailties, had not embraced socialism. The rural nature of this crime remained even if committed by women living in urban areas, the assumption being that they were new arrivals in the cities who had yet to integrate fully into socialist modernity. Similarly, given the new laws outlawing illegitimacy and legalizing abortion, criminologists viewed women resorting to infanticide as tending to still adhere to the now obsolete moral code of Imperial Russia. Women’s backwardness and their criminality were so conflated in the minds of criminologists that they actually viewed positively any diversification of women’s crime from the ‘domestic’ to the more ‘general’, that is to the...

Kidnapped Amazonians, Severed Breasts, and Witches

Freak shows are physical and metaphorical,demonstrating a cultural perception of what and who is privileged. In Renaissance England, Shakespeare and Spenser both write of deviant women and perpetuate the stereotypes of foreign women, creating literary “freak shows” in their works Two Noble Kinsmen and The Bower of Bliss. Whether these characters are Amazonian women disinterested in heterosexual romance or promiscuous witches, they are set as spectacle in the confines of their respective texts.

Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modern Spain by Margaret E. Boyle

Boyle, Margaret E. Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modem Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014. 184 pp.Margaret Boyle's Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modern Spain approaches the theatrical depiction of bad women in the Comedia alongside discourses of the real-life entities that worked to rehabilitate them in seventeenth-century Madrid. The inclusion of historical documentation of custodial institutions as well as fictional depictions of deviant women rehabilitated on stage highlights the crucial role of public performance to both. Indeed, as the author points out, the two institutions were even economically bound to one another, given that the revenue from the public theater would have supported the custodial houses (5). Perhaps more conspicuously, Unruly Women signals the fundamentally contradictory nature of rehabilitation inherent in the policing of women in both realms. At once reliant upon criminality and the public exposure of the unruly woman for survival, the custodial institution professes containment and piety for the purpose of rehabilitation. The term recogimiento, for example, encapsulates meditative, spiritual introspection along with forced incarceration. Likewise, the public theater holds up its variants on the deviant woman-the widow, the vixen, and the murderess-as exemplary and in need of transformation. The book, though limited in scope, is fascinating study of the gendered discourses that competed to construct early modern criminality and reform practices in Spain.Unruly Women is divided into two parts. Part One includes Chapter 1, Gendering Recogimiento in Early Modern Madrid, which analyzes the extant institutional literature pertaining to the Casa de Santa Maria Magdalena de la Penitencia (a 1777 manual authored by Don Manuel Recio), together with the introduction to proposal written by Madre Magdalena de San Jeronimo in 1608, petition to King Felipe III to create women's prison in Madrid. Part Two focuses on three full-length comedias that feature, and rehabilitate, three forms of the unruly woman. Chapter 2, Stage Widow in Pedro Calderon de la Barca's La dama duende, argues that Calderon's play carves an imaginative space to feature the widow's own creative (and metatheatrical) response to the physical and economic containment wrought by widowhood. Chapter 3, Dramatizing Community in Maria de Zayas's La traicion en la amistadreassesses Fenisa's designation as bad woman to correct the critical idealization of the community of women represented in the play. Chapter 4, Women's Exemplary Violence in Luis Velez de Guevara's La serrana de la vera, analyzes the comedic facets of Gila's persona as influenced by the larger-than-life cultural presence of actress Jusepa Vaca. The author notes that Gila's unconventional response to dishonoring, her mass violence, succeeds until she infringes upon the confines of the honor code itself, at which point the play's act of rehabilitation (her execution) crosses over to punishment. In all three examples, the comedia works to transform the protagonists' deviance, but in the process of the depiction of that transformation, there is revealed a more fluid negotiation of status in ways that frequently disrupt the clear social categories used to describe their outcomes: married or single, comic or tragic (98).The monograph concludes with call for more archival research to uncover the points of view of women actually housed in custodial institutions during the early modern period. …

Видовая структура женских девиаций в Царицыне в конце xix -- начале хх вв.

This article analyzes the complementary nature and structure of different types of female deviancy in Tsaritsyn at the end of XIX – beginning of XX centuries, describes the main socio-economic factors contributing to the development of this anomie in this historical period in society. The authors examine the motivational complex, the structure and form of the female deviant behavior, present trends in the development of female deviancy. This scientific research is devoted to the theoretical foundations of the influence of economic stability on the species structure of deviant and delinquent behavior of women. In this study, there is the analysis of various types of female deviancy of this period in Tsaritsyn and the development of technologies of minimization of the deviant behavior of women in situations of economic change. Advantage of the research is a logical structuring and grouping of key issues related to the dynamics and species structure of deviant behavior women of Tsaritsyn, which permitted to analyze quite extensive statistical material. The authors examine the main factors that activate the deviant behavior of women in the period of economic transformation of society.

How Women in Bangladesh Confront the Stigma of Childlessness: Agency, Resilience, and Resistance

In a context where motherhood is an integral part of a woman's stereotype, being childless is a devastating experience. We explore how these so-called deviant women manage this situation. The objective of this article is to contribute to the debate regarding infertile women's agency, resilience, and resistance. This article is based on anthropological fieldwork among urban middle-class and rural poor women. Their life histories reveal that childless women in Bangladesh, a pro-natalist, patriarchal society, are not passive victims, but rather actively fight their stigmatization and manage to survive. The childless women follow overt and covert strategies to overcome their stigmatized identity and create space for themselves in various innovative ways. The women do not resist in a coordinated way as a group, but do so individually. Given the collective nature of a society like rural Bangladesh, we believe that the women's individual acts will eventually have collective effects.

Age, prostitution and punishment in the late nineteenth century

Considerable research has been undertaken by historians to understand the meanings of prostitution as it evolved in the nineteenth century. Initially, commercial sex was considered in terms of criminality and deviance. Later studies, influenced by the seminal work of Walkowitz (1980) , explored the role of local economies in shaping the lived experiences of prostitutes. This article investigates the incarceration of women labelled as prostitutes in late nineteenth century Queensland, using prison and police sources. The analysis identifies similarities and differences between prostitutes and other female prisoners as a way of exploring the place of prostitutes in patterns of ‘offending’ in their communities. While situated in a criminal justice framework, the article takes account of recent work on historical images and representations of prostitutes. There is general agreement among historians on some core interpretations, but debate still surrounds the role of age, and particularly how concerns about age might have informed strategies of governance. In fact, it seems that age was less important in terms of control strategies. Instead, the reputation of women as street rowdies, petty criminals, and the carriers of disease were deciding factors in official regulation of their lives. However, considerations of age did inform contemporary visions of ‘deviant’ women, and especially popular views about divisions between deviant women themselves. Examples are provided of the formation of views about older and younger female offenders. Such views about generational divisions between ‘fallen’ women have exerted a tenacious hold on modern imaginations.