Gendered Embodiment Research Articles

Dirty Body Politics: Habitus, Gendered Embodiment, and the Resistance to Women's Agency in Transforming South African Higher Education

In discussing the difficulty with transformation, research notes that women and Blacks are excluded and marginalised by the cultures and practices within universities in South Africa. While the literature highlights the invisibility of these minorities in universities, with their bodies only becoming visible as tokens, or when representing minority issues, it is silent on how this plays out in interchanges in the transformation process, the embodiment of gender, and the resistance to women's agency within the field of higher education transformation. Adopting a hermeneutic phenomenological lens and Bourdieu's concept of field and habitus, this study examines ten academics' experiences of having agency to effect transformation. In particular, it explores women's narratives of body‐centered attacks in expressions of resistance to their transformation strategies, revealing the normalisation of the White, male body. This normalisation obscures the gendered processes of transformation and the bodily resistance to women's agency, revealed in tugging, pulling, shutting doors and having metaphorical knives pulled from their backs. The study argues that this not only prevents women from exercising their agency, but also ensures the reproduction of oppressive relations within the university and should be directly addressed in the struggle for transformation.

Digital girl: cyberfeminism and the emancipatory potential of digital entrepreneurship in emerging economies

Digital entrepreneurship has been described as a “great leveler” in terms of equalizing the entrepreneurial playing field for women. However, little is known of the emancipatory possibilities offered by digital entrepreneurship for women constrained by social and cultural practices such as male guardianship of female relatives and legally enforced gender segregation. In order to address this research gap, this paper examines women’s engagement in digital entrepreneurship in emerging economies with restrictive social and cultural practices. In so doing, we draw upon the analytical frameworks provided by entrepreneurship as emancipation and cyberfeminism. Using empirical data from an exploratory investigation of entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia, we examine how women use digital technologies in the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. Our findings reveal that women in Saudi Arabia use digital entrepreneurship to transform their embodied selves and lived realities rather than to escape gender embodiment as offered by the online environment.

Negotiating alternative femininities? Gender identity construction in female Basque pelota players

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to explore how female players of Basque pelota (pelotaris) construct their gender identity in a traditionally masculine sport. The theory of performativity is used to understand how females negotiate, resist or challenge the dominant gender discourse. Data were collected through 10 in-depth interviews with players. Through inductive analysis we found that the sociocultural context surrounding Basque pelota reinforces the binary system of gender embodiment, which includes hegemonic masculinities and idealised femininities. However, our findings also suggest that whilst some players adhere to this dominant discourse, others actively resist and transgress it through the embodiment of alternative identities. In doing this, these players create new and inclusive identities, therefore escaping a simplistic binary and embracing a multiplicity of gender identities. As a result, they can become active agents in the promotion of equity in sport.

Reflecting (On) the Body: Trans Self-Representation and Resistance in the Poetry of Ely Shipley

ABSTRACTDespite an increased awareness of trans identities and civil rights – facilitated by high-profile celebrities such as Laverne Cox – the mainstream US media continues to cast the everyday lives of trans communities in a limited and harmful light. Through an analysis of Ely Shipley’s Boy with Flowers, this article argues that first-person poetry offers a method for self-representation and platform to resist, as well as talk back to, hegemonic narratives of trans embodiment. In doing so, I position Shipley’s poetry as both a reflection of and on contemporary US culture and its policing of gendered bodies, especially under the current Trump administration. Developing the theme of reflection, I argue that the ‘reflections’ operate on physical, mental, and symbolic levels to explore how they register on the speaker’s own experiences of (trans)gender identity and embodiment.

The everyday practices of global finance: gender and regulatory politics of ‘diversity’

Abstract This article argues that practices of global finance provide a rich opportunity to consider gender's embodiment in everyday, but highly regulatory, financial life. Tracing a pathway through the rise of the ‘diversity agenda’ in global finance in the wake of the global financial crisis, the article asks how ‘diversity’ has shaped the global financial services industry, and whether it has challenged the reproduction of gendered power in global finance. Recent, innovative feminist political economy work has laid out a clear challenge to researchers of the global political economy to explore how everyday practices have become significant sites of gendered, regulatory power, and this article takes up this challenge, analysing how the rise of ‘diversity’ in financial services reveals the crucial intersections of gendered power and everyday economic practices. Using a conceptual framework drawn explicitly from Marysia Zalewski's work, this article advances critical inquiry into how gender has become an often unacknowledged way of writing the world of global finance, in ongoing, and problematic, ways. It proposes that the practices and futures of the diversity agenda in global finance provide a window into the persistent failure of global finance to reconfigure its foundational masculinism, and asks that financial actors begin to take seriously the foundational, gendered myths on which global finance has been built.

Queer Music Theory

AbstractQueer musical phenomenology refers to the practice of disorientation away from established music theories, including one’s own. In Lewin’s “Phenomenology” article, queering can be understood as his intentional, self-critical, conceptual disorientations—first departing from Schenkerian theory, and then moving toward and finally away from the perception-model. Through a close reading of Lewin in combination with Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, which offers a theory of embodied lives marginalized by pathways of normativity, I examine the generalizable application of theories such as queer phenomenology to another domain beyond gender and sexual embodiment: music theory at large. Lewin’s practice models a form of music theory that I regard as phenomenologically queer.

Gender Embodiment on Stage: an Interview with Elizabeth Hess

Gender Embodiment on Stage: an Interview with Elizabeth Hess

Knowing your place and commanding space: de/constructions of gendered embodiment in mixed-sex karate

ABSTRACTFeminists have long acknowledged that gendered divisions in access to spaces of leisure, and how women and men physically take up that space, reproduce gender inequality. This article will explore how karate practitioners participate in the space of mixed-sex karate practice and how such uses of space de/construct gendered embodiments and a gender hierarchy. Data presented are drawn from nine months of ethnographic emersion within three karate clubs and 15 photo-elicitation interviews with karate participants from the three clubs. The findings of this paper suggest that whilst women often occupied spaces of expertise within the karate hall, gendered distinctions in uses of space emerged in the more subtle ways in which women and men used their voice, responded to the tacit and smelt dilemmas of sweat, and moved their bodies across physical space. This research highlights both the potential of physical leisure practice to ‘undo’ conventional gendered embodiments that particularly restrict women’s intentionality in the world, and the power of spatially attuned research to illuminate the minute ways in which unequal gender relations are naturalised, legitimised and done.

Piss(ed): The Biopolitics of the Bathroom

AbstractThis article analyzes two recent works by transgender performance artist Cassils, PISSED and Fountain (2017), which were created in response to the Trump administration's decision to rescind federal protections allowing transgender students to use the restroom of their choice. While Cassils primarily conceptualized PISSED/Fountain as a queering of binary, essentialist understandings of gendered embodiment, I draw on performance, queer, and critical ethnic studies to illustrate that these pieces simultaneously challenge other kinds of oppositional embodiments, particularly health versus disease and citizen versus alien and/or terrorist; conceptualizations the state frequently deploys to surveil and control marginalized populations. PISSED/Fountain offer audiences a new strategy for both exposing and contesting state violence: these pieces can be read as a politically strategic disidentification with the state's classification of certain bodies and their excretions as ``deviant'' and ``toxic'' in order to purposefully ``terrorize'' the state's bio- and necropolitical aims.

A Feminist Genealogy of the Lived Body? Rethinking the Gendered Body as a Site of Excess and Indeterminacy

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a rethinking of the gendered body as both lived and historically constituted. These two dimensions are sometimes seen as irreconcilable, especially by some proponents of post-structuralism who are critical of phenomenology. My contention is that when approaching gender, Merleau-Ponty’s paradoxical formulation of the body as “always something other than what it is” can accompany a genealogy of the body. The body, as excessive, indeterminate, and ambiguous in Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, is at the same time the very object and product of certain techniques and procedures developed since the nineteenth century, as Foucault documents. Not only are phenomenology and genealogy compatible in this context, but thinking them together is necessary in order to illuminate the multi-faceted complexity of the embodiment of gender. The weight of this necessity is especially felt when approaching sexual violence, which tends to take place at the very intersection of the body-as-lived and the body-as-constituted.

Sportscapes: Contested bodies, gender and desire within a female Australian rules football team

Despite the recent rise of female Australian rules football in the public eye, little research has explored the nuances of players’ experiences of gendered embodiment, performance, identity, desire and engagement in the sport. The aim of this article is to explore how spaces have the capacity to create, normalise and regulate gender, bodies, identity and desire through an analysis of a women’s Australian rules football team, a space that is neither dominated by heteronormativity and neither queer nor lesbian subcultures. Through analysis of photographs and photo-elicitation interviews, this paper seeks to explore how bodies, gender, desire and embodiment are experienced, perceived and contested by and through the lens of players, within this sportscape. The implications of this research are an insight into the fluid and complex dynamics of a particular sportscape and the capacity of such spaces to redefine belonging and normativity outside of dominant hetero-gendered discourses.

Unraveling the Intersecting Meanings of Interpersonal Violence: The Embodiment of Gender and Race in Attributions and Characterizations of Violence

ABSTRACT We examine the meaning of interpersonal violence using labeling and embodiment perspectives. We systematically explore the process of marginalization from the vantage point of college students. Using one-on-one interviews, we report on the characterizations and origin of labels used to describe those perceived to engage in violent behavior. Grounded theory is employed to inductively develop hypotheses. Three themes emerged: The Embodiment of Violence; The Deviance of (White) Women’s Violence; and The Enduring Stereotype of (Black) Male Violence. We discuss the process used to impugn gendered and raced meanings upon violence. We delineate how assumptions about gender, race/ethnicity and the body influence e marginalization process. Knowledge-sources used to base judgments about behavior and group membership are identified. We add to labeling and embodiment perspectives while broadening the understanding of labels associated with violent offenders and their origin.

Creating Distance from Body Issues: Exploring New Materialist Feminist Possibilities for Renegotiating Gendered Embodiment

The body’s active role in the production of gendered embodiments is a key focus for feminist cultural studies and leisure studies. The article draws on new materialist feminist scholarship to explore how gender relations are produced and negotiated in physical culture through one case study example taken from a wider study of young people’s experiences of the body and self-image over time. The article explores how gendered embodiment is assembled through the socio-material circumstances of everyday life. For one particiapnt, 'Ann', “creating distance” from appearance concerns was an embodied process which involved new practices and encounters (e.g., walking for leisure, reading feminist literature) and relationships and engagements with others (e.g., a partner, friends, family). The potential for feminism to open possibilities to imagine the body otherwise is also discussed in relation to recent efforts to foster social justice imperatives in leisure sciences and feminist physical cultural studies.

Displaying Gender: Transgender People's Strategies in Everyday Life

Drawing upon data from in‐depth interviews with transgender people in Portugal and in the United Kingdom, this article critically reflects upon different ways through which transgender people recreate their gender displays, particularly in terms of gender embodiment and aesthetics, in order to navigate their everyday lives. I focus on four strategies of articulating gender displays with one's own gender subjectivities: “blending in,” “masking,” “naturalizing,” and “subverting.” These strategies are not exclusive of one another. They are used differently throughout the participants' own lives in accordance to the social contexts they were in.

Designing women: modernist mass culture and the formation of the female body

ABSTRACTThis essay argues for charm as feminist heuristic through which we may re-examine contemporary theories of gendered embodiment. Charm as a form of bodily habitation for women in modernity seems to be another facet of cultural or sociopolitical control over female subjects. However, this is not the entire picture. I argue that charm denotes a superficiality or refusal of depth in female embodiment that interrupts, yet also acknowledges, the physiological marks inscribed upon socially written bodies by addressing theories of the body. I then locate these interruptions in the early experimental poetry of Gertrude Stein and in selected works of mass culture including magazines, beauty pamphlets, and self-help books. Ultimately, by looking to Stein and these cultural texts, I find that women's charm exhibited by their bodies is not what it seems. There is both a seem and a seam to women's bodies, a fissure or stitching that appears when we examine how bodies are formed. This occurs through a repetition that – in contrast to contemporary theories of gendered embodiment by Judith Butler, bodily biopower by Michel Foucault, or bodily mattering in feminist new materialism – presents the body as a styled set of desires.

The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia by Gayle Salamon

Reviewed by: The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia by Gayle Salamon Perry Zurn (bio) Gayle Salamon, The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia New York: New York University Press, 2018, 192 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4798-9252-5 It was February 12, 2008. A group of eighth-grade students filed into the computer lab, Room 42, at E. O. Green High School in Oxnard, California. Abuzz with talk of the upcoming Valentine's Day, they sat down to write essays for their unit on tolerance. The computers themselves were old, with big, square bellies and hazy faces. One kid asked another, "Larry! Are you really changing your name?" "Yes!" came the excited reply. Another student, Brandon, sporting a pale face and crew cut under his dark hoodie, stood up slowly, pulled a revolver from his waist, aimed, and shot. Twice. A girl slumped over her keyboard. The cursor blinked heavily beside her new name: Latisha. In The Life and Death of Latisha King, Gayle Salamon reflects on the murder itself, the trial that followed, and the political issues at stake. Salamon attended the trial, which stretched from July 5 to September 1, 2011. She was joined by psychoanalyst Ken Corbett, author of Murder Over a Girl, and documentarian Marta Cunningham, director of Valentine Road. Training her eye and ear not only on the crisp court transcript, but also on the rich gestural and tonal fabric of the trial itself, Salamon emerges with a counter-narrative. The story is not, as the juridical system, Oxnard inhabitants, or even Ellen Degeneres1 would [End Page 153] have it, one of a boy killed for being gay. No. For Salamon, it's not a gay story. It's a trans story. Aligning herself with Latisha's friend Aliyah, who states, "I don't think Larry is gay. He's transgendered [sic]. It's a big difference" (20), Salamon argues in clear, cogent language: this was a case of transphobic hate. Latisha's gender—like transgender expression more generally—was perceived as a weapon (15), answerable only by another weapon. While Salamon's methodology might be surprising in this context, it is eminently effective. She does not offer a historical account, a sociological account, or even a traditional philosophical account. She does not ask what happened, when, and how, who did what to whom. Nor does she ask what moral imperatives were broken and why. No systematic attempt is made to get to the bottom of things. Instead, Salamon expressly attends to how things appear and how they get passed over, how they are experienced and how those experiences get buried (10). In tracing the threads of affect and meaning across figures and scenes, Salamon gets between things. Between the phenomena themselves and their already overburdened interpretations. Between the sleeves of gendered embodiment, gesture, and language. Between juridical protocol and the raw demands of responsibility. Salamon understands this to be the work of critical phenomenology, which, while it anchors reflection in first-person experience, places that experience in intersubjective context (17). This eminently reflective book aims to do justice to the texture of individual experiences, enmeshed, as they are, in social worlds. The Life and Death of Latisha King is organized into four main chapters: "Comportment," "Movement," "Anonymity," and "Objects." In each, Salamon turns her critical phenomenological attention to both the case and the courtroom in an attempt to pry apart the conditions that make transphobic violence possible. In chapter 1, "Comportment," Salamon explores how Latisha's gender is perceived as a provocation, a projectile, and a weapon; a form of harassment, bullying, and assault. Drawing on Erwin Strauss and Iris Marion Young, she insists that "an understanding of bodily movement is paramount to understanding how [. . .] gender expression becomes transformed into sexual aggression" (41). When non-normative gender becomes fungible with non-normative sexuality, such that one's transgressive mode of embodiment—one's queer walk, for example—is taken to signify a transgressive sexual act, gender itself becomes an act of aggression, a violent acting upon unsuspecting and unconsenting cisgender, heterosexual bystanders. Latisha is said to flaunt her gender, throwing...

Technologies of Epistolarity and Embodiment in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

By focusing on the epistolary narrator in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, this article shows that the eighteenth-century writing body is a hybrid form that can destabilize binary models of gendered embodiment. I first establish that the Memoirs’ epistolary narrator (rather than the narrated subject) is the primary participant in the book’s erotic scenes, and then situate these representations of sex in relation to the writing body described by eighteenth-century penmanship manuals. While previous accounts of the early modern penman have emphasized how the writing body was produced through a pedagogy that disciplined that body into abasement, analyzing the penman in Cleland’s pornography allows me to trace how this discipline could be perverted to create experiences of pleasure. In the Memoirs, these pleasures issue from scenes of erotic play that use disciplinary instruments and pedagogic technologies to shape the body into unstable new configurations: forms that exceed the limits of supposedly fixed categories of being.

The Shape of Desire

The Shape of Desire

Towards an Ontology of Body-in-Practice: The Embodiment of Gender and Caste

This paper studies the growing importance of the material body in re-enforcing caste and gender identities in India through a feminist analysis of body-in-practice. It borrows from the previous literary works to draw attention to the central paradoxes that arise in studying the body as a strictly biological and/or cultural representation. The first paradox relates to the translation of ‘mothering’ into a bio-technical process like in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and the second is the presumption of embodied caste in medical diagnosis of tuberculosis (TB). The paper departs from an understanding of ‘represented’ body to study the ways in which the body is lived within a spatial dimension

Under the Lights, Onto the Stage

AbstractIndonesia's waria commonly assert that the bodily transformations they undertake on a temporary but daily basis, which they call déndong, are central to their understanding of the self. The onerous efforts that waria make to craft their male body in line with frequently glamorous forms of feminine beauty nests within efforts to achieve visibility on the national stage. Waria also describe their gendered embodiment in terms of a personal narrative of self-actualization that sees it as one aspect of a process they call becoming. However, waria do not see déndong primarily as the expression of an individual self but assert that it is a reflection of the work of others. In this view, meeting more waria and interacting with them results in irrevocable changes to one's outer self. This article describes the historical emergence of this common understanding of selfhood and embodiment during the New Order in Indonesia (1967–98), a period characterized by the rapid growth of the mass media in the context of military rule. Emphasizing waria's own memories of this period alongside archival sources and personal photographs helps us understand how gender presentation both animates and undermines the fragile promise of national belonging in Indonesia.