Gender Debate Research Articles

Towards the Concept of Digital Grassroots Youth Innovation

In recent years, young people have acquired a more active role in different areas of public life, such as culture, politics and gender debates. However, the relevance of their role in innovation processes has remained largely undiscussed. Are young people, in particular those from working class backgrounds, a forgotten actor for innovation and technological change policies? This study aims to understand whether the youth population—who are widely connected to the Internet, who do not necessarily participate in formal educational spaces but are increasingly acquiring digital skills autonomously—can be considered as an agent of innovation. Specifically, this study aims to propose and define the concept of Digital Grassroots Youth Innovation. It is based on both empirical and theoretical sources. On the one hand, it relies on a compilation of experiences of innovative activities related to digital technologies led by young people in Argentina. On the other hand, it is supported by a theoretical discussion on (a) the different types of innovations and their subjects, (b) the specificities of the ‘marginal mass’ in informational capitalism and (c) the characterisation of the young population in Argentina as ‘NEET’ (not in education, employment or training). Finally, we ask about the role played by digital technologies and non-formal learning in these particular innovation processes.

Frames of Glass: Goldfish and Gender in Paint, Performance, and Print, 1870–1914

Abstract: This article draws upon examples from fiction, popular journalism, travel writing, theatre, and fine art from 1870 to 1914 to trace the evolving representation of goldfish in relation to shifting attitudes toward women in British and American culture. Beautiful and domesticated, yet quiet, unobtrusive, and often confined to its own miniature domestic "sphere," the goldfish seemed initially to parallel the domestic wife and had been used to naturalize domestic ideology. In the 1870s and 1880s, however, the importation of fancy goldfish with different and exaggerated morphological traits unsettled what the Victorians had taken to be self-evident and natural about this species and, by extension, their own. I argue that, at a time when the gender debate was inflected by biologically deterministic arguments about women's "natural" societal roles, the figure of the goldfish became a remarkably flexible discursive tool to grapple with (or endorse) the changing economic and social trajectories of Anglo-American women. A hitherto unexamined alternative to the quintessential Victorian image of the "bird in the cage," this study of the goldfish and its bowl provides insight into how the Victorians' confrontation with other species encouraged them to look more critically at themselves.

The gender debate: is midwifery education ‘women's work’?

This series of six articles is inspired by themes arising from the Royal College of Midwives State of Midwifery Education report. The series explores the current landscape and challenges in educating the future midwifery workforce, particularly those that pertain to the higher education workforce. This second article highlights some of the inequalities experienced by the majority female midwifery education workforce and their impact, exploring how these inequalities are symptomatic of many of the inequalities women experience more generally within patriarchal structures. The article examines if midwifery education is ‘women's work’, and how this can work to impede progression in leadership, research and scholarship for midwifery academics. How midwifery curricula can influence the future academic workforce in dismantling inequality is also considered.

How does the male gaze construct our understanding of sexual power — using the example of Chinese film female characters

China's increasing development and the people's giowing reliance on online social networking have led to social phenomena on social media becoming more prominent and. to some extent, deepening. Nowhere is this more evident than in the phenomenon of misogyny and men-pleasing, a gender debate that has been ongoing unresolved for over a century. The subject of this research paper is an in-depth analysis of the male gaze and a critique of the solutions that have been proposed. The research perspective of this paper will be based on the dissection of the male gaze by Foucault and Laura Mulvey, as well as postmodem feminist perspectives, to present and judge the gender issues that exist and are potential. From a theoretical perspective, the male gaze inherently influences plot and characterization in film, and the latter functionally deepens the impression on the masses on a societal scale. On the other hand, from an ideological standpoint, it can be argued that cunent attempts to counteract and diminish the male gaze are overly one-sided and may actually deepen society's ambivalence towards this social issue.

Becoming a Woman-Man

Abstract The phenomenon of female cross-dressing and gaining the social role of a man has been witnessed in the tribal patriarchal society of the remotest parts of the Dinaric region since the nineteenth century. Once found within both Slavic and Albanian populations, today sworn virgins have been rapidly vanishing, and are rarely still found in northern Albania. The fact that occurrence was equally common among Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim populations in the remotest mountain regions points to the phenomenon's ancientness. As women who aspired to the social status of men, sworn virgins did not cease to be women; only the “degree” of their womanhood or manhood varied. Examining this social phenomenon as a third gender, this article contextualizes it through Judith Butler's theory of performativity. It also focuses on the relatedness of the phenomenon to the ancient past, turning to existing theories, but also providing an original contribution to the third gender debate.

Mary Gladstone: Late-Victorian Hostess, Salonnière —and New Woman

ABSTRACT: Mary Gladstone's identity as an accomplished musician, salonnière , hostess, and ministerial secretary has been well-documented in recent scholarship. So has her close alliance with her father W. E. Gladstone, including their shared commitment to Victorian liberalism, Anglicanism, and the sanctity of the domestic sphere. But her close friendships with heterodox thinkers, her writings, and her work in support of female suffrage and social purity feminism suggest important distinctions between her views and those of her father. They also demonstrate that she occupied another subject position in late-century Britain: that of a proto-New Woman. Viewing her within this discursive field, and analyzing her associations with thinkers like Henry Scott Holland, Josephine Butler, John Jay Chapman, and Olive Schreiner, illuminate important, overlooked aspects of her life and ideological sympathies. Examining her diary entries, publications, and correspondence—especially her exchanges with Chapman and Schreiner—sheds new light on Gladstone's involvement in the socio-political, religious, and gender debates of the fin de siècle and of the distinctly progressive forms of her social and political liberalism.

Review of A Sword between the Sexes? C.S. Lewis and the Gender Debates

Review of A Sword between the Sexes? C.S. Lewis and the Gender Debates

The gender debate as experiment and performance in response to a global crisis, with an emphasis on Andreas Capellanus, the anonymous Mauritius von Craûn, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauenbuch. Or: the discovery of love and its discourse in the High and Late Middle Ages

ABSTRACT When medieval poets began to reflect on love, it was, from the beginning, a highly complex and problematic phenomenon, mostly determined by frustration, contradictions, and a lack of fulfilment. Highlighting particularly two major texts, one in Latin, the other in Middle High German, this paper brings to light the critically important element of discourse as part of the public performance of theoretical and practical reflections of love in the Middle Ages. Since courtly love thus has to be defined as a literary medium for courtly debates about its own identity, it makes perfect sense that we hardly ever hear about actual individual satisfaction and the realisation of erotic dreams. Instead, the overarching intention by medieval poets was to problematise the issue of love and to present its paradoxes, difficulties, and conflicts through the literary performance, not to present a maudlin, sentimental story with a simple happy end. As we realise here, the debate about proper attitudes towards the other gender, the analysis of values and virtues all contribute to the realisation of the discourse itself.

Trap/Trope: Galarte's Trans-Figurative, Racialized Readings

Trap/Trope: Galarte's Trans-Figurative, Racialized Readings

Gender debate is not worthy in the 21st century classroom: Evidence-based outcomes from psychological abilities in students

The debate about differences in intellectual abilities is far from over. This debate has astronomically drifted from academic success to mental possessions. In this regard, the current study examined curiosity, creativity, and academic motivation in students for possible differences in terms of gender. A total of 568 high school students were surveyed using a cross-sectional design. The data were gathered using adapted curiosity, creativity, and academic motivation scales to test for possible differences. Male and female students had similar abilities in curious, creative, and motivated potentials, according to the test MANOVA results [F (3,549) = 0.718, p > 0.610; Wilks’ Lambda = 0.993, partial eta squared = 0.007]. This could be the result of similar opportunities presented to both male and female students in their academic journey. Therefore, educational policies on gender parity should be developed to help tone down unnecessary comparisons and mental competition between male and female students in the areas of curiosity, creativity, and academic motivation.

Promoting gender – Equitable agricultural value chains: the role of corporate social responsibility in Nigeria's Niger Delta

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to critically examine the multinational oil companies' (MOC) corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in Nigeria. Its special focus is to investigate the impact of the global memorandum of understanding (GMoU) on promoting gender-equitable agricultural value chains in the Niger Delta region.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopts a quasi-experimental design that used survey research technique, aimed at gathering information from a representative sample of the population, as it is essentially cross-sectional, describing and interpreting the current situation. A total of 760 rural women (380 from the treatment group and another 380 from the control group) were sampled across the Niger Delta region.FindingsThe results from the use of a combination of a logit model and propensity score matching indicate a significant relationship between GMoU model and gender-equitable agricultural value chains in the Niger Delta, Nigeria.Research limitations/implicationsThis study implies that CSR of MOCs is a critical factor in the need to integrating gender into agricultural value chains, achieving the goal of increasing agricultural growth and expanding the stable food supply.Originality/valueThis research contributes to gender debate in agricultural value chains from a CSR perspective in developing countries and rationale for demands for social projects by host communities. It concludes that business has an obligation to help in solving problems of public concern.

Woman and Home in 1980s Turkish Cinema: A Relational Reading Through Atıf Yılmaz’s Films

The paper aims to analyze the effects of social transformations on cinema between 1980-90, within the framework of the class differences that became evident during the period and the feminist movement that was visible in these years in Turkey, and the context of related theoretical background. The 1980s, when neoliberal policies influenced the whole world, was a period of striking changes in Turkey as well. A military coup in Turkey in 1980 created a powerful transformation and with the re-election in 1982, a period started in which the political climate completely changed. In this new situation, which was suppressed by the political environment, public life was interrupted and the gaze was turned towards the home space. The pleasure of watching, fueled by the return to the home space and the strong representations of lifestyle, has become an important component that feeds the popularity of period cinema. The films, which were mostly set in indoor spaces, were considered successful to the extent that they make daily life and private relations a spectacle. The structural similarity that can be established between watching a movie and spying on a house became convenient for making a social analysis when considered in the context of the 1980s. In this era, critical representations that questioned the ideological patterns in society emerged with the influence of the rising feminist discourse. Within the scope of the study, critical movies will be focused on. Analyzing the relationship between space and woman characters opens up a common field of inquiry on both the gender debate and the social class difference.

Gender difference in nutrition and health in Nigeria’s agricultural households: the role of corporate social responsibility in oil-producing communities

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to critically examine the multinational oil companies’ (MOCs) corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in Nigeria. Its special focus is to investigate the impact of the global memorandum of understanding (GMoU) on gender difference in nutrition and health in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopts a survey research technique, aimed at gathering information from a representative sample of the population, as it is essentially cross-sectional, describing and interpreting the current situation. A total of 800 women respondents were sampled across the rural areas of the Niger Delta region.FindingsThe results from the use of a combined propensity score matching and logit model indicate that CSR of the MOCs using GMoU model has made significant success in closing the gender difference in nutrition and health in agricultural household in the Niger Delta region. The findings also show that mainstreaming gender in nutrition within the field of agriculture is a critical aspect of strengthening gender and nutrition/health linkages, in recognition of women’s substantial contribution to agriculture production and their central role in household food collection, preservation/processing and preparation.Practical implicationsThis suggests that mainstreaming gender in nutrition offers opportunities to integrate agriculture and health approaches in GMoU projects, which will require increased collaboration and coordination between the MOCs’ and CBD clusters in the field of gender and nutrition to exploit existing complementary and comparative advantages, and to apply a holistic approach in host communities.Social implicationsThis implies that gender and nutrition/health have multiple dimensions and are highly context-specific; and the pathway towards improved food and nutrition security for all should be a gender-equitable process incorporated in CSR programmes and projects in sub-Saharan Africa.Originality/valueThis research contributes to the gender debate in agriculture from a CSR perspective in developing countries and rationale for demands for social project by host communities. It concludes that business has an obligation to help in solving problems of public concern.

Gender sensitive responses to climate change in Nigeria: the role of multinationals’ corporate social responsibility in oil host communities

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to critically examine the multinational oil companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in Nigeria. Its special focus is to investigate the impact of the Global Memorandum of Understanding (GMoU) on gender-sensitive responses to climate change in oil host communities in Nigeria.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopts a survey research technique aimed at gathering information from a representative sample of the population, as it is essentially cross-sectional, describing and interpreting the current situation. A total of 1,200 rural women were sampled across the Niger Delta region.FindingsThe results from the use of a combined propensity score matching and logit model indicate a significant relationship between GMoU model and women, gender and climate change in the Niger Delta, Nigeria.Practical implicationsThis implies that CSR of a multinational oil companies is a critical factor in the need for gender-sensitive responses to the effect of climate change.Social implicationsIt suggests that, for adaptation to climate change effects, understanding gender dimensions and taking gender responsive steps be incorporated into GMoU policies and action plans of multinational enterprises.Originality/valueThis research contributes to gender debate in climate change from a CSR perspective in developing countries and rationale for demands for social projects by host communities. It concludes that business has an obligation to help in solving problems of public concern.

Ageing Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Spanish Literature

This article is the Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Ageing Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Spanish Literature’. This introductory article reviews and defines important concepts and approaches related to Ageing Studies and Gender Studies, and in particular the place ageing masculinities occupies in current ageing and gender debates. It also gives an overview of the articles to be included in the Special Issue.

Decolonizing the Gender and Land Rights Debate in India: Considering Religion and More-than-Human Sociality in Women’s Lived Land Relatedness

This article links the feminist debate on women’s land rights in India to the current academic debate on critical human-nature relationships in the Anthropocene by studying how married Hindu women weigh the pros and cons of claiming land in their natal family and how they practice their lived relatedness to land in rural Udaipur (Rajasthan, North India). The article disentangles the complex issue of why women do not respond eagerly to Indian state policies that for a long time have promoted gender equality in the domain of land rights. In reaction to the dominant feminist debate on land rights, the authors introduce religion and more-than-human sociality as analytical foci in the examination of women’s responsiveness to land legislation. Their ethnographic study is based on fieldwork with married women in landowning families in four villages in Udaipur’s countryside. The authors argue that women have well-considered reasons not to claim natal land, and that their intimate relatedness to land as a sentient being, a nonhuman companion, and a powerful goddess explains the women’s reluctance to treat land as an inanimate commodity or property. Looking at religion brings to the fore women’s core business of making land fruitful and powerful, independent of any legislation. The authors maintain that a decolonized perspective on women’s land relatedness that takes religion and women’s multispecies perspective seriously may also offer a breakthrough in understanding why some women do not claim land.

‘An impossible dream’? Non-binary people’s perceptions of legal gender status and reform in the UK

ABSTRACT The meaning and significance of gender is currently a focus of heated and, often, polarised debate in the UK and elsewhere. This article provides a new perspective in the gender debate through focused exploration of UK-based non-binary people’s perceptions of legal gender status and reform. Binary gender/sex systems, such as the legal gender system in the UK, are underpinned by cisgenderism and are challenged by those whose identity falls outside of the binary of woman and man. In contrast to most lay participants in the Future of Legal Gender (FLaG) project, the majority of non-binary participants reported support for reform (85.5% (n = 165) in favour) to the current UK legal gender system. Over half (57%, n = 110) were in favour of abolishing legal gender (i.e. the state would no longer assign a legal gender status), although this was constructed as ‘an impossible dream’. Situating non-binary people’s perspectives at the heart of the debate about the certification of gender offers novel insight which could have significant ramifications for how societal structures could support undoing gender in the future.

Ethnicity and Gender Debates: Cross-Readings of American Literature and Culture in the New Millennium

Ethnicity and Gender Debates: Cross-Readings of American Literature and Culture in the New Millennium

The Daily Lives of Urban Women during the Khrushchev Thaw in Soviet and Post-Soviet Scholarship

The article discusses the rise and changes of scholarly interest in urban women's everyday life in the USSR of the mid-twentieth century. By studying the Soviet and post-Soviet historiography of women's everyday life during Khrushchevs Thaw, the authors explain that at first this subject was treated in analogy to the customary celebration of Soviet achievements: also, the womens question would eventually be resolved. With rising doubts about the resolvability of the complex problems related to gender relations came a paradigm shift towards reflections on the difficulties and contradictions in the lifestyle of urban women. At the center of debate were now the necessity for shortening the working day and for additional vacation days, as well as the double bondage of women who had to combine a professional workload with heavy family obligations. The authors argue that in the 1990s (a period now often called the new thaw, and the nineties of the gender debates), the political aspects of female life in the 1950s and 1960s became marginal in scholarship. The main attention was now focused on the home and family spheres, on problems of corporeality and fashion, and on the woman's voice in literature, cinema and media. In consequence, some aspects of women's everyday life during the Thaw years remained unexplored. Finally, there are no generalizing works that would compare women's everyday life on the levels of the USSR, Russia, or Russias regions, and little work has been done on ethnocultural characteristics of women's life in the post-war USSR.

Film Censorship and Identity in Kenya

The postcolonial government in Kenya has embarked on a sustained war against identity by banning locally and internationally produced motion pictures that depict LGBTQ themes in the ongoing national discourse on gender identity. In 2014 and 2018, the government effectively banned two films by local directors (The Stories of Our Lives and Rafiki) for including the LGBTQ community in this discourse. Within the same period, officials banned The Wolf of Wall Street and Fifty Shades of Grey, both by international directors, for their explicit sexual content. The bans attracted public attention and triggered a debate over the country’s censorship laws in particular and gender identity in general. However, while paying specific attention to postcolonial censorship laws that aimed to retain the status quo, the debaters failed to ground their arguments in their proper historical context. To better understand censorship in Kenya, we must first understand its history during the colonial period (1895-1963), a period that saw the colonizer attempt to construct for the colonized a morally acceptable identity. This construction saw the British colonial government shield African cinema audiences from films that they thought would teach them undesirable behaviors. To achieve this goal, censorship officials censored films with “questionable” scenes. This study connects the present and the past, broadens present censorship and gender debates by deepening our collective imagination of real and imagined laws, and incentivizes the debaters to think broadly about continuity without change in Kenya. It vacates rigid chronologies and does not purport to provide a definitive history of censorship and identity during the two historical periods, even if such a history were possible to produce. Broadly, the study situates censorship within a long history of framing and re-framing identities and, consequently, contributes to a more complex understanding of the chaotic interplay among power, art, and identity.