Gender Agency Research Articles

The Phantasm of the Feminine: Gender, Race and Nationalist Agency in Early Twentieth-Century China

The Phantasm of the Feminine: Gender, Race and Nationalist Agency in Early Twentieth-Century China

Challenges of thinking feminism and revolution in Egypt between 2011 and 2014

The approach to politics by ruling elites in Egypt has been consistently patriarchal. In this context, feminism stands as a resilient revolutionary force, which over the twentieth and the twenty first century contributes to the complex cultural process that Michael Hardt conceptualizes as ‘human revolution’. Building on this concept, and on the history of Egyptian feminism, this essay analyzes the 25th January Revolution as a challenge to the remnants of the patriarchal culture. If feminized bodies, as the site of cultural and political contestation, have been constructed, in both nationalist and colonial discourses, as objects in need of protection, women's agency has challenged these narratives and, in the context of the 2011 revolution, has re-shaped the discourse about protection. The views and actions of the emerging women's movement are situated along the extended line of the feminist revolution, which here is examined through the methodology of oral history. Focusing on cultural, more than institutional, change, and shedding light on the shift from women to gender agency, this essay investigates the strategies through which the young revolutionaries in Egypt today are creating a new political discourse, imagining new forms of political participation.

Charlotte Brontë’s Circumvention of Patriarchy: Gender, Labour and Financial Agency in Jane Eyre

Whether Jane Eyre functions as a primarily feminist text has been a source of debate in recent literary and gender discourse; Jane’s ultimate marriage and pregnancy seemingly diminish her desire for independence and her resistance to socially constructed norms of appropriate femininity. However, these concessions on Jane’s part of her prized self-sufficiency are not sacrifices of her earned agency, but, alternatively, cognitive choices that she can afford to make as a result of her purchased societal station. Jane’s inheritance, a necessary rhetorical implementation on Charlotte Brontë’s part, provides her with the luxury to negotiate her own interpretation of the social conventions of marriage and motherhood. Financial autonomy allows Jane to view romantic involvement as a potentially equitable partnership rather than as an opportunity for social or monetary security; in order to grant Jane a truly egalitarian relationship with Rochester, Charlotte Bronte simultaneously relieves Rochester of his corporeal masculinity, effectively elevating Jane to the position of head of the household.

“The Walls of Her Prison”: Madness, Gender, and Discursive Agency in Eliza Fenwick's Secresy and Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman

The female protagonists of Eliza Fenwick's Secresy and Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman are located on the margins of madness, exploring the space between psychological disorder and reason. Both novels radically challenge eighteenth-century gendered discourses of madness and the accompanying institutions that sequester and silence women. However, while Fenwick and Wollstonecraft work to undermine gendered constructions of madness, they nonetheless remain bound to the discursive limits that divide madness and reason irreparably. Together, Secresy and The Wrongs of Woman indicate the pervasiveness of eighteenth-century discourses of madness, as both novels are finally unable to subvert the assumptions underlying these discourses, continuing to associate the feminine with unreason and madness with the inarticulate and incomprehensible.

Height matters: practicing consumer agency, gender, and body politics

The significance of body and gender in the formation of consumers’ identities and agencies has been widely scrutinized. Nevertheless, this study argues that this formation is not fully understood, unless the role of height is taken into account. It leans on a practice-based perspective and critical auto-ethnographic methodology so as to examine how a distinct agency is fabricated for a short-sized female body by a whole range of social, material, and sensory practices that are continuously enacted across various domains of life. It thereby adds to the existing literature on body, gender, and consumer agency by way of incorporating height into critical inquiries this far mostly concerned with weight; by way of materializing and sensorializing the fabrication of an embodied consumer agency this far addressed in visual terms; and by way of considering everyday life as the site in which it continuously unfolds. These insights bear important implications for the development of body politics.

Imperial narratives displaced by Indian subaltern identities in early amateur films

This article analyses how representations of Indian people in colonial amateur films from the 1920s challenged and displaced imperial narratives. It explores how conventional visual colonial rhetoric allowed typological (mis)representations of Indian people, and how these can often voice a suppressed collective history outside the films' customary early twentieth century imperial narrative on race and indigenous traditions. It discusses how British and Indian amateur filmmakers employed visual tropes of colonial discourse on race and identity when constructing, controlling and (mis)representing Indian identities as ‘criminal’ tribes, ‘savage’ colonial subjects, members of esoteric groups, and as members of the imperial elite. Most British amateur filmmakers modelled their records after colonial picture postcards of India or ethnographic and travelogue films, and supported Britain's ‘civilizing’ imperialism by portraying Indian people within a ‘primitive’ romanticised colonial locus. Some Indian amateur filmmakers often employed the journalistic style of British actualities (newsreels) across their entire collections and especially when recording state visits and durbars. Drawing on theoretical perspectives borrowed from the subaltern studies framework, this paper investigates issues of Indian racial and gender agency in four colonial amateur films, and argues that the visual (mis)representation of several Indian subaltern identities ultimately cancels conventional imperial narratives. The research corpus includes missionary films, ethnographic travelogues and home movies made by Anglican missionaries, British ethnographers and freemasons and Maharajahs in the late 1920s. These examples belong to film collections held by the British Film Institute, the Centre of South Asian Studies (University of Cambridge) and the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum.

Gender and Sexual Agency: How Young People Make Choices About Sex

Gender and Sexual Agency: How Young People Make Choices About Sex

Transborder Migration, Social Reproduction and Economic Development: A Case Study of Burmese Women Workers in Thailand

International MigrationVolume 48, Issue 6 p. 13-43 Transborder Migration, Social Reproduction and Economic Development: A Case Study of Burmese Women Workers in Thailand Kyoko Kusakabe, Kyoko Kusakabe Gender and Development Studies, School of Environment, Resources and Development, Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand.Search for more papers by this authorRuth Pearson, Ruth Pearson Centre for Development Studies, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom.Search for more papers by this author Kyoko Kusakabe, Kyoko Kusakabe Gender and Development Studies, School of Environment, Resources and Development, Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand.Search for more papers by this authorRuth Pearson, Ruth Pearson Centre for Development Studies, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom.Search for more papers by this author First published: 23 November 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2010.00630.xCitations: 23Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume48, Issue6Special Issue: WOMEN AND MIGRATION IN GLOBALIZING ASIA: GENDERED EXPERIENCES, AGENCY, AND ACTIVISMDecember 2010Pages 13-43 RelatedInformation

Class and gender inequalities in different types of welfare states: the Social Citizenship Indicator Program (SCIP)

Korpi W. Class and gender inequalities in different types of welfare states: the Social Citizenship Indicator Program (SCIP)Int J Soc Welfare 2010: ••: ••–••© 2010 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and International Journal of Social Welfare.This article considers the role of legislated welfare state institutions as mediators of effects of political and structural forces on citizens' levels of living of relevance to inequalities in health and mortality. The focus is on institutional structures of welfare state programmes relevant to class inequality, as indicated by income inequalities, and to gender inequality, conceived of as differences in agency. I introduce the Social Citizenship Indicator Program, a database providing quantitative and qualitative information on structures of main social insurance programmes in 18 countries from 1930 to 2000, on about 300,000 data points. It is used to delineate types of distributive institutions of relevance for income inequality. Institutions relevant for gendered agency inequality affect choices by women, especially mothers, between unpaid and paid work. Driving forces behind the emergence of differences in distributive institutions are discussed, and patterns of class and gender inequalities are outlined.

Feeling at Home: Gender and Creative Agency at Red House

Much has been written about Red House, the home of Jane and William Morris between 1859 and 1865, as an example of architectural innovation and a place of artistic fellowship. In accounts by Morris's contemporaries and subsequent scholars, Red House has also been represented as a site of conviviality, creativity and youthful idealism, where a utopian way of life proved unable to withstand the vagaries of mature responsibilities. This essay reconsiders the happy memories attached to Red House and explores how the affective investments that linked people, spaces and objects were created and enhanced by a shared process of creative improvisation there. Drawing on recent scholarly work on feelings, emotions and affect, this essay pays particular attention to the gendered experience of intimacy and creativity at Red House and seeks to redress a tendency to discount women's creative agency in the household. In the web of relationships at Red House, expressed and enacted through practices of creative labour and ...

The Conditions of Politics: Low-Caste Women's Political Agency in Contemporary North Indian Society

In this article I analyse the structural and cultural conditions of low-caste women's political agency in urban north India. Whereas in Western feminist political theory, the sexual division of labour is considered to be a key constraint for women's political participation, I show how this has a secondary relevance in the context analysed. I argue that issues concerning the division of labour are intertwined with and subject to those of male consent and support for women's activities. I illustrate how it is often the supposedly ‘oppressive’ household boundaries rather than alternative outer spaces that, under a series of enabling circumstances, initiate women's political activities. Against this backdrop, I show how Indian women activists’ political agency is shaped by men's role, and how agency's relational nature is embedded in women's lifecycles, everyday practices and cultural expectations; in essence, in overall gendered agency. Comparative analyses between Western and non-Western models of political participation and discourse have only just begun. In this respect, I contribute to this nascent field in the following directions: not only do the arguments I present in this article challenge the individualistic Western subject of political action, but they also complicate the idea of the resulting empowerment as a culturally constructed process whose understanding arises from the dialectics between insider and outsider values.

Gender, Citizenship and Political Agency in Lebanon

This paper examines the condition of women as political agents in Lebanon in the context of legislation and political participation. It focuses on the effect of the Civil War on women's conditions of living in Lebanon, and their lives in the post-war period. War had negative effects on women, reinforcing their patriarchal subjugation, furthering their economic deprivation, and diverting attention from issues like women's rights, which have only added to women's political and social marginalization. The war also had a positive effect on women as it opened up new avenues for them to participate in public life. This paper analyzes gender relations in Lebanon through the frameworks of social change and the rise of civil society, but also emphasizes the challenges facing women in post-war Lebanon, where they are still governed by patriarchal values that hinder their political participation and their identification as full citizens.

The politics of veiling, gender and the Muslim subject: on the limits and possibilities of anti-racist education in the aftermath of September 11

This paper draws on feminist, postcolonial and queer analytic frameworks to address the pedagogical significance of veiling and the Muslim subject in the aftermath of September 11. It addresses questions related to the knowledge and analytic frameworks needed to engage pedagogically with a politics of difference vis-à-vis the gendered body and practices of veiling in the context of teacher and public school education. The paper discusses implications for developing an approach to anti-racist education that is capable of addressing the limits of Orientalist representations of veiled women, while still entertaining a critique of heteronormativity and sexism as they apply across the Orientalist divide. The pedagogical implications of such tensions are explored in light of drawing on bodies of knowledge that attend to the historical specificity of gender and race relations, as well as engaging with analytic frameworks that inform a knowledge of the body as a cultural signifier. We conclude that a basis for articulating an anti-racist politics must be capable of engaging with a more sophisticated understanding of gender relations, sexuality, agency, and resistance within the context of interrogating narratives about the practices of veiling and unveiling.

Surviving Domestic Violence: Gender Poverty and Agency

Surviving Domestic Violence: Gender Poverty and Agency

Gender-Agency as Communicated in the Intra-Interorganizational Structures of the Spiritual Baptists of Barbados: A Postcolonial Account of Cultural Resistance

This article draws from a larger study of the postcolonial experiences of an Afro-Caribbean religious group called the Spiritual Baptists (of Barbados). It examines the question of gender agency as women and men contest the need to transform traditional and ecclesiastical organizational structures that served them well in their formative years. While being confronted with the reality that some of the structures that have been internalized are oppressive, gender agency emerges as a cultural identity that is navigated, contested, and manifested through younger members at the intra-interorganizational levels of experience. Group-as-a-whole theory provided an ontological understanding of how this agency is communicated within the Spiritual Baptist Church both at conscious and unconscious levels of interaction. As a cultural insider, the author was able to draw on the nuances of the organizational culture to make sense of the complex interrelatedness of subgrouping, religious identity, privilege, leadership–followership dynamics, and personal desire which got encoded in the discourse for greater authorization within the seemingly discrete gendered roles. Further, the author drew on a body of research on masculinity within a postcolonial context of the wider society from which this organization breathes its existence. To retain the authenticity of the voice of these agents, unstructured focus groups provided the mechanism of data gathering of the phenomenological experiences of the group-as-a-whole.

Roundtable Discussion on Sexuality in Development and Treatment II: Clinical Application

Through the detailed presentation and consideration of psychoanalytic work between a male analyst and female patient, this panel continues an earlier conversation (Slavin et al., 2004) on “dialogues” of sexuality in development and treatment. The present discussion focuses on the complex interaction between, on the one hand, the patient's unfinished developmental sexual and gender conflicts and struggles and, on the other, the analyst's equally gendered and sexual agency in promoting, as well as provoking, the process and outcome. Panelists and audience address the navigation of poles of seduction and growth, safety and danger, and the nature and development of sexual agency in women and men.

Gender at Critical Realism Conferences

This paper reports the findings of a case study of recent IACR conferences where subtle, but significant, (negative) gender differences in conference participation were observed. It goes on to use notions of gender order, agency and structure, styles and genres to explain the key causal factors that generate these differences. It concludes with some suggestions about how these gender differences could be minimised in future conferences.

“i tell myself to myself”: homosexual agency in the journals of anne lister (1791-1840)

Anne Lister's (1791-1840) journals are a voluminous account, spanning her lifetime, of her female homosexuality and intimate relationships. They are a priceless historical record of a woman's engagement with early nineteenth-century British culture. Whilst Anne's gender agency within her sociohistorical context has previously been analysed, her homosexual agency has not yet been considered. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on feminist literary theory, women's and lesbian feminist history, and history of sexuality, the methodical processes for inscribing agency into historical women's journal writings will be examined. Through a close reading of Anne's black clothes and her management of a sexually transmitted disease, Anne's sexual agency will be analysed through a consideration of her embodied strategies for spectatorial, sartorial and medical representation

Sanctuary: A Women’s Refuge in India

This research addresses delineations of gender roles, agency, and change in a modern urban women’s residence in north India. It explores the social relations of residents in a women’s hostel where the shaping of special community creates empowermenf through self-reflection, interaction, and negotiation, yet where also reside tensions, paradoxes, and constraints, in the merging and interplay of traditional values and those of modernity.

"A boy stepped out': Migrancy, visuality, and the mapping of masculinities in later fiction of Ian McEwan

If the figures of mobility and displacement have become leitmotifs for redressing the future for gender agency and autonomy, how do the formal devices of Ian McEwan's later fiction predict the implications of directing such critical metaphors at masculinities in fields of social visibility? What does it mean for his aesthetic to perform this kind of emblematic function for "masculinity studies' anyway? And can it do so without anachronism: without merely affirming the abstractive practices of theory's intrusion into literary fiction in search of answers? This article addresses the dialogue between contemporary gender politics and fictional technique in a novelist who remains a far from straightforward figure for feminist ethics today--not least because of his (in)famously spare and elusive narrative register. Tailoring alternative frameworks to three key novels from his later oeuvre , it agues that the possibility of complicating the dialectically constitutive and constituting model of human agency is actively re-envisioned through McEwan's use of literary realism. For if masculinity is irreducible to visual regimes of legitimation, then it is the unfinished and aesthetically promiscuous idiom of McEwan's realisms in which an open-ended account of male subjectivity finds its narrational dynamism. Reading becomes viewing, and Derrida meets Percy Lubbock, in this portrait of a tricksterish McEwan whose later experiment tackles the complex mapping of masculinity's creative formation as it emerges between, if ultimately collapsing, the poles of compulsory inherence and wishful voluntarism, bodily inscription and recuperation.