Discourses Of Masculinity Research Articles

ANALISIS SEMIOTIK PERUBAHAN PERSEPSI MASKULINITAS DALAM IKLAN MINUMAN SUPLEMEN INDONESIA

The development of reformation era has provided diverse discourses of masculinity that develop in Indonesia society. This paper aims to examine the changing perceptions of masculinity in Indonesia supplementary beverage advertising. Based on the theory of semiotics expressed by Roland Barthes, this paper examines the changing perceptions of masculinity reflected on five ads of Extra Joss for “Qurbani” (the day of sacrifice) edition. This paper will analyze the symbols of masculinity through the use of linguistic and visual elements in the advertisement.The result showed that there had been changes in the perceptions of masculinity in Extra Joss ads for “Qurbani” or the day of sacrifice edition. Four advertisements made before 2017 showed the image of masculinity characterized by the glorification of body strength, aggressiveness, and fearless attitude of men. This value of masculinity is also marked through the use of aggressive linguistic markers such as the use of the word laki, fearless, penjinak, etc. However, one advertisement that was created in 2017 showed a softer image of masculinity. It was marked by warmth and togetherness behaviors of men generated by the male model in the ad. This was reinforced by the emergence of female characters in the ad. The analysis also showed that these masculinity changes were influenced by K-Pop globalization which generated a softer masculinity than previous advertisements. In addition, the analysis also showed changes in the meaning of “Qurbani” (sacrifice) in the ads. Previously, it was marked as something that was achieved and struggled. However, nowadays “Qurbani” or sacrifice is seen as a joyful activity.

Men’s Use of Metaphors to Make Sense of Their Spouse’s Miscarriage: Expanding the Communicated Sense-Making Model

ABSTRACTWith approximately 20 % of pregnancies ending in loss, miscarriage is a relatively common and stressful occurrence. Because romantic partners’ coping efforts are intimately connected, the way one partner copes with the other’s miscarriage has important implications for individual and relational well-being. Grounded in the communicated sense-making (CSM) model, the current study investigated how cis-gender men in heterosexual marriages (n = 45) communicatively constructed the meaning of their wife’s miscarriage through metaphors. Analysis of interview data revealed two supra-themes—metaphors of miscarriage and metaphors of men’s role as a husband. Metaphors of lost gift, cataclysm, death of a loved one, emptiness, and chaotic movement animated husbands’ CSM about their wife’s miscarriage. Men drew upon discourses of masculinity to make sense of their role as a husband in the miscarriage process as a rock, guard, repair man, and secondary character. We explore these findings in light of the master narrative of birth and propose an expansion of the CSM model to include metaphors as a key CSM device.

The Postqualitative Turn in Physical Cultural Studies

In this autoethnographic paper I engage with feminist theories of the body, materiality and affect to illuminate the ways in which I negotiate dominant discourses of masculinity in playing football. I begin by grounding the paper within Feminist Physical Cultural Studies, and explore the post-qualitative potential of auto-ethnography as a means of exploring lived experiences. In the sections that follow, I describe my experiences of playing football and delineate the objects and intensities which I saw within an AFL assemblage. Jerseys, balls, and beer all have the potential to mark bodies as skilful, tough, masculine, or otherwise. In examining the relationships between objects and bodies, I am able to demonstrate the means through which masculinity is woven into football.

The politics of naming public spaces in Tehran

A study of the politics of naming public spaces in Tehran reveals a masculinist discourse lying behind the process. The majority of streets, plazas, universities and even parks have non-feminine names, and a considerable number of streets with feminine names were renamed after the Islamic Revolution. The analytical lens of this study focuses on the ideological stratification the government displays via the intentional naming of public spaces with official responses seemingly trying to determine the appropriate place for women. The streets are believed to be dominated by men. The way in which Iran names public spaces intensifies such an ideology. This paper aims to broaden the literature on toponymy by pursuing a relatively new path that considers the structure of power embedded in place-naming in Tehran.

Citations of Norms and Lines of Flight in One Immigrant Boy's Performances of Masculinities and Reading Identities

AbstractIn this ethnographic case study, the author examined one immigrant adolescent's performances of masculinities through reading practices. The author analyzed how Omar (pseudonym), a Muslim boy from Libya, used reading practices to produce himself as a boy in one U.S. multilingual classroom. Extending the anti‐essentialist scholarship on gender and reading, the author brought together Butler's queer feminism and Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of becoming to further trouble gender and analyze the instability of Omar's masculinity performances in relation to reading practice. Through analyses of field notes, classroom interactions, and artifacts, this study showed that Omar discursively performed and negotiated multiple and seemingly conflicting reading identities across time and space. Although he was discursively positioned as a nonreader in classroom interactions, he also performed disengagement with reading to display a cool, nonschoolish masculinity aligned to the normative discourses of Arab masculinity to which he was subject. However, he also enacted reader identity and behaviors not traditionally associated with masculinity. Omar's identity negotiation, interactionally and socially situated, demonstrated the instability of masculinity performances, featuring repeated citation of gender norms fissured with lines of flight breaking away from normative ways of being. This analysis contributes to the anti‐essentialist research on boys and literacies by shedding light on the regulations and ruptures in masculinity performances of a gendered subject. The study highlights the importance of situating analysis of gender and reading practices within the social and power relations in the discursive and interactional space. Addressing space allows a close reading of how gender hegemonies operate and fracture in micro movements of identity performance and how space can be shaped to open up opportunities for becoming‐other.

Refusing the Performance: Disrupting Popular Discourses Surrounding Latino Male Teachers and the Possibility of Disidentification

Popular discourses surrounding male teachers of color can serve to reify confining and problematic notions of masculinity in schools. Taking a critical approach to the study of gender and race, this article highlights the ways schools reproduce specifically Latino male identity through the cultural expectations of Latino male educators, as well as the gender performance of Latino male teachers themselves. Through an ethnographic case study of a middle school Latino boys’ program in the San Francisco Bay Area, I explore the ways one Latino male teacher navigates cultural pressures surrounding the enactment of Latino masculinity. This study uncovers the ways the scarcity of Latino male educators creates a pressure to perform specified notions of masculinity; particularly that of the domineering, hypermasculine disciplinarian. Furthermore, this study looks at embodied resistance to dominant discourses of Latino masculinity through deviant gendered performances, locating the body as a key site of struggle.

Recognising shadows: masculinism, resistance, and recognition in Vietnam

ABSTRACTPride parades, LGBT rights demonstrations, and revisions to the Marriage and Family Law highlight the extent to which norms and values related to gender, sexuality, marriage, and the family have recently been challenged in Vietnam. They also illuminate the gendered power relations being played out in the socio-cultural context of Vietnam, and thus open up for a more in-depth consideration of the ways in which LGBT people have experienced and resisted these relations in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Vietnam's two largest cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, in 2012, this article discusses the relations between these power relations, the dominant Vietnamese discourse of masculinity, or masculinism, and the politics of recognition. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which Vietnamese gay men have resisted heteronormative normalising practices in their search for the recognition of self and others. Utilising the local term bóng, or ‘shadow’, the article highlights the ways in which light and shadow can be used metaphorically to understand gay men's struggles for the recognition of self and others in contemporary Vietnam.

De Valera's Gains: The Masculine Body in Irish Political Cartoons, 1922–39

De Valera's Gains:The Masculine Body in Irish Political Cartoons, 1922–39 Timothy Ellis (bio) Éamon de Valera was unquestionably one of the most significant political actors in twentieth-century Ireland. His political career, spanning almost six decades from the Easter Rising in 1916 to his death in 1975, makes him a fascinating subject for study. Indeed, de Valera's time in high office was arguably one of the longest of any democratically elected leader in history. Perhaps his most significant political achievement was the 1937 Irish Constitution. Controversially, this document proclaimed that "mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home,"1 inviting the following question: What connects gender and political power in de Valera's career? How, for instance, was the representation of de Valera's masculinity used to confer political legitimacy? Conversely, how were representations of his perceived lack of masculinity used to denigrate his legitimacy? This essay analyzes the representation of de Valera in the period 1922–39 through the medium of political cartoons. It argues that cartoons demonstrate how discourses of masculinity were central to the construction of political power in the Irish Free State, using de Valera as a case study. The years 1922–39 represent a period of postrevolutionary consolidation in Ireland. It was during this time that the Irish state gradually achieved sovereignty from Great Britain, but also introduced a series of legislation that sought to limit the role of women in public life. The analysis of masculinity offers a useful entry point from which to consider the political culture of these years. Indeed, few historians [End Page 61] would disagree that the political culture of the Irish Free State privileged masculinity over femininity.2 Legislation limited women's participation on juries in 1924 and 1927. It also limited their access to contraception in 1929 and 1934. Moreover, while not a result of formal legislation, between 1923 and 1932 only two women took their seats in Dáil Éireann (Margaret Collins O'Driscoll, who served 1923–1933, and Kathleen Clarke, who served briefly in fall 1927).3 This was the result of a pro-Treaty victory in the Irish Civil War. Most politically active women supported the anti-Treaty side, which was ridiculed by its opponents as "the women and Childers party."4 The way in which political life is represented as masculine has long roots in political history. As Wendy Brown argues, "politics has been more exclusively limited to men than any other realm of endeavor and has been more intensely self-consciously masculine than most other social practices."5 As a state that had emerged from a nationalist revolution, the Irish Free State was particularly marked by a masculine political culture. To quote Joan Scott, emergent rulers have often sought to legitimize "domination, strength, central authority, and ruling power as masculine . . . , and [have] made that code literal in laws . . . that put women in their place."6 As Nira Yuval-Davis argues, gender is heavily implicated in constructions of nation.7 Nationalist revolutions are therefore especially imbued with a rhetoric of masculinity. Drawing on the theories of Ashis Nandy, Gerardine Meaney argues that in these circumstances, of which Ireland offers a classic example, "colonized peoples, often long after colonization itself has ended, tend [End Page 62] to observe or impose strictly differentiated gender roles in order to assert the masculinity and right to power of the (male) subjects."8 Moreover, recent scholarship has demonstrated the intellectual potential of the study of masculinity as a lens for analysis of Irish society and politics. Since the 1990s, scholars of Irish studies have increasingly demonstrated an interest in this subject. Caroline Magennis and Raymond Mullen have written on the role of masculinities in Irish literature and culture.9 The discipline of history has also shown encouraging signs of coming to terms with the complex relationship between masculinity and political life. Patrick McDevitt's work on sport and masculinity in the British Empire has recognized the significance of Gaelic sport in constructing an Irish nationalist masculinity.10 Fearghal McGarry's biography of Eoin O'Duffy has demonstrated how masculinity and virility...

The Victorian Male Body ed. by Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt

Reviewed by: The Victorian Male Body ed. by Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt Jennifer Fuller Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt, eds., The Victorian Male Body Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, pp. ix + 259 $110/£75 cloth. This ambitious collection considers how the male body was examined and judged in Victorian culture. The essays (largely by female authors) concentrate on representations of the body to trace the discourse of ideal masculinity that developed in fiction. While the male body represented a set of complex virtues, it was unable to maintain those ideals under scrutiny. White masculinity, while intended to represent a form of power, was [End Page 423] never "one, unified, complete, (perfect?) construction;" nevertheless, "discourse around this ideal had real and embodied consequences for women, people of color, colonised subjects and white men themselves" (15). Thus, each of the book's three sections examines how masculinity was discussed, debated, and adapted from the ideal and what those digressions help us understand about the coded norms of the Victorian male body. The collection's first section, "Constructed Bodies," focuses on the way men were expected to tailor their masculinity to an idealized body. Alice Crossley opens the section by analyzing the physical abuses suffered by schoolboys in Victorian fiction. Emphasizing a range of acceptable behaviors from sensitivity to assertiveness, these texts reveal the shifting conversation about masculinity in the nineteenth century. The theme of punishing the male body continues in Joanna Begiato's essay, which considers the role of self-denial in manliness. Using records from insane asylums, she demonstrates the contemporary belief that a man's inability to master his passions would produce "beast-like or child-like" behavior (rather than effeminacy) and could lead to penalties including the label of insanity (61). While the first two chapters explore masculinities in flux, Tara MacDonald's essay examines physical perfection in relation to ideas about the New Man in Ménie Murel Dowie's Gallia (1895). With strong eugenic undertones of national identity, constructions of the New Man objectified the male body as a specimen to be judged on its capacity to produce offspring. The next section, "Fractured and Fragmented Bodies," analyzes the disabled and diseased male body. In a lively essay, Ryan Sweet examines pirate fiction and the presumed connection between villainy and prosthesis. Questioning this stereotype, Sweet shows that many pirates exhibit a hypermasculinity in accepting and overcoming physical loss. Meredith Miller focuses on tuberculosis, which is usually coded feminine, as a way to explore an alternate masculinity embodied by John Keats and the "wasting male youth of visionary sensibility" (109). In contrast to hyperphysical imperial masculinity, Miller reads tubercular men in the works of Henry James and George Eliot as a Gothic antithesis that emphasized Romantic sensibility over national identity. Alison Younger also takes up unconventional masculinities in her analysis of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). She argues that gents, dandies, and other identities that imitated masculine behavior while flouting traditional rules of breeding and manners were coded as monstrous in literature, "grotesque parod[ies] of a noble idea" (144). From the monstrous, Ruth Heholt takes us to the supernatural with her reading of the male body in ghost stories by Victorian women. As she insightfully notes, criticism of this genre typically focuses on the way women writers used ghost stories as a form of liberation, but little has been said of the male ghost who inhabits a sphere generally associated with weakness and need. Heholt argues that male [End Page 424] ghosts undermine stable ideas of masculinity not only by creating anxiety about healthy male bodies but also positing a hypermasculine mind robust enough to deny death. These stories challenge the link between Victorian masculinity and virile embodiment by asserting that even the most ablebodied men will eventually die. The final section focuses on "Unruly Bodies" that do not fit (sometimes literally) within the restrained notions of ideal masculinity. Of special interest to periodical scholars, Françoise Baillet's chapter considers how George du Maurier's sketches for Punch opened a forum for the discussion of middle-class manliness. The starving male body features in Charlotte Boyce...

The Positive Side of Feminist Theory in Entrepreneurial Finance: Feminist Themes and Tropes in Crowdfunding for Social Change

Following literature that already reframes entrepreneurship as a social change activity, we consider the societal change potential of entrepreneurial narratives in crowdfunding pitches of predominantly female-run ventures. We understand the community-driven phenomenon crowdfunding therefore as a vehicle to transcend and change the predominantly masculine entrepreneurial discourse of innovation and business success. Following an idiographic methodology, we analyse the discourse in crowdfunding video-representations of female-run ventures and explore structure, linguistic usage, visual artefacts and the implied intentions towards social change from a feminist perspective. From the sampling set of 42 crowdfunding campaigns, we use the resulting discursive elements and tropes to identify feminist themes that drive the success of these campaigns through connecting with immanent societal values. With this we contribute to the social change perspective in entrepreneurship research by addressing epistemological issues within prevailing paradigms.

Reconstructing Adult Masculinities: Part-time Work in Contemporary Japan by Emma E. Cook

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Adult Masculinities: Part-time Work in Contemporary Japan by Emma E. Cook Futoshi Taga (bio) Reconstructing Adult Masculinities: Part-time Work in Contemporary Japan. By Emma E. Cook. Routledge, London, 2016. xvi, 207 pages. $160.00, cloth; $51.95, paper; $51.95, E-book. Against the background of Japan's prolonged recession and deregulation of the employment system since the late 1990s, the increased number of young irregular employees attracted public attention and caused a moral panic over youth independence, while also giving rise to the prevalence of the newly named furiitā (freeter). Although the term generally describes young male and female part-time workers aged 15–34, who are neither students nor housewives, "freeter" has accrued various meanings beyond a mere employment category. The word has highly gendered connotations, and criticism of freeters has been directed primarily at male workers because the meaning of adult manhood has been linked so closely in postwar Japan to full-time labor and male breadwinning, as represented by sarariiman (salaryman). While prevailing discourses on freeters are extremely simplified—whether as immature boys lacking a work ethic or victims of a changing employment system—details of their living conditions are less than well known, especially to international readers. Now, however, thorough the anthropological approach of Reconstructing Adult Masculinities: Part-time Work in Contemporary Japan, Emma E. Cook provides a detailed picture [End Page 456] of how young male part-timers negotiate the meaning of masculinity and adulthood in their daily lives. Cook's study is based on ethnographic research conducted intermittently in Hamamatsu from 2006 to 2013. Qualitative uniqueness and abundance of locally collected narratives are just part of this study's attractions. As a participant observer, Cook worked as a part-timer with freeters at a nine-screen cinema. Becoming a member of and developing rapport with the target group, she interviewed more than 100 men and women, including nonfreeters. The fieldwork location is particularly significant for Cook's topic. Existing major surveys on freeters have been conducted in and around Tokyo. However, Tokyo is not a typical area but a very special place in Japan as a whole. Indeed, the majority of young part-timers are born and live in local areas with stronger community ties and more limited occupational choices than in metropolitan areas. Selecting the provincial city Hamamatsu as a research site "where social pressures can be amplified as men continue to live in the neighborhoods of their childhoods" (p. 17), Cook depicts lively interactions between young male part-time workers and their parents, for example, how sons tried to persuade their parents to accept them as freeters and the influence parents' expectations had on their sons' life courses (chapter 3). In addition to these ethnographic features, the study is also characterized by how masculinities are understood. While acknowledging the importance of the salaryman as a symbolic figure and of hegemonic discourses of masculinity in male part-timers' narratives, Cook refuses to look at masculinity as a static type, seen for example in the mutually exclusive categories of "salaryman masculinity" and "freeter masculinity." Instead, she adopts an alternative approach that "explore[s] how individuals draw on different aspects and dimensions of masculinities in different spheres of their lives—at the level of both discourse and practice—that shape their adult masculine identities in particular ways at particular points in time as they age" (p. 6). Based on such an understanding of masculinities, Cook proposes an ingenious and suggestive analytical frame: a pair of concepts she terms "aspirational masculinity" and "restrictive masculinity." On the one hand, aspirational masculinity illuminates the ways in which men try to construct and practice their masculine selves through future-oriented aspirations, especially within the sphere of labor. On the other hand, "restrictive masculinity" refers to how men "make concessions with regards to their pursuit of labor aspirations… according to their expectations of future marriage" (pp. 7–8). In this context, young male part-time workers face difficulties, which Cook has dubbed the male "freeter failure dilemma": "[I]f they gave up on their aspirations they felt they would be failing to achieve something that they felt in part defined them, that was constitutive...

"Debajo de la sotana": (Re)Dressing Clerical Masculinity in Alas's La Regenta

This article examines the seemingly contradictory embodiment of nineteenth-century discourses of masculinity by Fermin de Pas, the clerical protagonist of Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta (1884-85). Despite its identifiable rhetoric of anticlericalism and emasculation, I argue that Clarin’s novel casts the priest-hood as a dynamic metaphor for the paradoxes inherent in nineteenth-century masculinity writ large. What I call Fermin’s clerical morphology of masculinity coalesces around two dynamically opposed modes: ostentatious self-display and ascetic self-restraint. Through his opulent liturgical dress and immaculate street-wear, Vetusta’s Magistral embodies noble patterns of masculinity that nostalgically gloss Ancien Regime social hierarchies. On the other hand, Fermin’s tightly controlled deportment and bodily self-restraint dialogue with discourses and ide-als of bourgeois masculinity that also call for men to dress austerely and abstain periodically from sex. This facet of his clerical persona is illustrated throughout the novel in Fermin’s internalized struggles with clerical behavioral patterns and dress. Through regular comparisons with contemporaneous cultural prod-ucts including pan-European conduct manuals and novels, I illustrate how La Regenta’s fashioning of Fermin de Pas indexes the priest as one of the dominant myths governing modern fantasies of masculinity

Unwanted appearances and self-objectification: The phenomenology of alterity for women in leadership

This paper introduces the concept of dys-appearance ( Leder, 1990 ) as a way of conceptualising the lived experience of alterity (or Otherness) of women’s bodies in leadership. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study (using interviews and photo-elicitation) it contributes towards growing bodies of literature that emphasise the corporeal and highlight the Othering of the female body in the masculine discourse of leadership. Contemporary leadership scholars have drawn on Merleau-Pontian phenomenology to conceptualise the fundamental reversibility of embodied perception between the leader and the follower, but this analysis has not extended to a consideration of the sexed and gendered body. By focusing on the subjective experiences of women leaders this paper demonstrates the phenomenon of dys-appearance ( Leder, 1990 ) in which the female body, which signifies a socially problematic presence in this context, appears to the subject in a disruptive or unwanted manner within their self-perception. The self-objectification and dys-appearance of the recalcitrant body exerts a telic demand upon the self to rectify its problematic presence and return it to a state of undisruptive normality. This analysis contributes novel insights on the unique or different experiences of leadership for women, and the impact of the problematizing of the female body on their self-perceptions.

M. Butterfly Filminin Yapı Sökümcü Analizi

It can be claimed that the representations of femininity and masculinity in the cinema reinforce the dominant masculine discourse. Not only representations of femininity and masculinity, but also another dimension of the sovereign discourse about Eastern / Western societies in mainstream cinema. While East is depicted as powerful hegemonic, East is represented as a place that needs to be civilized. Furthermore, East is associated with femininity and the West with masculinity in the dominant discourse of the cinema. The film, M. Butterfly, reverses this hierarchical discourse formally. M. Butterfly was examined through the question of what power/identity is through taking into consideration of this reversed discourse of East/West and feminity/masculinity. The ambiguity of meaning was emphasized while questioning hegemony of West in this article. Moreover it was also aimed to analyze what forms of counter hegemony are while mentioning ambiguity of construction. The suicide of protagonist in M. Butterfly which is inspired of Madam Butterfly opera, was also taken into consideration while questioning what identity and gender are. This article is qualitative and deconstructive analysis was uses in the analysis of the film as a text. It was found that no structures were ultimately constructed in the film, and that the established structures were constantly changing.

La destitución del mito. Christa Wolf y la reescritura de la memoria histórica

The main aim of this essay is to go through Christa Wolf's literary itinerary through a perspective that I define as mythological destitution. From this standpoint, I analyze Wolf's four fundamental works. In the first —Divided Heaven— the author tests the concept of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, a re-elaboration of the past that allows us to overcome it. In the second —Patterns of Childhood— Wolf develops the analytical figure of what she calls phantastische Genauigkeit, a fictional exactness as the only possibility of accessing a collective historical memory. Finally, in Cassandra and Medea authentic historical reconstruction is identified with the deconstruction of male discourse about women. Europe stands at the core of all of these works: Cold War Europe, Nazi Europe, Europe in the original moment of its ideological foundation.

La despenalizaci??n identitaria y la amnist??a pol??tica masculina en la Espa??a de la Transici??n democr??tica: movimiento feminista y LGTB

The fall of the Franco???s dictatorship will produce the start of a process of decriminalization of ???feminine crimes??? and gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans* identities as the same time as their organization as political movements. These formations are deployed in a time of political opening ???the Democratic Transition???, facing both the internal problems of their movements, and the continuous obstacles imposed by the structures of the State that seemed to intentionally ???forget??? gender alterities. A clear example will be the Amnesty policies applied 1975-1977 that show how determined groups were legally and socially excluded because of masculine discourse of ???common good???.

La despenalización identitaria y la amnistía política masculina en la España de la Transición democrática: movimiento feminista y LGTB

La caída del Régimen dictatorial de Francisco Franco lleva al inicio de un proceso de despenali-zación de los denominados “delitos femeninos” y de las identidades, gay, lesbiana, bisexual y trans* 1 paralelo a la organización política de estos colectivos. Estas formaciones se despliegan en un periodo de “apertura” —plena Transición Democrática— enfrentándose tanto a las problemáticas internas de sus movimientos como a los continuos obstáculos impuestos por las estructuras del Estado que parecían “olvidarse” intencionalmente de las alteridades de género. Un claro ejemplo serán las leyes de amnistía de entre 1975-1977 que demuestran como determinados “colectivos” serán excluidos en nombre del discurso paternalista del “bien común”.

Embeddedness in context: understanding gender in a female entrepreneurship network

ABSTRACTIn this paper I argue that through a process of embeddedness in context, a female entrepreneurship network is able to challenge gender structures. I investigate how a female entrepreneurship network is constructed and how they reinforce and possibly challenge existing gender structures. From an ethnographic study, three processes in the female entrepreneurship network were identified: making proper entrepreneurs, building relationships and engaging in change. In the different processes the women involved in the network reinforced gender structures through compliance with a masculine discourse of entrepreneurship, but also challenged gender structures through questioning this discourse. Through becoming embedded in their local community, the women entrepreneurs were able to take charge of the development of the network and challenge gender structures as a result of questioning the masculine discourse of entrepreneurship. This implies an interplay between embeddedness and gender as two separate but dependent processes. Linking together gender and embeddedness elicits a new take on the way female entrepreneurship networks are constructed and how they could advance gender equality within entrepreneurship. Consequently, this paper emphasises a need for further examination of embeddedness within gender and entrepreneurship research.

‘Shakespeare Had the Passion of an Arab’

This article analyses the Shakespearean appropriation in Fadia Faqir’s Willow Trees Don’t Weep (2014) to show how Faqir’s novel establishes a new Arab Jordanian feminist trope of the willow tree, metaphorically embodied in the female character of Najwa, who does not surrender to the atrocities of the masculine discourse. Faqir’s novel, appropriating a direct text from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and an allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello, does not praise the Bard but dismantles the Shakespearean dramatization of the submissive woman. In this article, I claim that Faqir’s Willow Trees warns against mimicking the Bard’s feminine models and offers a liberating space or a local ‘alternative wisdom and beauty’, in Ania Loomba’s expression, and a ‘challenge’, in Graham Holderness’s terminology, to Shakespeare. In Faqir’s novel, Shakespeare has been ‘Arabized’, in Ferial Ghazoul’s words, to revise and redefine new roles of the Arab Jordanian woman.

AMBIGUITY OF GENDER IDENTITY IN SHAKESPEARE’S TWELFTH NIGHT

Gender is often identified with sex and gender, even though they have different concepts. It is associated with men and women who are socially and culturally formed. Understanding about masculine and feminine discourses are formed to identify gender identity which men must behave masculine and women must behave feminine. Taking William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night play as its object, this study aims to see how gender identity displayed and describe the ambiguity of gender identity that is acted by character in the play. The data which were taken from the play were analyzed by relating them to the secondary data taken from references discussing the gender identity depicted in the play. The study concluded that sex, gender and sexual orientation are something that is fluid, not natural and changing and constructed by social conditions. Changes of the identity can be said changing with the form performativity shown, namely by disguise.