Gender Agency Research Articles

Guest editorial: New perspectives on women’s entrepreneurship in China: identity negotiation, gender agency, and meaning-making

Guest editorial: New perspectives on women’s entrepreneurship in China: identity negotiation, gender agency, and meaning-making

The gender agency gap in fiction writing (1850 to 2010)

Works of fiction play a crucial role in the production of cultural stereotypes. Concerning gender, a widely held presumption is that many such works ascribe agency to men and passivity to women. However, large-scale diachronic analyses of this notion have been lacking. This paper provides an assessment of agency attributions in 87,531 fiction works written between 1850 and 2010. It introduces a syntax-based approach for extracting networks of character interactions. Agency is then formalized as a dyadic property: Does a character primarily serve as an agent acting upon the other character or as recipient acted upon by the other character? Findings indicate that female characters are more likely to be passive in cross-gender relationships than their male counterparts. This difference, the gender agency gap, has declined since the 19th century but persists into the 21st. Male authors are especially likely to attribute less agency to female characters. Moreover, certain kinds of actions, especially physical and villainous ones, have more pronounced gender disparities.

Spatial Imagination, Embedded Female Agency, and Women’s Networks in Early Christianity

Abstract Using spatial and intersectional analysis as well as theory dedicated to embedded gender agency, this article argues that the religious identities of female Christians were dynamic and pluriform not static and singular. These tools help to identify the ways in which one or more aspects of simultaneously co-existing female gendered identities became salient in different situations, through specific social practices. Documents for analysis include references to urban women in Pauline literature with special attention to widows/single women in 1 Timothy, ascetical women rejecting marriage as represented by the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla, and the representations of female Christ followers and the gendering of Christianity by first and second century Greek and Roman polemicists/magistrates against Christ religion (Celsus, Lucian, Caecilius, Pliny).

Where are the missing girls? Gender inequality, job precarity, and journalism students’ career choices in China

This study aims to explain the puzzling discrepancy between the large number of female journalism students and the comparatively fewer female journalists in the workforce in China today. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 graduates in journalism from the same class, we investigate the female students’ professional socialization process and analyze the external and internal factors that led most of them to choose a journalism major but not to join the journalism industry. Along the three significant phases in a funnel-shaped model—admission, college education and internship, and job market—we identify the combined influences of structural gender inequality and female students’ increasing gender awareness and agency. We further examine female students’ situation through the conceptual lens of precarity and discuss how it is manifested in ways that differ from those in the West. Our findings reveal a mixed picture of gender reality in Chinese journalism and in Chinese society.

Competing Allies: Legal Pluralism, and Gendered Agency in Mumbai’sShariaCourts

Building upon participant observation in a women’sshariacourt in Mumbai, run by activists of an Islamic feminist movement in India, and its networks with similar alternative dispute resolution forums run by maleqazis(non-state actors trained in Islamic law and Muslim personal law), this article explores the modalities of interaction between non-state actors who adjudicate Muslim personal law in India. It also delineates how gendered agency is shaped in these interactions. This article identifies three aspects of this interaction between male and female non-state actors: (1) everyday cooperation between male and female qazi despite their doctrinal differences; (2) the gradual assertion of female qazi in and through everyday cooperation with male qazi; and (3) institutional competition interlaced with everyday cooperation. I explore a range of interactions including contestation and collaborative contestation between non-state actors, a domain that has not been explored in existing scholarship on legal pluralism. I also draw attention to how we might think about women’s agency in a legal pluralist context beyond a straightforward challenge to male authority and as it is forged at the intersection of individuals, interactions, and institutions. Through a critical exploration of women’s agency, I show how women both inhabit and transform gender norms at an individual and institutional level in their interactions with non-state actors and institutions, expanding scholarship on legal pluralism and gender beyond reified “women’s interests.”

Bodies of and against austerity: gendered dispossession, agency and struggles for worth in Portugal

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Nation and Its ‘Other’ Women: Muslim Subjectivity and Gendered Agency in Delhi

Partition produced newer anxieties for Delhi’s Muslims as they became subject to the everyday violence of both state and society, exacerbated by the rise of Hindu nationalism and the organised demarcation of Muslim-dominated areas as ‘exclusionary’ and ‘contested’ zones. While the city was fraught with violent conflicts and exclusionary politics, gender was also being redefined and renegotiated. This article will query the particular lived experience and embodied agency of Muslim women in order to study gender and space within the context of social, cultural, economic and political changes after Partition. It will explore the ways in which women exercised agency and claimed space and belonging in everyday negotiations and strategies for survival, thereby contributing to family income and small capitalism in the Old City. It will study their diverse experiences which were shaped by their social location and challenged by the political, religious, economic and social processes that impinged upon their lives. Rather than seeing them as passive subjects of history, it foregrounds Muslim women’s navigation of state, community and the household in independent India.

Screening Gender and Popular Culture in Moroccan Cinema

This paper tries to analyze the construction of gender in modern Moroccan cinema. By considering some Moroccan postcolonial films, this paper is an attempt to question the notion of cinematic representation of gender and popular culture in Moroccan contemporary cinema. Indeed, much academic research and scholarship have been written on Moroccan cinema, but the research on gender representation is still in its infancy. The present article attends to the problematic of gender agency as represented by contemporary Moroccan cinema especially in the following films: Trik Layalat (2007) (Deux Femmes Sur la Route), Mille Mois (2003), Youm w Lila (2013) (Day and Night), Rock the Casbah (2013). These films have been chosen in order to shed light on the controversial (mis)-representation of gender in modern Moroccan cinema. In this way, this paper aims to foreground the complex ambivalent formation of female identities and temporalities. Thus, this work examines the politics of women’s recognition as represented in Moroccan cinema. The portrayal of the women in Moroccan cinema, oftentimes contradictory, reveals the dominant patriarchal attitudes towards gender in Morocco, and continues to provide insight into shifting social roles in the period after Moroccan independence. The films selected by this paper highlight the grounds behind the abrogation of women, their alienation and loss in a society that is imbedded in patriarchal discourse. Ipso facto, in this paper attends to the problematic of transmitting a culture that is de-alienated by discursive conditions related both to women and men, without each one blaming the other to be the cause of his or her everyday shock and loss.

Caring for Dying Parents in the Shadow of Childhood Maltreatment: Gendered Agency, Constraint, and Health

Adult daughters represent the largest and fastest growing population of providers of unpaid care labor (UCL) to older adults with life limiting illness. Providing UCL to parents at the end of life is associated with significant and lasting risks of morbidity and mortality, especially for women with negative relationships with care recipients, and those who provide UCL based on constraining gendered expectations rather than agentic choice. While nearly one quarter of US women experience some form of maltreatment from parents during childhood, few studies have examined, or even acknowledged, the effect of trauma on the experience and health impact of family UCL. We used feminist poststructuralist informed dialogic narrative analysis to explore discursive constructions of agency and constraint in co-constructed life histories from 21 women who provided end of life UCL to older adult parents who maltreated them in childhood. For these women, parental childhood maltreatment influenced identity construction, social position, intersubjectivity, and vulnerability to victimization. For some, providing end-of-life UCL to the parents who maltreated them facilitated the mobilization of relational agency and identity validation. For others, providing UCL potentiated lifelong constraint, reinforcing their positions as non-agents and leading to significant psychical and emotional harm. End of life UCL for older adult parents represents a crucible out of which either healing or re-traumatization can arise. Our findings will be leveraged to inform clinical practice and policy to support the growing population women trauma survivors providing UCL to older adult parents, reducing negative outcomes for those at the greatest risk.

Deficit or Credit? A Comparative, Qualitative Study of Gender Agency and Female Gang Membership in Los Angeles and Glasgow

To date, there has been a paucity of comparative, qualitative research exploring the nuances of women’s gang involvement beyond the United States. In this article, we seek to address this gap by drawing upon qualitative interviews with small samples of self-nominated female gang members in Los Angeles, California (United States) and Glasgow, Scotland (United Kingdom). The emerging insights indicated that two key models of entry into the “social field” of the gang emerged in the data: a deficit model entry linked to drugs and debt and a credit model of entry where women were considered to bring social skill, expertise, and agency into the gang. Implications in terms of testable hypotheses for future research as well as for future practice are outlined.

Temporality and gendered agency: Menopausal subjectivities in women’s work

This article advances feminist organizational theorizing about embodiment and subjectivity by investigating menopause at work as a temporally constituted phenomenon. We ask how time matters in women’s embodied and subjective experiences of menopause at work. Theoretically, we draw on feminist writers McNay and Grosz to explore the relationship between gendered agency and time in a corpus of 48 qualitative interviews conducted with women employed at two Australian universities about their experiences of menopause. Our empirical analysis identifies three temporal modalities – episodic, helical and relational – that show how gendered organizational subjectivities are not simply temporally situated, but created in and through distinct temporal forces. We offer two contributions to feminist organizational theory: first, by illuminating the ontological role played by time in gendered agency; and second, by fleshing out the notion of a ‘body politics of surprise’ with implications for feminist studies of organizational embodiment, politics and ethics.

Girls and the formation of modern Ireland

ABSTRACTImages of the ‘ideal’ Irish girl and woman were mobilized through a range of dominant discourses in Ireland from 1831 to 1931: biological, educational, religious and political. Female education was firmly located within the domestic sphere. This paper critically explores the interwoven gender discourses in education that were fashioned within the ideological, religious and political context of the period and then moves on to analyze gender subjectivities and gender agency in performativity. Methodologically, it draws on uncharted archival sources such as national school books, teacher manuals, medical and religious discourse and published journal articles.

The Complex Ties that Bind: Gendered Agency and Expectations in Conflict and Climate Change‐related Migration

AbstractFor the past decade, western public discourse and the policy world have become increasingly concerned about ‘irregular’ migration and, to a slightly lesser extent perhaps, what driving role conflict and climate change play in triggering it. Addressing the causes and effects requires having a better understanding of the impacts that climate change has on multi‐dimensional crises and the knock‐on effect this has on migration. A key factor in understanding how these processes affect different women, girls, men, boys and other gender identities is gender. Much of the analysis, however, has tended to be based on relatively simplistic teleological models and gender stereotypes. Based on case studies, this article argues for more nuanced understandings of how gender and other societal markers affect people differently in different contexts of crisis and climate change‐related migration to better formulate policy responses.

Swashbucklers: The Costume Adventure Series by James Chapman, and: The Middle Ages on Film: Critical Essays ed. by Meriem Pagès and Karolyn Kinane, and: Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to A Game of Thrones ed. by Helen Young, and: The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre ed. by Helen Young

THE FAIR FIELD OF MEDIEVALISM-THE RECENT HARVESTJAMES CHAPMAN, Swashbucklers: The Costume Adventure Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Pp. xiii, 279 (with 27 stills). isbn: 978-0-7190- 8881-0. $110.00.MERIEM PAGES and KAROLYN KINANE, eds., The Middle Ages on Film: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015. Pp. vi, 219. isbn: 978-0-7864-7941-2. $40.00.HELEN YOUNG, ed., Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to 'A Game of Thrones.' Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 230. isbn: 978-1-60497-896-4. $104.99.HELEN YOUNG, ed., The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 231. isbn: 978-1-60947-897-1. $109.99.Helen Young is indefatigable. She has published, almost simultaneously, two excellent complementary edited collections of essays that discuss many of the subfields of medievalism. The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre offers nine essays that engage what Young calls 'the multiple Middle Ages' (1). Young eschews dividing this collection into discrete sections-she calls each essay a 'chapter'-better to reflect the 'impossibility of neatly categorizing contemporary medievalisms as well as the tendency of genres to bleed into each other' (4). Chapters are clustered to reveal overlaps rather than boundaries.The first four chapters cluster around issues of gender roles and agency. Clare Bradford and Rebecca Hutton look at the ways in which recent film and television retellings of the Arthuriad have used female protagonists, though that use is neatly circumscribed in a way that denies the protagonists real agency. Judy Ann Ford sees a similar restriction on agency for the protagonists in the films Red Riding Hood and Brave. Geneva Diamond argues that this pattern-a sort of one step forward, two steps backward approach that results in unrealized agency-continues offscreen in the romances of Julie Garwood, where a medieval setting 'allows a hypermasculinization of courtship' (5) not found in Garwood's non-medieval romances. In contrast, Robin Anne Reid notes how Nicola Griffith's 2013 historical novel Hild offers an eponymous hero who successfully counters 'popular neo-medieval fantasies of the twenty-first century' (84). The novel is at its heart a political statement determined to re-envision the distant past in terms of contemporary notions of gender-neutral activism.Alana Bennett's essay changes genre once again as the chapters in this volume move from the big and small screens to print and now to music, specifically the ways that neo-medieval music raises questions about cultural identity. Accuracy of performance is not essential to such music-it is in some ways antithetical to it. Neo-medieval music 'deliberately re-creates and repurposes' medieval music and instruments, coupling them with spectacular stage effects 'to signal and enable an escape from the mundane world into the reclaimed past' (6).Similarly, the video game Assassin's Creed, as Elisabeth Herbst Buzay and Emmanuel Buzay demonstrate, while bearing all the trappings of the medieval, uses those trappings as a backdrop for discussing a variety of contemporary issues, specifically present-day tensions between Christianity and Islam.Carol Robinson surveys issues of gender and sexuality in the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson and the Matrix film franchise of the brothers Wachowski. Anne McKendry pairs the quest of the modern detective with that of the medieval knight by looking at the medievalist crime fiction of Ellis Peters, Peter Tremayne, and Bernard Knight and finds that both medieval and post-medieval questers seek a common ground-the establishment of social order.The final essay brings this collection back full circle to the Arthuriad, as Molly Brown examines how the art of telling a story, not nostalgia, informs Kevin Crossley- Holland's 2001-2003 Arthurian trilogy and Catherine Fisher's 2002 novel Corbenic. …

Unsold Peony: The Life and Poetry of Daoist Priestess-Poet Yu Xuanji of Tang China

This article takes an interdisciplinary approach to a comprehensive examination of the life, poetry, and subjectivity of the Daoist priestess-poet Yu Xuanji of Tang China. It begins with a philological study and textual analysis that reconstructs Yu’s life and psychological experience. Through close readings of her poems, interpretations of their images and symbols, and analyses of their syntax and structure, the article then undertakes a nuanced interpretation of Yu’s works that reveals her strong subjectivity and acknowledges her poetic achievements. By situating her work within its cultural-religious contexts and applying a feminist and gender critical lens to her writings, the article also foregrounds Yu’s gender awareness and agency as a Daoist priestess and dispels the false label of “courtesan” placed on her by discourses of later ages.

Exploring gender norms, agency and intimate partner violence among displaced Colombian women: A qualitative assessment

Women displaced by conflict are often exposed to many factors associated with a risk of intimate partner violence (IPV) such as high levels of community violence and the breakdown of social support systems. Previous research found that Colombian women perceived IPV to increase after displacement. This study explored how the experience of displacement altered gendered roles in ways that influenced the risk of IPV. Thirty-three qualitative interviews were conducted with displaced partnered Colombian women. Women disclosed that couples often held patriarchal gender norms; however, the roles of each partner necessitated by conditions of displacement were often in conflict with these norms. Men's underemployment and women's employment outside the home were viewed as gender transgressive within some partnerships and increased relationship conflict. Economic resources intended to empower displaced women, notably women's earnings and home ownership, had unintended negative consequences for women's agency. These consequences included a corresponding decrease in partner financial contributions and reduced mobility. Women's ability to obtain support or leave violent relationships was hindered by interpersonal, social and structural barriers. For women to have agency to leave violent relationships, power relationships at all levels from the interpersonal to societal must be recognised and addressed.

Gender, Mission and Work

This article explores the complex relationship between formal gender rights and agency in the gender-conservative Norwegian mission organization, the Norwegian Lutheran China Mission Association (NLCM). The NLCM, currently named the Norwegian Lutheran Mission (Norsk Luthersk Misjonssamband, NLM), is known for promoting women’s subordination under men. In the NLM, women were not granted the right to vote at the General Assembly (GA) until 1997. Even today, only men may have a seat on the NLM’s committee for principal theological deliberations and decisions, because supreme spiritual leadership is reserved exclusively for men. NLM is currently the largest mission organization in the Nordic countries. The NLCM has been understood as an exception among Protestant missions that promoted women’s visibility, formal organizational rights and public role at the turn of the 20th century. Based on original archival research on the NLCM’s first decades in China, this paper analyses to what extent the NLCM was exceptional in its gender ideology and practice compared to other major Norwegian mission societies and Norwegian state Christianity at the turn of the 20th century.

Gender, empowerment, and cultural preservation at Topu Honis Shelter Home, Timor-Leste

Women's empowerment, the ability of a woman to make her own decisions and shape her own life, is a common goal for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating under the gender and development framework. This article examines the way that one NGO, Topu Honis Shelter Home, in Oecussi, Timor-Leste, facilitates the empowerment of its young women members and challenges gender norms in a patriarchal society. In doing six months of participant observation research at Topu Honis and semi-structured interviews, I discerned four sources of empowerment, which are explored in this article: (1) gender equality, (2) education, (3) agency and confidence, and (4) cultural preservation. The primary finding of this research is the suggestion that cultural preservation can be an important resource for empowering women, even in a patriarchal society. At first glance, this may run counter to the dominant western notions of empowerment, but in the case of Topu Honis, key cultural practices are preserved while oppressive gender norms are simultaneously dis-embedded. Development practitioners should explore how preserving and promoting local cultural practices may contribute to development and/or empowerment.

Ironic Reversals:

Abstract Olupona's “indigenous hermeneutic” offers a privileged guided journey into the dense ritual space of a vital city. I underscore a subtle leitmotif—gender and female agency—running throughout this interpretive account to show women's power to be both a sustaining force and source of ironic reversals in the fate of Ilé-Ifẹ̀

Gender Embodiment as Gender-Enacted Body: A Review of Intimate Partner Violence and Gender Embodiment Perspectives

The author proposes the gender-enacted body as a better perspective of gender embodiment than the three current prevailing views: sex differences (the biomedical organism), socio-cultural imprint (the regulated body) and experienced gender (the lived body), which are not wrong, but misrepresentative of the active nature of gender embodiment. Gender embodiment is both an ongoing process of configuring subjectivity and the ensuing gendered agency. This implementation of the enacted body perspective is supported by two different arguments: first, a theoretical one to establish that the process of gender embodiment and the corporality that results from it are the settlement of human meaning and acting conditions; second, an empirical application of this perspective to resolve the shortcomings of current explanations of intimate partner violence in heterosexual couples by interpreting some well-known gender embodiment processes as enactment processes in which the body becomes an agent that generates practice. These gender-enacted bodies generate, in assemblage with the breakdown of the circuits of dependence within the couple, the agency of this kind of violence.