Enactment Of Gender Research Articles

Shaping entrepreneurial gender play: Intersubjectivity and performativity among female entrepreneurs

This paper aims to enrich both the Entrepreneurship as Practice (EAP) and female entrepreneurship literature by advancing the existing insight that gender and entrepreneurship are interconnected practices. It contends that the enactment of entrepreneurship and gender is contextually contingent. To this end, we reinitiate the discourse on situational definition within the EAP framework, employing Butler's performativity and intersubjectivity concepts. We posit that the interplay of gender and entrepreneurial endeavors yields distinct practices influenced by the individual's identity and social affiliation within intersubjective and performative processes. A participatory ethnographic study spanning three years, conducted within a women-centric technology incubator, exposes the incubation process as a hub of interactions facilitated by intersubjectivity. It functions both as an educational medium for "praxis" and as a catalyst driving progressive performativity, distinctively expressed by each female entrepreneur contingent upon their individual attributes. This research enriches the EAP literature by revealing divergent gender enactments across industries and individuals. Furthermore, it augments female entrepreneurship literature by enhancing our understanding of how women, irrespective of contextual variables, effectively cultivate micro ventures through practical engagement.

Gender Transgression, Motherhood and Desire: Circumventing the Western Queer Ideology - A Post-colonial Literary Reading of Devdutt Pattanaik’s The Pregnant King

The term both gender and biological sex play a significant role in determining human behaviour. The foundation for presenting the underlying power structures that have aggressively preserved the gender binary was laid by a significant shift in theoretical viewpoint. Similarly, postmodern feminist and queer theorists' lenses questioned gender as a social construction rather than a natural manifestation of biological sex. Gender nonconformity transgresses the traditionally constructed gender binary by giving traditional masculinity the primary status and enabling the power and privilege related to gender enactment. The definition of gender transgression, however, varies significantly across cultures and historical Periods. The perpetuation of the gender binary and the hierarchal power system is deeply rooted in Western cultures. These power structures are embedded in reified social norms and governmental policy. This paper focuses on identifying forms of gender transgression and its ideological impingement. Combining insights from queer and post-colonial scholarship, it emphasizes the critical importance of a two-pronged theoretical approach. Following the recent research in redefining queer discourses in the limelight of post-colonial theory and narratives, this paper argues that revisiting mythological queer fiction contests the Western prejudice in queer paradigms. Queer narratives from the South Asian sub-continent signify the importance of race, class, religion, diaspora, ethnic, and linguistic formations concerning issues surrounding the representation of non-binary gender and sexualities. Through an intense reading of Devdutt Pattanaik’s Mythological text, The Pregnant King, this study circumvents the Western model of queer identities, tries to reposition the transformative non-Euro-American context, and gives queer its legal status as a pluralistic critical formation.

Religious Schools, Home Schools, and Gender-Role Beliefs in Adulthood

Background When parents in the United States choose to send their children to religious schools or to home school, they are often motivated, at least in part, by a desire to transmit religious beliefs to their children. These religious beliefs may in some cases promote traditional gender roles that are built into religious tenets, practices, and subcultural identities. Purpose With this in mind, we examine whether religious schools act as distinct sites of religious gender socialization by considering the following questions: (1) do Americans who attend religious high schools and homeschools hold more conservative gender-role beliefs later in life compared to their public school peers? and (2) does attending a religious school have a differential effect on gender beliefs for men or women? Methods We use data from the Cardus Education Study—the largest nationally representative survey that includes religious high school and home school graduates as well as measures of religiosity—and logistic regression to explore the gender-role beliefs of 24–39 year olds who graduated from conservative Protestant, Catholic, public, and home schools. Results Graduates of the different religious school sectors we examined varied in their tendencies to hold more traditional gender-role beliefs. Specifically, we find that graduates of conservative Protestant schools and home schools held more conservative gender-role beliefs than graduates of other sectors. In contrast, Catholic school graduates—particularly female graduates—held more egalitarian beliefs compared to the other sectors. Conclusions and Implications In light of these findings, we discuss potential mechanisms within school environments that may contribute to the enactment of gender and religion. We extend empirical and theoretical knowledge about gender socialization, an area of critical importance given its ability to influence people's aspirations, choices, and life outcomes as well as social norms and policies.

Do the Marriageable Men want to Protect and Provide? The Expectation of Black Professional Hybrid Masculinity

Gender ideologies are embedded in intersecting race, class, and gender systems. Yet Black masculinity is often defined one-dimensionally, without attention to class variation in gender enactment. Particularly, with regard to heterosexual partnering, representations of Black masculinity most often involve men enacting compensatory displays to account for having too little masculine capital to meet the dominant culture’s protector–provider prerequisites for accomplishing marital masculinity. Drawing from interviews with 42 never-married Black professional men, I explore their ideas about how masculinity ought to be done within the marital relationship—a critical site for the reproduction of gender inequality. Findings reveal that these men construct “Black professional hybrid masculinity” around a simultaneously racialized and classed compensatory strategy of masculine protection and equitable spousal sharing, resisting simple classification as either hegemonic or counterhegemonic. Rather, it is a distinctly hybrid masculine strategy. These men cherry-pick hegemonic gender norms to reconstruct gender identities that reaffirm their sense of manhood and idealize their future wives as symbols of hybrid femininity—work-devoted women who are also femininely in need of masculine protection. This research offers an intersectional extension of hybrid masculinity and illustrates the need for heterogeneous and context-varied theories of how Black men do gender.

The end of intimate politics in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster

ABSTRACT This article examines Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 film The Lobster in relation to debates about intimate politics in contemporary queer scholarship and queer cinema studies. Rather than reading the film as a satire on compulsory coupling, this article teases out the film’s depiction of both normative and antinormative practices as parallel forms of sexual citizenship. Examining the relationship between normative enactments of gender and sexuality and the regulation of the species boundary, we argue that The Lobster reveals three dichotomies at the core of heteronormative cultural mythologies: male and female, coupled and uncoupled, human and nonhuman. In examining the complex interplay between these categories throughout The Lobster, this article foregrounds the important intersections between critical approaches to normativity established within feminist and queer film studies, and emergent approaches to nonhuman and more-than-human ethics in the environmental humanities.

Volunteering masculinities in search and rescue work: Is there “a place for girls on the team”?

AbstractThis article explores performative enactments of gender at work in a UK‐based Search and Rescue voluntary organization, QuakeRescue. Based on ethnographic research, we analyze how gender is performatively constituted in this male‐dominated setting, focusing in particular on how hegemonic masculinity is enacted through bodies, physicality, and technical competence. Our findings show how performative acts, predicated on essentialist understandings of superior masculine bodies, constructed femininity as limited, deficient, and Other, legitimizing the assigning of mundane, routine tasks to women volunteers. By endorsing women's presence, albeit as low‐status team members, there was sufficient recognition to ensure that sedimented practices of “doing gender” at QuakeRescue remained largely unquestioned. We conclude that hegemonic masculinity predicated on bodily practices in male‐dominated workspaces is oppressive in its effects, and until this is recognized and acknowledged, transformative potential is limited.

Enactment of Gender and Performing Selves: A Study on Hijra Performativity

ABSTRACT ‘Sex' is understood as ‘anatomically' and ‘biologically’ inherent in an individual and is mirrored through 'gender' and its signifiers. The contested binaries of male and female are associated with the perceptions of an individual's level of conformity to the vexed ideals of ‘masculinity' and ‘femininity', but a ‘trans' identity finds its expression outside these assigned gender dichotomous roles and find its expression in embodied and bodied practices. The aspects of masculinity and femininity are seen as ‘performative' which can be reflected through ‘sign vehicle' and ‘body idiom', the terms used by Sociologist Erving Goffman. Based on the Butlerian theory of ‘performativity of gender' and ‘materialization', this study pursues the question of hijra (trans woman) construction through the conceptual framework of ‘performance', ‘corporeal significations' and ‘appearance' which is linked to their gendered identity. The reading examines and critiques on the construction of hijra identity and further observes that in imitating the inveterate femininity their construction goes beyond the ascribed ‘feminine’ gender role. It engages with select hijra autobiographies namely, The Truth About Me (2010) by A Revathi, I Am Vidya (2007) by Vidya and Me Hijra, Me Laxmi (2015) by Laxmi, which provides narratives on distinct construction of hijra feminine identity.

‘There is a secret in love’: gender, care and HIV management in South Africa

Research within geography and cognate disciplines have worked to demonstrate the important ways care(ing) informs the emotive, bodily and obligatory nature of gendered health. Although acts of care shape gendered health inequalities and possibilities for reconfiguration, scholarly research tends to focus on individual caregiving and receiving relationships within the domestic sphere, eliding more complicated, contradictory and uncomfortable questions of care that emerge in and through the wider social context. South Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic provides important opportunities to engage contradictions in care since expanded access to antiretroviral therapy allows women to care for their health with increased confidence. Drawing on qualitative research with women in South Africa, we argue that while new HIV management regimes rework opportunities for women to care for and enhance bodily health and wellbeing, they paradoxically conflict with women’s ability to care for and maintain their gendered selves, generating possibilities for harm, conflict and abuse. New biomedical modes of care mean women are often forced to make contradictory decisions between caring for their health but losing idealized notions of the gendered self, or caring for their gendered self, but undermining their possibilities for health. This article concludes that future geographic research on gender-health-place interactions should extend the practice and politics of care by illuminating how constructions, experiences and enactments of gender, health and disease mediate encounters with care and the institutions that attempt to manage them.

Fighting Gendered Battles: On Being a Woman in a Contemporary Gaming Community

This scholarly personal narrative (Nash 2004) draws on the author’s experiences as a woman in a male-dominated gaming community. In such a space, being a woman who plays the game problematizes notions of gender for both the author and for her most-often male opponents. When playing the game, she operates in a liminal space between expert and outsider because of her gender identity. At the same time, her gender troubles her men opponents. She discusses her struggles for acceptance in this community and how her notions and enactment of gender have changed as a result of her experiences. In the article, the author explains the social norms of the game and the demographic breakdown of the game’s players; to accomplish this, the author shares stories from her time as a player.

Young people and the gendered and aesthetic dimensions of ‘enterprise’: stories from a ‘Rust Belt’ city

ABSTRACTIn the ‘Rust Belt’ city of Geelong in Victoria, Australia, discourses of young people’s enterprise and innovation provide a counter-narrative to the prevailing material and symbolic consequences of industrial decline, job losses, and the growing insecurity of employment and income. GT Magazine is a weekly, large circulation magazine in Geelong with a significant focus on the activities and aspirations of enterprising young people. In this paper, we examine, by utilising techniques of content analysis and discourse analysis, the particular ways in which young people’s innovation and enterprise are framed and enacted in GT Magazine. Our analysis reveals that ‘youth’ and ‘enterprise’ are, in GT Magazine, given an embodied form that is powerfully marked by aestheticised, normalised enactments of gender, class and race. In doing this work, we make productive contributions to three key themes in contemporary youth studies: new work orders and the youthful self as enterprise; the gendered and aesthetic dimensions of affective labour in these new work orders; and the emerging spatial turn to examine young people's embodied, place-based experiences of employment and enterprise. We seek to make problematic the sense that solutions to multiple disruptions and crises in capitalism and the environment are to be found in young people’s enterprise. Particularly when that enterprise is given form in ways that are aestheticised, gendered, classed, individualised and responsibilised.

Becoming horseboy(s) – human-horse relations and intersectionality in equiscapes

ABSTRACTLeisure studies have given scant regard to human-animal relations and intersectionality. In this paper, I respond to calls for research analysing leisure as a complex, multispecies phenomenon by exploring human-horse relations and intersectionality in boy’s/men’s equestrian stories through the concept of intra-activity and creative analytical writing. Thinking and writing through intra-activity brings insights into the co-constitution of humans and horses, as well as the entanglement of other power relations and social categories. The paper illustrates that becoming horseboy(s) is a process of material-discursive intra-activity where boys/men, by transcending the human-animal divide simultaneously transcend the female-male/masculine-feminine divide. Thus, engaging materially with horses can allow and encourage boys/men to be less constrained by dominant gender discourses. The paper also illustrates the importance of studying gender, not as a separate or primary category of privilege or inequality, but as one that is entangled with race, class, sexuality, age and other animals. I finally argue that bringing horses, as well as discourses, into discussions of the enactment of gender in leisure landscapes offers a productive site for elaborating the much-debated question, posed by feminist posthumanists, of the agency of matter.

Gender-Typed Personality Qualities and African American Youth’s School Functioning

Numerous studies document sex differences in African American girls' and boys' academic achievement and motivation, but little is known about how the enactment of gender, such as in the forms of gendered behaviors, attitudes, or personal-social qualities, is related to school functioning. To advance understanding of African American adolescents' academic experiences, this study examined the longitudinal linkages between stereotypically feminine (i.e., expressive) and stereotypically masculine (i.e., instrumental) personality characteristics and school adjustment. The moderating effects of youth's ethnic identity and school racial composition also were tested. Participants were 352 African American youth (50.1% girls; mean age at Time 1 = 12.04 years; SD= 2.03) who participated in annual home interviews. Net of biological sex, expressive traits (kind, sensitive) were positively related to school self-esteem and school bonding for both girls and boys, but youth with higher levels of instrumentality (independent, competitive) exhibited sharper declines in academic achievement across adolescence. School racial composition moderated the effects of instrumentality at the between-person level, such that instrumentality was positively related to school self-esteem only for youth who attended schools with fewer African American students. These results highlight the importance of incorporating gendered personality traits, rather than biological sex alone, into theoretical accounts of African American youth's school functioning.

Coming Out as Transgender: Navigating the Social Implications of a Transgender Identity

ABSTRACTThis study examines transgender coming-out narratives. Most previous studies of coming out as transgender have relied on psychological stage models of identity development, with little empirical verification. This study uses identity theory to reframe transgender coming out as a primarily external, ongoing, and socially situated process. The data were collected from 20 transgender people residing in the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota metro area through interviews and focus groups. The analyses reveal that coming out as transgender requires navigating others’ gender expectations, others’ reactions, and the threat of violence. The results indicate that transgender individuals do not simply decide to “come out of the closet” and then stay out. Rather, they make strategic decisions regarding the enactment of gender and gender identity disclosure based on specific social contexts. Coming out as transgender is best conceptualized as an ongoing, socially embedded, skilled management of one’s gender identity.

LGBTIQ+ Youth and Experiences with Violence in Education

In the article, we focus on young LGBTIQ+ individuals’ experiences with violence in education. Research show that LGBTIQ+ youth are targeted with various forms of violence within education; while most research focuses on peer-to-peer violence, the violence perpetrated by school workers, and their inactivity when it comes to addressing violence on the basis of gender and sexual identity, is often neglected. In the article, data gathered in the research Everyday life of young LGBTIQ+ individuals, as implemented by Pride Association in 2017, is presented. A total of 751 young LGBTIQ+ individuals aged between 16-30 participated in this research. In this article we focus on a specific aspect regarding their experiences with violence in education, namely, their experiences with violence perpetrated by schoolmates and school workers, including teachers and counsel workers, as well as on their feelings of safety in the school hallways and classrooms. Such violence is often addressed by ‘bullying discourse’, which rarely takes into account hetero- and cisnormative social structures and their manifestations in education, and it predominantly addresses bullying as a form of individual pathology and not as practices of violence that derive their disciplinary power in terms of enforcing normative enactments of gender and sexuality. In this regard, violence against young LGBTIQ+ individuals in education should be addressed within a broader framework that takes into account social power relations.

LGBTIQ+ Youth and Experiences with Violence in Education

In the article, we focus on young LGBTIQ+ individuals’ experiences with violence in education. Research show that LGBTIQ+ youth are targeted with various forms of violence within education; while most research focuses on peer-to-peer violence, the violence perpetrated by school workers, and their inactivity when it comes to addressing violence on the basis of gender and sexual identity, is often neglected. In the article, data gathered in the research Everyday life of young LGBTIQ+ individuals, as implemented by Pride Association in 2017, is presented. A total of 751 young LGBTIQ+ individuals aged between 16-30 participated in this research. In this article we focus on a specific aspect regarding their experiences with violence in education, namely, their experiences with violence perpetrated by schoolmates and school workers, including teachers and counsel workers, as well as on their feelings of safety in the school hallways and classrooms. Such violence is often addressed by ‘bullying discourse’, which rarely takes into account hetero- and cisnormative social structures and their manifestations in education, and it predominantly addresses bullying as a form of individual pathology and not as practices of violence that derive their disciplinary power in terms of enforcing normative enactments of gender and sexuality. In this regard, violence against young LGBTIQ+ individuals in education should be addressed within a broader framework that takes into account social power relations.

Indigenous Ambivalent Figure in Jack Davis’s Play, The Dreamers

History of Australian Aboriginal’s colonisation, exploitation and assimilation has had ill effects on the performance of Indigenous gender relations, challenged the heteronormative conception of gender and directed Aboriginal people into shaping marginalised type of masculinities and femininities. With this background, this study attempts to depict the trajectory of shift in gender enactment of Aboriginal men and women in the pre and post contact era. The purpose is to account for the gender enactment of Indigenous people of Australia as has been veridically represented in Davis’s The Dreamers in the decades of 1970s and 1980s. Zooming in on such issues as unemployment, imprisonment, alcohol consumption, and acts of violence, among others, this paper argues that Indigenous characters in the play show signs of crisis of masculinity; in this regard, Tim Edwards’s notion of the crisis of masculinity has been employed. As the counterbalance of Indigenous emasculated men, however, the masculine performative role of Indigenous women has been highlighted. Raising these assumptions, we touch upon Judith Butler’s notion of performativity and gender identity, at the heart of theoretical framework, and prove the authority of our discussion regarding Indigenous ambivalent figures in the light of Indigenous critics such as Brendan Hokowhitu, Kim Anderson and Shino Konishi, to name but a few. Keywords: Jack Davis; The Dreamers; Indigenous Gender Roles; The Crisis of Masculinity; Performativity

The Challenge of Mütterliteratur: Gender, Generation, and the Genres of German Cultural Memory

Current models of German postwar memory culture often contrast an accusatory second-generation Vaterliteratur with a more self-reflexive third-generation family writing. This article demonstrates that reading second-generation books about mothers in the context of historical cultural memory undermines this distinction. Ingeborg Drewitz’s Gestern war heute (1978), Barbara Bronnen’s Die Tochter (1982), and Helga Novak’s Die Eisheiligen (1979) share key features with the post- Wende “new family novel” typified in recent scholarship. These similarities suggest that changing enactments of gender and cultural memory have allowed previously feminized experiences and memory practices to evolve into the basis for a national memory culture.

Doing vegetarianism to destabilize the meat-masculinity nexus in La Plata, Argentina*

In patriarchal societies where hegemonic masculinity implies an imperative to eat meat, vegetarianism disrupts food culture, raising questions about how vegetarians do, re-do, and rework gender. Analyzing 23 interviews in La Plata, Argentina, I find that the narratives of conversion and social pushback reported by women and men expose gender enactment and social reinforcement of the binary. At times, vegetarians compensate by drawing on scripts of femininities and masculinities that uphold difference, e.g. women cook meat and reassure meat-eaters; men make rationality-based claims and demonstrate strength. Yet in other moments, vegetarians defy attempts to hold them accountable to gendered social expectations. Women, for example, assert authority over their diets; men embody rejection of the meat-masculinity nexus by adopting a worldview that also rejects sexism and racism. I contend that in such a context, we cannot separate the ways people ‘do vegetarianism’ from how they ‘do gender.’ Doing vegetarianism in interactions drives social change, contributing to the de-linking of meat from gender hegemony and revealing the resisting and reworking of gender in food spaces.

Blurring the Boundaries: The Interplay of Gender and Local Communities in the Commercialization of Social Ventures

This paper examines the critical role of gender in the commercialization of social ventures. We argue that cultural beliefs about what is perceived to be appropriate work for each gender influence how founders of social ventures incorporate commercial activity into their ventures. Specifically, we argue and show that although cultural beliefs that disassociate women from commercial activity may result in female social venture founders being less likely to use commercial activity than their male counterparts, these effects are moderated by cultural beliefs about gender and commercial activity within founders’ local communities. The presence of female business owners in the same community mitigates the role of founders’ gender on the use of commercial activity. We examine these issues through a novel sample of 584 social ventures in the United States. We constructively replicate and extend these findings with a supplemental analysis of a second sample, the full population of new nonprofit organizations founded during a two-year period in the United States (n = 31,160). By highlighting how gendered aspects of both the social and commercial sectors interact to shape the use of commercial activity by social venture founders, our findings contribute to research on hybrid organizations in the social sector, communities as a context for the enactment of gender, and the enactment of gender in entrepreneurship.The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1144 .

Addressing gender equality: enactments of gender and hegemony in the educational textbooks used in Swedish sports coaching and educational programmes

ABSTRACTSport is often described as a field containing competitive and hierarchy shaping activities. However, in Sweden and elsewhere, this field is also permeated by democratic principles where, for example, everybody has the right to participate in children’s and youth sports regardless of gender, ethnicity or physical ability. In Sweden, there are distinct objectives for gender equality, where women/girls and men/boys should ideally be treated and recognised equally. The aim of this paper is twofold: to examine how gender is enacted in the textbooks used in Swedish sports coaching and educational programmes and to identify whether any of the enactments reflect a hegemonic masculinity. The textbooks used in two of the most extensive courses arranged by the Swedish Sports Confederation, ‘The Platform’ [Plattformen] and ‘Basic Coach Education’ [Grundtränarutbildning] are in focus. The theoretical framework and methodological approach are inspired by research on sport, gender and the hegemonic masculinity thesis. In the process of analysis, the hegemonic perspective is central. During the analysis, four themes are identified as expressions of a hegemonic masculinity and, thus, as obstacles to gender equality. Firstly, the binary sex norm poses a real challenge for the implementation of gender equality because it helps to shape a hierarchy that privileges men and masculinities. Secondly and thirdly, the themes ‘puberty’ and ‘the coach’ appear to be important, in that they support and contest a gendered hierarchy. Finally, there are examples of men, like sport coaches, appearing as genderless, which is interpreted as a hegemonic acceptance of the category of men (as universal and genderless subjects). By critically illuminating these themes, the paper adds to the wider research field of sport, coaching and education programmes and the complexity of gender mainstreaming in sport.