Gendered Power Relations Research Articles

Dominated Myths Are Almost Broken: Evaluating Assembly Members’ Lived Experiences in Ghanaian Local Politics

Ghanaian cultural norms, verbal and non-verbal expressions, gender stereotypes, and male dominance are real propaganda that discourages women from engaging in local politics. This paper draws from the dominant ideology, development approach and gender power relations to reveal efforts to motivate aspiring women politicians to engage local government administration. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were used in collating the data. The study findings showed that male and female assembly members resisted derogatory pronouncements. The actions were to encourage more women to contest district assembly elections and win. The male assembly members suggested ways to encourage women in their electoral areas to participate in local politics influenced the near deconstruction of the myths. These myths included male dominance surrounding discriminatory predispositions against aspiring women politicians in Ghana.

Gendering Urban Namescapes

The gender relations of power embedded within the urban landscape and materialized in street nomenclature remain an underexplored topic in place-name studies. This paper situates the gendered spaces of street names within the broader investigation of identity politics played out in the public space. Drawing on scholarship from “critical toponymies”, this article diachronically examines the gender patterning of urban nomenclature in a city from Eastern Europe (Sibiu, formerly Hermannstadt, Romania). For this purpose, a dataset was compiled from the entire street nomenclature of the city across seven successive historical periods, from 1875 to 2020 (n = 2,766). The statistical analyses performed on this dataset revealed a “masculine default” as a structuring principle underpinning Sibiu’s urban namescape for the two centuries investigated. As this analysis demonstrates, contrary to the overall democratization of the Romanian post-socialist society, Sibiu’s streetscape continues to tell a patriarchal story informed by hegemonic masculinity.

Gender, Climate Change Adaptation, and Cultural Sustainability: Insights From Bangladesh

The focus of this paper is mainly to investigate climate change adaptation practices and the applicability of a cultural sustainability approach in understanding gender dimension of the residents of the southwest coast of Bangladesh. It is one of the most vulnerable regions in South Asia due to the significant impacts of climate change. The long-term effects of climate change in this region are the increasing salinity in farmlands, heatwaves, and sea-level rise. The southwest coast of Bangladesh is a classic example of “good practice” as well as the center for learning, implementing, and communicating climate change adaptation actions in practice. The reason for this the collective action carried out to initiate and improve adaptation activities by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change of the Government of Bangladesh, as well as several national and international development and non-government organizations (NGOs). Using a systematic review of literature, and field-based case studies, we examined how gender and cultural issues (such as the adaptive capacity of men and women, and the transformation of gendered power relations) have been addressed to successfully implement climate change adaptation initiatives in the context of the nominated study area. Our study results revealed that both male and female participants were strategic and capable of dealing with climate change impacts, although the adaptive capacity of the former group was comparatively sturdier than the later. The extent of cultural sustainability was found to be weaker in the study region compared to many other coastal communities in the country. The efforts made by NGOs in collaboration with the governmental bodies of Bangladesh were found contributory in providing knowledge of climate change along with the techniques to adapt to its consequences for the people of the study region. Similarly, the activities of NGOs were found influential in helping the government to support people in adapting to climate change in terms of the gendered and cultural sustainability perspectives. Our findings contribute to the field of climate change impacts in understanding the complexities of rural development.

Mothering on the web: A feminist analysis of posts and interactions on a Chilean Instagram account on motherhood

Social networking sites (SNS) have become important spaces during the early years of parenting. They allow users to access information, share experiences and provide an opportunity to establish support networks. In this article we present the results of our research on a Chilean motherhood account on Instagram. The research, which takes a feminist approach, used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze discourses around “good mothering”, and the role of this communication site in this process. We present the results in three sections: a) “Positioning in debates about motherhood”; b) “Real motherhood and maternal love”; and c) “Interactions as regulatory mechanisms”. The main findings suggest that these SNS, through interactions between the account holder and their followers, reproduce dominant discourses of what is considered to be “good mothering” which both sustain asymmetrical gendered power relationships and challenge such power relations. Furthermore, we conclude that although SNS may appear to be an inclusive relational space, the regulatory mechanisms of the sites circumscribe who, and how one, can participate in this space.

Violence as Control, Revenge, or Defense

This article analyses the universe of the traditional ballad from a perspective that problematizes gender power relations and masculinity. This universe is generally characterised by masculine domination, separation of male and female spheres, and manifest structures of power. Masculine violence, not least sexual violence, tends to be normative, especially in heroic ballads and ballads of chivalry, although other masculinities also exist. Feminine power is usually circumscribed, and feminine violence is accepted only under certain conditions. Several narrative motifs concerning masculinity, femininity, violence and power structures can be traced across different ballad types. The author analyses some of these motifs, and clusters of motifs, using the methods of re-reading, close reading and cross-reading. Examples are taken from the Scandinavian and English-Scottish ballad corpora.

Ageing, embodiment and datafication: Dynamics of power in digital health and care technologies

As a growing body of work has documented, digital technologies are central to the imagining of aging futures. In this study, we offer a critical, theoretical framework for exploring the dynamics of power related to the technological tracking, measuring, and managing of aging bodies at the heart of these imaginaries. Drawing on critical gerontology, feminist technoscience, sociology of the body, and socio-gerontechnology, we identify three dimensions of power relations where the designs, operations, scripts, and materialities of technological innovation implicate asymmetrical relationships of control and intervention: (1) aging bodies and the power of numbers, (2) aging spaces and the power of surveillance, and (3) age care economies and gendered power relations. While technological care for older individuals has been promoted as a cost-effective way to enhance independence, security, and health, we argue that such optimistic perspectives may obscure the realities of social inequality, agist bias, and exploitative gendered care labour.

The Janus face of development brokers across migration borders

AbstractEmploying an ethnographic approach, I analyse the agentive practices of a codevelopment project named Africoop, showing how it navigates the migration‐development field by blending egalitarianism rights‐based concerns with hierarchical political authority, foregrounding economic neoliberalism and translating development. Africoop advocated for migrants rights and opened up opportunities for social mobility and also reproduced gender asymmetries and power relations among Italian donors and Ghanaian recipients. By examining the organisational level of brokerage and the career trajectories of the main leaders, I unravel how social nets, aspirations and biographical paths are interwoven to reconfigure the brokers' representativeness and accountability across migration borders.

Women's use of sport as identity-work in managing mental health and trauma

While there is much research on men's mental health and sport, there has been less focus on women's gendered experiences of mental health and sport. Sport is widely considered to improve or sustain mental health, but it can be a problematic space for women. Focusing on four in-depth interviews with two women from a case study of an Australian field hockey club, we examine how women negotiate and manage their mental health and recovery from trauma through sport participation. Analysis is informed by a narrative approach that focuses on the enactment of gendered identities through stories that complicate relations between playing hockey and mental health. While sport facilitates women's identity-work and mental health recovery, we demonstrate how it can also produce additional challenges due to the gendered power relations shaping their experiences within sport and society more broadly.

“Disrupting peace at home”? Narrating connections between sexual violence perpetrated by armed men and intimate partner violence in (post-)conflict settings

ABSTRACT While much is now known about the multiple forms of gender-based violence (GBV) to which people are subjected in (post-)conflict spaces, there remains a relative lack of knowledge about how those experiencing such forms of violence perceive the interconnections between them, as well as about how these perceived interconnections are enmeshed in gendered power relations. This article analyzes group interviews carried out with male and female refugees living in Kampala, Uganda, to scrutinize the complex interweaving between GBV and heteropatriarchal gender norms and power relations in (post-)conflict spaces. Participants repeatedly drew causal connections between sexual violence perpetrated by enemy armed men against women and men, and subsequent intimate partner violence. Our discussion of the logics underpinning these perceived causal connections enables close analysis of the shifting and contingent ways in which various forms of GBV are understood as imbricated in one another and implicated in shifting gender norms. This enables us to examine some of the complex ways in which GBV reverberates through gender norms and power relations in (post-)conflict contexts.

Violence against Women and Girls: Female Filmmakers Critique the Menace

Violence against Women and Girls: Female Filmmakers Critique the Menace

Strategic femininity on Facebook: women’s experiences negotiating gendered discourses on social media

ABSTRACT This paper explores the gender discourses that influence ways women create digital representations. Framed by post-structural feminism, I explore ways gendered power relations influence the decision making of 9 women from Canada. As part of a larger study, I use feminist discourse analysis to analyze data from initial open-ended qualitative interviews. Findings discuss ways women negotiate discourses of beauty, heteronormativity, and professionalism when creating digital representations on Facebook. The participants balanced representing what they felt was an accurate depiction of their lives with their perception of social acceptance and audience reception. I argue that understanding these acts of strategic self-representations may uncover ways female gender identities are discursively marginalized in digital spaces.

Window dressing inequalities and constructing women farmers as problematic—gender in Rwanda’s agriculture policy

Rwanda is often depicted as a success story by policy makers when it comes to issues of gender. In this paper, we show how the problem of gendered inequality in agriculture nevertheless is both marginalized and instrumentalized in Rwanda’s agriculture policy. Our in-depth analysis of 12 national policies is informed by Bacchi’s What’s the problem represented to be? approach. It attests that gendered inequality is largely left unproblematized as well as reduced to a problem of women’s low agricultural productivity. The policy focuses on framing the symptoms and effects of gendered inequality and turns gender mainstreaming into an instrument for national economic growth. We argue that by insufficiently addressing the socio-political underlying causes of gendered inequality, Rwanda’s agriculture policy risks reproducing and exacerbating inequalities by reinforcing dominant gender relations and constructing women farmers as problematic and men as normative farmers. We call for the policy to approach gendered inequality in alternative ways. Drawing on perspectives in feminist political ecology, we discuss how such alternatives could allow policy to more profoundly challenge underlying structural constraints such as unequal gender relations of power, gender norms, and gender divisions of work. This would shift policy’s problematizing lens from economic growth to social justice, and from women’s shortcomings and disadvantages in agriculture to the practices and relations that perpetuate inequality. In the long term, this could lead to transformed gender norms and power relations, and a more just and equal future beyond what the dominant agricultural development discourse currently permits.

Beyond the ‘Feminization of Agriculture’: Rural out-migration, shifting gender relations and emerging spaces in natural resource management

In international research and development discourses, the ‘Feminization of Agriculture’ is often used as a vague umbrella term referring to an increase in women's labor burden and responsibilities in agriculture as a result of male out-migration. However, the term is under-conceptualized, and fails to reflect changing gender relations in agriculture and natural resource management, with the potential consequence of ill-defined agriculture and gender research programs. This paper challenges narratives of the ‘Feminization of Agriculture’. Drawing from feminist political ecology, this paper conceptualizes gender relations more broadly by highlighting gendered subjectivities and power relations in agriculture in contexts of male out-migration. I propose a conceptual framework to explore shifts in (1) socio-spatial struggles over resources, (2) influence within agrarian households and communal spaces, (3) aspirations, feelings of insecurity and self-determination. I build on extensive participatory fieldwork conducted in three countries, Nepal, India and Bangladesh.The conceptual framework helps analyze how some gender norms and relations are renegotiated in contexts of male out-migration. While unequal power relations shape everyday struggles in agriculture and natural resource management, for some women, increased mobility, social engagement and handling cash create new spaces to influence, move, and communicate. Importantly, everyday struggles over agricultural, water and land resources remain shaped by gender, age, caste, land ownership, remittances and household position, particularly those living with the family in-laws. Research and development programs need to take intersectionality into account and explore emerging spaces for influence, but also be aware of persistent gender norms and power relations which shape agricultural practices, aspirations and self-determination. I conclude by arguing for the need to expand the ‘Feminization of Agriculture’ debate towards a broader understanding of socio-spatial change and gendered subjectivities within agriculture.

Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment by Wibke Schniedermann

Reviewed by: Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment by Wibke Schniedermann Shuqin Fu Wibke Schniedermann. Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 177 pp., $18.61 (electronic), $18.02 (hardback). Gender issues in James's oeuvre have been subjected to extensive academic scrutiny. Among the scholarly works that probe into James's stance and speculation on gender, Wibke Schniedermann's Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment contributes impressively to work on gendered power relations and the narrative representation of these structures in James. Building on Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology theory as well as his assumptions on masculine domination, the book specifically examines the female protagonists' personal struggles against and strategies to break from gender-based symbolic violence and symbolic power in three major James novels––The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Although much has been written about James's sensitivity to power disequilibrium, Schniedermann sheds new light on James's depiction of social power and its problematic implications that "account for this power's social conditionality" (2). This book is composed of six chapters. Chapter 1, which serves as an introduction, presents the subject and structure of the study. In particular, Schniedermann introduces the book's critical practice in "Daisy Miller: A Study" (1879) via Bourdieu's terms habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence, and symbolic domination. The author contends that a micro field is created in the novella, in which clashing habitus leads to the conflicts among the characters, whose capital distribution can be analyzed to disclose the represented social hierarchies. In this sense, symbolic capital works as the premise for the exercise of symbolic power, which can only exert its influence by means of actual misrecognition. Thus, Daisy's failure to recognize the established symbolic power literally plunges her into a closely knit and inescapable web of gender-specific domination as "the form par excellence of symbolic domination" (24). As a result, her absence and death at the end of the story constitute a doom foretold in the androcentric society. As Schniedermann explains, James's treatment of a female protagonist's absence in "Daisy Miller" is an experiment in the androcentric basis of feminine absence, which James develops in Isabel Archer. Thus, chapter 2 ("The Presence of Absence in The Portrait of a Lady") focuses on feminized vacancy and (absence of) visibility as well as the female character's inner struggle against gendered domination. The author contends that Isabel's fighting back is fully manifested through her feminized absence in the beginning of the novel, the constantly changing perspective toward her view, and her self-chosen absence at the end of the story. Unlike Daisy Miller, who is short on wisdom and lacks the disposition to empower her own subversiveness, Isabel's penetrating cognition and critical temperament make her subversion truly potent. Just as absence is a common topic of the textual analysis of "Daisy Miller" and The Portrait of a Lady, inheritance as a species of symbolic capital turns out to be [End Page E-11] a shared theme of the textual interpretation in chapter 3 ("The Grip of Inheritance in The Wings of the Dove") and chapter 4 ("How to Survive One's Inheritance in The Golden Bowl"). Revolving around "the unequal distribution of capital and the gender-dependent sphere of influence provided by and through a character's resources" (26), the third chapter concludes that Milly's controversial triumph comes less from a misjudgment of her class privilege than from the latter's intricate interconnection with her wealth and fatal illness. Compared with Milly's moderate success, Maggie's victory is a full one in that "she achieves exactly what she aims at" (27): Maggie's astute cognition, firm decision, and consequent actions enable the novel to uncover the powerful effect of the well-disguised system of masculine domination. Firmly believing that her father deserves honor and authority, Maggie spares no effort in maintaining his power by hiding Amerigo and Charlotte Stant's adultery. In essence, what Maggie tries to cover is just what the text tries...

Negotiating power and relationship throughout marital life: narratives of middle-aged women from Turkey

ABSTRACT Intersectional approaches call for the study of gender-power relations as dynamic processes shaped in the context of social structures and locations, and invite the representation of diverse voices. However, these ideas are yet to be fully embraced in empirical family and marriage research. The present study addresses this gap and employs a qualitative design to investigate women’s accounts of the spousal relationship and marital power over their marital life cycles in a non-Western context, Turkey. Data comes from individual interviews with 24 middle-aged women who come from different socio-economic levels and reside in different parts of the country. The analysis was conducted in two steps. In the first step, an inductive thematic analysis revealed 4 main themes: (1) transition to marriage, (2) relating to domesticity, (3) negotiating marital power, and (4) emotional tone of marriage. In the second step, a deductive rereading of the data demonstrated variations among women’s experiences depending mostly on the intersection of patriarchal tradition with their socio-economic realities, and partly on their geographical locations. Women’s accounts pointed to diverse ways of negotiating marital relationship and power over time, including traditional accommodation, resistance/opposition, and sharing/mutual love. The study argues that an intersectional lens can provide new insights into women’s agency, empowerment and increasing autonomy in marital relations.

Nora’s Re-birth as a Human: A Critical Analysis of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Abstract
 This paper scrutinizes Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House where the female protagonist character is analyzed through investigation of the three elements of human beings: soul, body, and mind. This analysis of the play is processed along with the analysis of the dramatic elements, techniques, and conventions of dramatic criticism. The investigation of the stages of social drama in the female character’s situation as presented in this play is intended to highlight woman’s tragedy in patriarchal society. Ibsen sees women caught in a tragic situation where Nora is found in confrontation with society and its patriarchal concepts. This paper, thus, traces women’s attempts to challenge gender inequality as presented through the female protagonist’s acts. The female character actions in incidents of stereotyping, objectification, and oppression which reflect gender politics, sexuality, and power relations, should reveal her stand facing gender inequality under patriarchy. Evidence in the play text that demonstrate the female character’s negotiation, rejection, and/or objection to all that deprives her equal rights to those of man as human should reveal to which extent, she manages to challenge gender inequality. By so doing Nora breaks the inferior status imposed on her being a woman.

Exploring the disability experiences of South Asian Women living with HIV in Southern Ontario, Canada

Purpose Given the steady rise in HIV incidence among South Asian women in Canada their health-related challenges and disability are not well understood. Our aim was to understand the “lived experiences” of disability among South Asian women living with HIV in Southern Ontario, Canada. Methods We conducted a qualitative study using an interpretive phenomenological approach. We recruited immigrant South Asian women living with HIV in Ontario and conducted one-on-one semi structured interviews. Following the first interview, participants were invited to participate in a second interview. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Results Eight participants completed the first interview; six completed a second interview (14 interviews total). The mean age of participants was 47.1 years (standard deviation (sd) = 5.8) and mean length of time since HIV diagnosis was 15.1 years (sd = 6.7). We identified two overarching themes, “experiencing disability” and “experiencing discrimination”. Apart from the physical and mental health impairments, the complex intersection of illness, gender, ethnicity, HIV-stigma and discrimination influenced disability experiences. Conclusion Understanding the disability experiences of marginalized women living with HIV through a phenomenological lens can help to facilitate the development of culturally safe treatment approaches and health care policies to lessen disability and improve their quality of life. Implications for rehabilitation Developing culturally safe treatment approaches may help to improve rehabilitation service provision for ethnically and culturally diverse populations. Rehabilitation professionals need to adopt a trauma-informed care when treating people living with HIV. Rehabilitation professionals should consider cultural safety by considering the role of religion, dependency, and gendered-power relations while treating South Asian women living with HIV.

The lived experiences of Turkish men’s engagement in domestic violence interventions in England

This article illustrates the first in-depth study on major conditions of engagement among Turkish men in interventions that work with perpetrators of domestic violence in England. It investigates how key circumstances related to Turkish men’s cultural backgrounds, migration status, racialisation and different interactions with facilitators shape their engagement in interventions. The data was collected from semi-structured interviews with Turkish perpetrators who participated in domestic violence interventions and professionals who worked with Turkish men in these interventions. Participants’ social and cultural background, class, gendered power relations and racialisation affected their active engagement in interventions. The insufficiency of trained interpreters and culturally-competent professionals, mistrust of the services and the social stressors about living in a society with different cultural values to their home country were identified as factors of inadequate engagement. We found that adopting culturally-sensitive strategies including professionals’ understanding of men’s social, cultural and religious backgrounds, and being aware of racism, discrimination and migration-related stressors were key in improving engagement during interventions.

‘Pay close attention to what my eyes are saying without having to spell it out’: Heterosexual relations and discourses of sexual communication in #MeToo commentaries

This paper explores how concepts of sexual communication and sex are discussed in #MeToo commentaries. Previous research has focused primarily on questions of consent, gendered power relations and sexual violence against women. Drawing from work that has called for more reflexive considerations of desire and pleasure in #MeToo, I undertake a critical feminist discourse analysis of over 163 traditional news, online magazine and social news articles commenting on #MeToo, sexual communication, dating and heterosexual relations between men and women. The findings of this analysis note discourses underpinning tensions between what constitutes ideal or appropriate forms of sexual communication, uncertainties as to what effectively makes sex ‘good’ or ‘bad’, moralisations regarding how ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sex are possible, and contradicting accounts of women’s capacity for sexual empowerment. Through highlighting the incongruities in expectations as to how individuals should proceed sexually and romantically in a #MeToo era, I conclude with a discussion on how we can think about such relations within a consideration of a ‘self-in-process’ and ‘subject-act-ivity’ framework.

Using Intersectionality to Identify Gendered Barriers to Health-Seeking for Febrile Illness in Agro-Pastoralist Settings in Tanzania.

BackgroundResearch has shown that gender is a significant determinant of health-seeking behavior around the world. Gender power relations and lay etiologies of illness can influence the distribution of household resources, including for healthcare. In some rural settings in Africa, gender intersects with multiple forms of health inequities, from proximal socio-cultural factors to more “upstream” or distal health system determinants which can amplify barriers to health-seeking for specific groups in specific contexts.AimWe used an intersectionality approach to determine how women in particular, experience gendered barriers to accessing healthcare among Maa and non-Maa speaking agro-pastoralists in northern Tanzania. We also explored lay etiologies of febrile illness, perceptions of health providers and rural health-seeking behavior in order to identify the most common barriers to accessing healthcare in these settings.MethodsMixed method ethnographic approaches were used to collect data between 2016 and 2018 from four Maa-speaking and two Swahili-speaking agro-pastoralist villages in northern Tanzania. Maa-speaking villages were based in Naiti, Monduli district while non-Maa speaking villages were selected from Msitu in Babati district. Data on health seeking behaviors was collected through semi-structured questionnaires, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and home and facility-based participant observation.FindingsThe results primarily focus on the qualitative outcomes of both studies. We found that febrile illness was locally categorized across a spectrum of severity ranging from normal and expected illness to serious illness that required hospital treatment. Remedial actions taken to treat febrile illness included attending local health facilities, obtaining medicines from drug sellers and use of herbal remedies. We found barriers to health-seeking played out at different scales, from the health system, community (inter-household decision making) and household (intra-household decision making). Gender-based barriers at the household had a profound effect on health-seeking. Younger married women delayed seeking healthcare the most, as they often had to negotiate health-seeking with husbands and extended family members, including co-wives and mothers-in-law who make the majority of health-related decisions.ConclusionAn intersectional approach enabled us to gain a nuanced understanding of determinants of health-seeking behavior beyond the commonly assumed barriers such lack of public health infrastructure. We propose tapping into the potential of senior older women involved in local therapy-management groups, to explore gender-transformative approaches to health-seeking, including tackling gender-based barriers at the community level. While these social factors are important, ultimately, improving the public health infrastructure in these settings is a first step toward addressing structural determinants of treatment-seeking.