Gendered Narratives Research Articles

The Yorùbá God of Drumming: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Wood that Talks edited by Amanda Villepastour

The Yorùbá God of Drumming: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Wood that Talks edited by Amanda Villepastour

Gender differences in the development of suicidal behavior among United States military veterans: A national qualitative study.

The rate of suicide mortality among women is increasing in the United States (U.S.), especially among military veterans. Prior research suggests that important gender differences in suicide risk exist, but not enough is known to tailor prevention approaches by gender. The goal of this study is to understand gender differences in the development of suicidal behaviors (suicide risk) among U.S. veterans to inform future research and gender-tailored prevention efforts. Using a modified grounded theory approach, this qualitative study interviewed 50 (25 men, 25 women) U.S. veterans who had made a recent (prior 6 months) suicide attempt. Veterans were recruited from Veterans Health Administration (VHA) healthcare facilities across the U.S. Semi-structured, hour-long interviews examined participants' experiences with military service, suicidal thoughts and attempts, and healthcare following their attempt. The analysis revealed two gendered narratives of suicidal thoughts and attempts that incorporated the primary themes of self-concept, social power, relationships, coping, and stress. When discussing reasons for their suicide attempts, women discussed negative self-evaluative processes describing themselves as, "shameful," "tainted," and "worthless," whereas men discussed becoming overwhelmed, and recalled thinking, "it just wasn't worth it," "I've had enough," and, "screw this." This study provides an in-depth, nuanced understanding of the gender differences in suicide risk among veterans and suggests several ways in which future work may address gender-tailored suicide prevention efforts. Specifically, women veterans may benefit from methods to increase self-worth through positive social relationships, while men veterans may benefit from methods that increase their sense of purpose in life and help them achieve their ideal selves through successful experiences.

Girls Do Not Sweat: the Development of Gender Stereotypes in Physical Education in Primary School

Despite efforts towards gender equality, from an early age, girls practice sport less than boys. Explaining this is paramount to psychology. Stereotypes about gender-appropriate behaviour play a key role in doing physical-sports activity. Based on the expectancy-value model, this study describes the gender beliefs of boys/girls regarding physical education. A total of 30 children (half-boys, half-girls) that were 4th- and 5th-year pupils (8–10 years) at two Colombian schools were interviewed using a semi-structured script focusing on open-ended questions. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed. The results suggest gender differences in boys/girls already in the 4th year with respect to their abilities and the value they put on physical education based on a wide range of gender stereotypes. Specifically, boys/girls see football as a men’s sport, while skating, handball and volleyball are perceived as women’s sports. Furthermore, boys/girls have a dominant gender narrative that makes femininity subordinate to masculinity, thereby encouraging binary gender beliefs and practices. These stereotypes are reflected in their choice of activities and in how they use the school facilities, educing in this way the opportunities of both boys/girls as far as physical-sports activity are concerned. We discuss the findings emphasizing their relation to education and sociocultural influences. The conclusions suggest the need to make boys and girls more aware about gender equality, make changes to the activities and to how the physical spaces are used and provide equal teaching and learning experiences to reduce a divide still present in physical-sports education.

Hagiography as Source: Gender and Conversion Narratives in The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church

Drawing on the work of Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, this essay proposes utilizing hagiographies from the The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church, a fifteenth-century Ethiopian collection of saints’ lives, to explore various aspects of conversion. Other scholars employ a similar approach when analyzing hagiographical literature found in medieval Europe. While acknowledging that these texts do not provide details about the historical experience of conversion, they can assist scholars in understanding the conception of conversion in the imagination of the culture that created them. This essay specifically focuses on the role of women in conversion throughout the text and argues that, although men and women were almost equally represented as agents of conversion, a closer examination reveals that their participation remained gendered. Women more frequently converted someone with whom they had a prior relationship, especially a member of their familial network. Significantly, these observations mirror the patterns uncovered by contemporary scholars such as Dana Robert, who notes how women contributed to the spread of Christianity primarily through human relationships. By integrating these representations of conversion from late medieval Ethiopia, scholarship will gain a more robust picture of conversion in Africa more broadly and widen its understanding of world Christianity.

Elite Women Athletes and Feminist Narrative in Sport

ABSTRACT A number of sport philosophers have noted the potential of sport as meaningful narrative and storytelling. While these arguments are convincing, they fail to acknowledge that not all athletes experience sport in the same way, and that, in fact, many are marginalized based on their identity. This essay focuses on the marginalization of women athletes, in particular elite women athletes, in the narrative of sport. The most common athletic narratives serve to exclude women and remind female athletes of their secondary status. First, I establish the role of narrative and storytelling in sport. Secondly, I argue that gendered narratives pose a problem for women athletes—including both narratives intended to empower female athletes and narratives intended to compare male and female athletes. Finally, I conclude that because of this, feminist narratives in sport are necessary in order to better advance sport.

Secularisation theory and its discontents: Recapturing decolonial and gendered narratives. Debate on Jörg Stolz’s article onSecularization theories in the 21st century: ideas, evidence, and problems

Secularisation theory has been a central element of research and teaching in sociology since the middle of the twentieth century. This article discusses the current state of the art in secularisation research through the perspectives of decolonial theory, global sociology, feminist theory and the experiences of minority religions. Responding to Jörg Stolz, the article argues that current secularisation research suffers from conceptual shortcomings regarding the socio-political implications of secularism and the secular, that the parochial nature of secularisation theory has led to its entanglement in modernist, catching-up narratives, and that a feminist perspective is necessary to provide more detailed accounts of the gendered nature of processes of secularisation, particularly regarding new religious movements and the religious transformations within minority religious groups. The article concludes that secularisation theory needs to take into account minority religious experiences, the religiosity of women and religion beyond Euro-America in order to understand the significant shifts in religiosity that remain overlooked by methodologies operating solely at the level of nation-states.

The Triumph and Anguish of the Russian Revolution: Bessie Beatty's Forgotten Chronicle

The article gives a long-overdue consideration to a gendered narrative that until recently has been among discourses often excluded from historical scrutiny in the process of understanding and interpreting the Russian Revolutions of 1917. It is dedicated to American journalist Bessie Beatty, one of a dozen foreign correspondents who arrived in Russia to report on the history unfolding in the crumbling empire. The piece is a homage to Beatty's legacy of an ardent suffragist and devoted pacifist, whose life was effervescent with places, individuals, adventures, and events that would reverberate throughout the 20th century and beyond. Whether covering miners' unrest in Nevada, castigating the system for profiting from prostitutes' deplorable plight in San Francisco, or trying to decipher the convoluted social turmoil in revolutionary Petrograd, she would always manifest compassion and humanism, revealing the lives of individuals, rather than drawing an impersonal and generalized picture of the masses. Most importantly, the author strives to prevent Beatty's work from oblivion and amplify her opposition to war, the heavy toll of which she first witnessed reporting from the Russian front a century ago, when she exposed pervasive human suffering, denounced the lust for blood, and lamented the total deprivation of human dignity. While it may not bring to naught an ever-growing anguish in the face of current precarious rivalries and never-ending gnawing strife, it may help to revive Beatty's hope that "the muddled old world" would be once remade "upon a basis of human freedom and safety".

How Power Dresses: The Gendered Aesthetics of Uniform A Comparative Case Study of Contemporary Women Heads of State and/or Government in Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines

The clothed body, whether dressed thoughtfully or not, performs a social narrative of gender, wealth, status, nationality, and occupation embedded within a larger network of intersectional positionalities. Clothing conveys a set of values of not only the individual but also of the cultural politics of their milieu. For women Heads of State and/or Government, who are uniquely situated to project a diverse intersection of identities as well as access clothing choices socially unavailable to their male counterparts, a nuanced analysis of the garment choices of these professionals on the international stage yields significant findings about how women negotiate their roles as politicians, national figures, religious or areligious representatives, and as individuals. Three contemporary case studies of women Heads of State and/or Government in office between 2000 and 2013 from Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines interrogate these strategic choices of clothing by holistically cataloging and then analyzing the style, color, and pattern of the attire of each figure. Contextualized within their respective cultures and histories, the ways in which their clothing serve to mimic masculine color coding as seen by Australia’s Prime Minister, re-entrench religion within politics as seen by Indonesia’s President, and ‘self-Orientalize’ the national, post-colonial identity as seen by the Philippine’s President, each woman’s clothing informed her leadership and vice versa. This thesis analyzes the complex negotiations between identity, power, and politics through clothing for women political leaders. How do women Heads of State and/or Government visually communicate national narratives of identity and express political authority through their aesthetic wardrobe choices? How do these clothes project inscriptions of femininity, modesty, religiosity, development, and the national self? Discovering these strategies can provide a foundation for future study of the occupational uniform of women in historically masculine roles as well as the power of the national body as represented by women to reflect but also perpetuate particular socially normative ideals of the modern empowered woman across cultures.

El papel de las mujeres en los acuerdos de paz en Colombia: la agenda internacional

Los acuerdos de paz en Colombia se han conformado como un referente internacional al poner fin a cincuenta y nueve años de conflicto armado en el país e incorporar nuevos instrumentos jurídicos que establece el marco sobre Mujer, Paz y Seguridad de Naciones Unidas. Así pues, esta transformación sobre las narrativas de la securitización está mediada por los relatos de las organizaciones de mujeres, que, junto con la Resolución 1325 del Consejo de Seguridad, han promovido su mayor participación en los procesos de negociación, así como la incorporación de un enfoque de género en los acuerdos de paz, logrando así romper con un espacio inicialmente masculinizado. A partir del examen de los distintos acuerdos de paz acontecidos en Colombia y las dinámicas de género que los atraviesan, el artículo evidencia cómo se ha logrado un cambio en las narrativas de género establecido en el discurso hegemónico, y cómo, en consecuencia, las mujeres se convierten en sujetos políticos necesarios para la consecución de la paz en Colombia.

Re-evaluating the “traditional”: How the South Sudanese use established gender narratives to advance women’s equality and empowerment

Women’s equality and empowerment are international development priorities, but are difficult to achieve. Much gender and development literature blames entrenched “traditional” gender roles and norms, using them to explain slow progress towards gender and development goals, such as girls’ and women’s education, women’s participation in public decision-making, and women’s land and property ownership. The literature often concludes that, for gender and development goals to be realized, traditional gender narratives must be challenged and changed. However, limited research examines the full range of ways in which people, who live in highly gender-unequal societies, actually use traditional gender narratives to negotiate issues of women’s empowerment and gender equality. Drawing on qualitative data collected from three rural South Sudanese communities—comprising interviews and focus groups with 94 research participants, and over five hours of community radio content—this study demonstrates that gender narratives considered to be traditional by the South Sudanese, during a post-conflict transition period, do not necessarily constitute barriers to the advancement of gender and development goals. Rather, the South Sudanese use traditional gender narratives, in this context, to both resist and support goals that the international development community prioritizes. By providing evidence that traditional gender narratives are mobilized and used by community members to support women’s equality and empowerment, this paper challenges and extends development scholarship that positions traditional narratives as barriers, and encourages development practitioners to consider how they might critically harness, rather than reject, such narratives in the pursuit of gender and development goals.

‘These chicks go just as hard as us!’ (Un)doing gender in a Dutch CrossFit gym

CrossFit is a relatively new fitness movement/sport, where women and men train together in the same space, performing the same athletic movements and gender equality is celebrated in CrossFit marketing, promoting equal opportunities for men and women. This paper explores how the much emphasized gender-equality narrative in CrossFit unfolds in gender performativity in a Dutch CrossFit gym. To this end, we draw from an ethnographic case study through which we examine the gendered narratives and bodily gestures of CrossFitters. Using Butler’s heterosexual matrix, we found that gender ideologies emerge in explicit and implicit narratives, materials and organizational structure, and embodied performances in the CrossFit gym. CrossFitters, on the one hand, explicitly challenge gender norms and create a space where women can undertake behaviour that is traditionally considered masculine. However, traditional gender norms, including heterosexual desire, are nonetheless implicitly reproduced through performances, narratives and organizational structures present in CrossFit.

Josō or “gender free”? Playfully queer “lives” in visual kei

Coalescing in the 1980s, visual kei is currently a Japanese music subculture known for flamboyant theatrics, a woman-dominated fanbase, and its performers’ non-normative, often playfully queer gender expressions, which defy heteronormative binaries and hegemonic conceptions of gender and sexuality. This article illuminates the queer facets of visual kei through an in-depth investigation focusing on two forms of binary-destabilizing expression: onnagata/josō and “gender free” or gender-bending. The first involves complete adoption of feminine-coded clothing by self-identified male performers, the second a disregard or even intentional disruption of gendered boundaries. Combining ethnographic fieldwork data with close analysis of social media discourse, this paper explores the “queer lives” of visual kei performers through their personae. This double-pronged approach is necessary as these queer expressions are created and reiterated through both the “live” concert performance and the appearance of “lives” created through social media. In creating these “lives,” performers often employ casual, fluid utilization of queer expression which destabilizes normative gender and sexuality narratives while not necessarily explicitly invoking any queer identity. Through elucidating these multifaceted, ambiguous yet queer performances, this paper aims to help complicate current discourse on queer lives in Japan and wider scholarship.

My Mobile Phone, My Life: Deconstructing Development (Maendeleo) and Gender Narratives among the Marakwet in Kenya

The increased adoption of mobile telephony for development is based on the assumption that mobile telephony has the potential to foster social change. To some, such technology can aid most developing countries to leapfrog stages of development. Yet to others, the technology is at most counterproductive: development has been understood differently by the developed in comparison to the underdeveloped. Missing in this narrative is the people’s own conceptualization of the term development as well as their gender roles, often a component of development programs. This study presents findings on an alternative conceptualization of development, dubbed maendeleo, a Swahili term that denotes process, participation, progress, growth, change, and improved standard of living—as defined by the people or women themselves as they interact with mobile telephony in rural Kenya. Using Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory to analyze interviews, this study proposes an alternative conceptualization of development. This different perspective on development denotes both process and emergence, through the processes and roles that mobile telephony plays in the techno-social interactions of users, context, and other factors as they form social assemblages that are fluid in nature, hence challenging the Western proposition that new technologies produce development understood as social transformation.

Gendering South Africa's Foreign Policy: Toward a Feminist Approach?

Abstract South Africa's leadership has sought ethical foreign policy since the advent of democracy. This foreign policy outlook focuses on the African continent and includes certain articulations of pro-gender justice norms. In this article, I reflect on the extent to which South Africa's foreign policy embraces these norms as part of its foreign apparatus and practices. It takes at its starting point the nascent literature on feminist foreign policy applied to South Africa, which shares similarities to countries in the Global North that claim a feminist orientation to foreign policy. Moreover, it takes account of gender dynamics at the domestic level and how they are manifested in foreign policy discourses and practices, particularly in the understanding and implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. Utilizing qualitative content analysis, this article provides context and meaning for how gender concerns have evolved in South Africa's foreign policy, including the role of certain norm entrepreneurs in shaping the gender narrative. The article concludes that the domestic context is important to shaping and limiting how a country can enact feminist foreign policy. Importantly, the South African case provides a Global South dimension to the nascent scholarship.

Gender and New Wars

This brief introduction to the special collection outlines the main features of new wars and discusses some of the conceptual thinking around gender in the context of new wars and how it relates to international frameworks, such as UN Security Council resolutions on Women, Peace and Security. It considers in particular different forms of women’s participation and constructions of masculinities in new wars. This introduction argues that the binary narrative of gender has been damaging to both women and men and that the focus instead should be on understanding how subordinated populations are made vulnerable to the exercise and abuse of asymmetrical systems of power. To this end further academic research is urged.

Questions of Space in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

AbstractSpatial fixing was an integral part of maintaining imperial power structures throughout the colonial period, and like other discourses, it later found itself reproduced in cinema. As such, the physical and mental use of space has become key to the dissemination of ideological messages in many films. Confronting this tendency, this study applies theories of postcolonialism to selected examples of contemporary Hollywood film to examine how far it reconstructs traditional binaries of space. This investigation finds that despite attempts to disseminate more culturally sensitive and globally-minded portrayals of the Other, space remains particularly problematic. It also remains vital to storytelling narratives of race, gender, class and society in consideration of the film cases analysed in this study. While Fanonian notions of space continue to permeate cinema—with Total Recall and Avatar in particular drawing upon stereotypical motifs, it is possible to observe developments upon these discourses. Elysium and District 9 exemplify this, with each feature employing space to address increased questioning of US cultural superiority since the failed Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and the 2008 global economic crash.

Gender Violence: The 1917–1922 Ukrainian Pogroms and the Challenges of Modernity

By conducting a detailed analysis of the diverse evidence of mass rape of Jewish women in Ukraine during the Civil War pogroms, this article explores the impact of gender violence that was employed as a strategic weapon of genocide by pogrom perpetrators. Various accounts of witnesses, humanitarian workers, and medical practitioners suggest that there was a group of victims who demonstrated a similar set of reactions to the traumatic experience of mass rape. Further research established that this unique response is specific to the group of victims solely identified by their exposure to secular education. To discern how exposure to secularism shaped the traumatic experience, this study pursues in-depth analyses of victim narratives as they fall along gender lines. The established gender narrative patterns suggest that the Jewish women were particularly traumatized by the visceral, wild, and carnivalesque nature of the pogrom rape that was tragically juxtaposed against their commonly shared ethical values. Victims exposed to secularism had a more internalized and solitary experience of the gruesome ordeal, and, as a result, demonstrated less coping ability which resulted in a variety of outcomes ranging from acute despair and depression, to suicidal tendencies when the trauma proved unbearable to the victim. The most widespread outcome of pogrom rape among secularized survivors was to escape it by leaving terrible memories behind forever and concealing the traumatic experience.

The contained citizen: first ladies, public memory, and the rhetoric of visual containment

ABSTRACTThis essay suggests adopting containment as a lens to read the material and spatial dimensions of sites of public commemoration. Specifically, after investigating six presidential museums and the “First Ladies” exhibit at the Smithsonian, I argue that narratives of containment cast first ladies as outsiders, a threat to be contained, while upholding male rule/agency as the norm. In particular, women are relegated as “outsiders” through their contrast with the president-as-common-citizen; their power and influence are further contained through narratives of circumstance, as well as visual strategies of dissociation. Furthermore, appeals to normalization, masquerading as more “political” enactments of the first lady role, bolster the presidency as inherently masculine. Ultimately, this article extends previous work on containment as a visual lens and offers the potential to expose how sites of commemoration uphold longstanding and problematic narratives of gender and citizenship.

Gendering Objects at the V&A and Vasa Museums

This article presents two case studies, which are the result of the application of a gendered interpretative tool to the collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum (London) and the Vasa Museum (Stockholm). Objects and their gendered narratives within the museums’ collections were researched across their lifecycle, from commission and manufacture to consumption and display in a museum setting. This research was developed in close co-operation between researchers, curators, and museum professionals, seeking to develop best practice guidance on making diverse gendered history more visible in the museum space. The team of researchers, curators and museum professionals identified and researched a selection of early modern objects and their gendered narratives within the museums' collections. We argue that this gendered analytical focus not only reveals the relevance of gender to the production, consumption and use of any given object in the early modern period, but also how society was organised in a global context. Using two hats at the Vasa and V&A Museums to demonstrate this methodology, we argue for greater awareness of gender as an important analytical category within the museum environment. The application of gendered historiographical analysis has the demonstrable potential to facilitate new gendered perspectives on museum objects, leading to a more deep and diverse representation of gender in curation and interpretation, and further, that this transformation of curatorial and interpretative practice can lead to increased engagement from audiences marginalised by their gender and/or sexuality.

The inner world of Beethoven’s ninth symphony: Masculine and feminine?

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I explore the principal model within classical Western music, the sonata form, in terms of its gendered narratives. Susan McClary, an eminent American musicologist, started to do this in the 1980s as part of her forceful feminist critique of academic musicology and the music considered to be “great” within the Western classical music canon. She has been especially critical of much of Beethoven’s music, particularly the Ninth Symphony, which, along with other major works, she considers to be structured along patriarchal lines, actively if unconsciously promoting the values of patriarchy, overflowing with male violence and female subordination, its narrative primarily based on phallic sexuality. Her influence has been very considerable in musicology. I set out her case and critique it psychoanalytically, but in so doing I also set out my own theory of sonata form and Beethoven’s music as imbued with, and expressive of, a bisexual narrative. As Beethoven’s forceful masculinity has long been recognized, I particularly emphasize and illustrate his musical femininity. I also discuss and employ theories of countertransference and Oedipal configurations in relationship to Beethoven’s music in particular, and in general the links between Western classical music and the musicality of ordinary clinical psychoanalysis.