Negotiation Of Gender Roles Research Articles

Women as carriers of the ‘weaving legacy’: Shifting labour and changing gender relations in marriage

The study highlights how women bear the responsibility of perpetuating the cultural identity of the weaving community due to gendered norms around endogamous marriage, the dual burden that women bear within family enterprises, and the exit of male weavers in pursuit of more sustainable economic opportunities. Male weavers of these family enterprises rely on women's continuing allegiance to the ancestral craft to carry forward the economic gains of upholding the weaving craft when they embrace the option of mobility in order to alleviate the financial precarity and stabilise their livelihoods. The normative expectations of marriage within the weaving community, where women's labour is regulated and exploited via intra-community marriage, serve as the foundation for this practice. Women engage in complex negotiations, confront gendered expectations, and, in the worst situations, disrupt gender norms in the family, community, and the labour market throughout this process. The paper drawing from a qualitative study conducted in the handloom clusters of Nadia, West Bengal (India) critically examines the intricate negotiation of gender roles, presenting a nuanced portrayal of how women navigate societal expectations and contribute to reshaping gender norms within family enterprises and weaving community at large.

The Effects of Externalised Border Control Management by Germany on Marriage Migrants from Third Countries

ABSTRACT Since European Union states began externalising their migration control regime, by delegating to third states, their own remote institutions and non-state actors, scholars have widened the ‘destination state-centric’ perspective of Zolberg’s influential ‘remote control’ interpretative framework. Border externalisation is, therefore, regarded as a complex ‘battlefield, in which different actors are positioning themselves’ and which produces multifaceted transnational effects. Based on autoethnography and semi-structured interviews with spouses from several post-Soviet states who are married to German citizens, this paper illuminates how tightening border policies and vigilant practices at German consulates directed at marriage migrants from third countries influence households and couples’ life trajectories. The reverberations encompass the evolving nature of transnational borderscapes in response to state policies, as well as changing conditions of marriage, family planning, the maintenance of two households and (re)negotiation of gender roles.

Exploring the Fluidity of Becoming: A Stylistic Analysis of Claudia Morgado E.’s No Bikini


 The paper is a critical exploration of the fluidity of becoming through the character of Robin in Claudia Morgado Escanilla’s short film No Bikini1 (2007). The paper further investigates the role of water in the dynamic configurations of the paradigms of gender expressions and highlights Robin’s relationship with water in their process of ‘becoming.’ An extensive focus on the stylistic construction of Robin’s character and the space of the swimming pool is analysed in rendering further possibilities of extending one’s self beyond the realms of the heteronormative world. Hence, this paper essays at understanding the positionality of children amidst the larger queer expressions predominantly constitutive of adult lives, and how children negotiate gender roles and a child’s casual manner of queering heteronormative structures, are further studied.

The Spy Girls and the Quest for “Forbidden” Literacy: Rural Chinese Girls’ Negotiation of “No Christmas” School Policy Through Subversive Literacy Practices

ABSTRACT This article is a critical ethnographic study that examines rural Chinese girls’ literacy practices in sanctioned and unsanctioned spaces, and their negotiations with the articulated and delivered literacy program. In particular, this study focuses on a group of 1st-grade girls, who I call the “Spy Girls,” engaged in the celebration of Christmas, and their interactions with unauthorized literacy practices or “forbidden literacy” that challenge the institutional and structural discourse in relation to gender and school policies. Using a feminist lens, I argue that although local governments have deemed celebrating Christmas to be a compromise of tradition and unpatriotic, the girls’ practices exemplified the ways they negotiate gender roles and construct literate identities through appropriating acceptable forms of literacy expression to communicate under the radar.

Negotiating Gender Roles in Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm

Gender roles, in the context of the present study, specifically refers to traditionally accepted roles in patriarchal societies wherein women’s subordination to their male counterparts is amplified. The study incorporates ideas of feminist theorists, and in particular, Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex where she explores the paradigm of gender roles provides the theoretical foundation upon which the primary text Bodily Harm will be analysed. Traditionally, women’s roles are often confined within the domestic boundaries in which they are expected to fulfil the needs of their family, bereft of financial as well as bodily independence, subjugating them to passivity and submissiveness. Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm presents the nuances of gender roles, detailing how girls are conditioned, since their childhood, to conform to these gender roles. The present paper lays emphasis on the female protagonist’s attempt to subvert these roles and the endless conflicts, both internal and external, that she has to endure to acquire agency.

Negotiating Gender Roles in Academia: A Courageous Exploration

Negotiating Gender Roles in Academia: A Courageous Exploration

Negotiating Gender Roles and Power Relations Through the Management of International Migrant Remittances in a Patriarchal Community in Ghana

This paper draws on a feminist poststructural perspective to examine gendered dimensions of sending and managing international migrant remittances in a patriarchal community in Ghana. It relies on primary data collected through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and observation in Nkoranza, a Ghanaian community with a long history of international migration and receipt of remittances, to analyze the fluidity of gendered and intergenerational power relationships associated with managing remittances. The findings show that males and females perform different roles as remitters and managers of remittances. While the patterns of sending and receiving remittances tend to conform to gender norms, which construct men as providers and women as carers, these subject positions are fluid. Although men are generally reluctant to perform traditional female roles even when their wives migrate, gendered and intergenerational power relations are being negotiated through the sending and management of remittances.

“An Extraordinary Piece of Engineering”: The Artificial Woman as Digital Effect

In the history of science fiction feature cinema, the manufactured female body has long been treated as a blank canvas for spectacular visual effects, arguably beginning with Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927). Nearly a century later, fembot bodies tend to be computer generated rather than constructed on-set, but they have retained the role of a diegetic tech demo highlighting the latest advancements in visual effects research and design. Drawing on the persistent cultural notion of the female body as a site for simultaneously negotiating gender roles and technological progress, my article offers a close reading of cyborg, nonorganic, and biologically enhanced women and/as digital effects. I examine a range of feature films, including Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014), Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017), Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), and Alita: Battle Angel (Robert Rodriguez, 2019). I argue that such media texts cast sexualized digital Galateas to affirm (digital animation) technology’s capacity to fulfill white male heteronormative fantasies. At the same time, depictions of the computer-generated female body as a sexual object aim to compensate for the digital effect’s artificiality. Both within the narrative and in paratextual discourse, tying technological progress to male sexual wish fulfillment becomes the digital female’s benchmark for authenticity.

Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Independent Block of Macha Caporal

This paper explores the experience of six Macha Caporal dancers belonging to an independent female block in La Paz, a recent and still unexplored mode of associa­tion to dance. This article analyzes and makes visible the challenges and restrictions women face in endeavoring to sustain an independent dance practice in the context of urban folk dance in Bolivia. Through the accounts of the women and the ethno­graphic material gathered from fieldwork in 2018 in Bolivia, the study portrays the women’s dancing context revealing the challenges and restrictions linked to the condition of being women in a society that is traversed by chauvinism. In the task of dancing, the women’s performance reveals a complex negotiation of gender roles, ideas, and expectations; processes that highlight the women’s agency and determina­tion to carry on with a practice that ultimately grants them feelings of self-validation and autonomy.

Striving for balance: women entrepreneurs in Brazil, their multiple gendered roles and Covid-19

PurposeThis paper aims to explore how women entrepreneurs in Brazil are managing their businesses and gendered role expectations at home in the context of Covid-19. Using the lenses of business-family interface theoretical construct, the paper seeks to explain how women are navigating the business and family commitments in the pandemic context.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopts the interpretivist approach using Gioia methodology and 13 individual semi-structured interviews with women entrepreneurs in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.FindingsThe findings demonstrate that women implement numerous strategies including reliance on social relationships within the family, and externally, to manage the home-business expectations. The findings also reveal entrepreneurial resilience and adaptability in the face of a crisis that marks how women entrepreneurs navigate challenges in their entrepreneurial journeys.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the gender and entrepreneurship literature by giving greater visibility to women entrepreneurs in developing society in the context of the pandemic. This paper also demonstrates how negotiating gender roles can empower women entrepreneurs to challenge gendered norms.

“Leftover Women” or Single by Choice: Gender Role Negotiation of Single Professional Women in Contemporary China

In today’s Chinese society, we see more and more well-educated, well-paid, and independent career women. However, as traditional femininity has been associated with subordination and sacrifice, well-educated career women are perceived as less feminine and less like proper “women” or prospective wives. Career women who remain single until their late twenties have been referred to within Chinese popular culture as “leftover women.” The current research explores the negative discourses that single career-oriented women encounter in their lives, as well as their own perceptions on work, marriage, and gender roles. Through in-depth interviews with 30 single, professional women, I examined whether these women are really “leftover” on the marriage market and how they perceive their independent, single life. The study aims to explore how these career-oriented women live within conflicting social expectations and value systems, as well as how they perceive gender roles, marriage, and career.

“Re-feminization” of dependent women migrants: Negotiating gender roles in the Chinese digital diaspora

ABSTRACT Chinese women migrating to the US on dependent visas have been paid little attention. ICTs provide them a means to form an online community and to express their voices. Through netnography on a popular online forum of female Chinese immigrants in the USA (www.huaren.us), this article investigates how Chinese dependent visa holders describe and perceive their gender roles after migration. This paper finds that two representative gender roles—“miserable homemakers” and “successful career women”—stand out. However, both these groups of women take on more conservative roles in the domain of reproduction for motherhood and home-making after migration, which is defined as ‘re-feminization’ and represents their increased performance in and valorization of domesticity. By comparing gender norms in the US and China, re-feminization is regarded as resistance to hegemonic Chinese gender norms that devalue domesticity, but do not challenge the sexual division of labor that underlies patriarchal gender norms both in China and the US.

The mediated erotic lover. The role of pornography in the negotiation of gender roles and desire amongst Italian heterosexual couples

ABSTRACTConsidering gender, sexuality and sexual desire are culturally and socially constructed through social learning and interaction and pornography as a cultural practice, this article focuses on how the discourse that young Italian heterosexual couples construct around pornography can illustrate their definition and negotiation of desire, and gender roles. The work is based on 50 e-mail interviews with 21 female and 29 male young Italians aged between 20 and 24 years old. Our interviewees (both male and female) express the idea of heterosexual male desire as implacable, natural and a fundamental expression of masculinity. In the complex plot delineating desire, gender roles and heterosexual scripts in heterosexual couples, we suggest that pornography might be seen as an erotic lover capable of embodying practices and desires that cannot be expressed or shared by the couple.

Chinese ‘Study Mothers’ in Living Apart Together (LAT) Relationships: Educational Migration, Family Practices, and Gender Roles

Chinese people have a long history of giving great weight to education. Under the one-child policy, Chinese parents usually spare no efforts to devote themselves to their child’s development. This study examines how the gendered experiences of Chinese ‘study mothers’ ( peidu mama) who accompany their children to study while living apart from their partner, has impacted upon their everyday practices of ‘doing’ family in the Chinese social, historical, and cultural contexts. Drawing on data from qualitative interviews, this article examines how family is culturally constructed and practised in order to reclaim conventional forms of family and gender norms in China. For a woman, being a full-time study mother, even when it is at the cost of living separately from her partner and established career development, has been considered as a way to privilege ‘motherhood’ over ‘wifehood’. The dramatically opposite parenting roles reinforce and entrench the existing traditional gendered division of labour and gender hierarchy in contemporary Chinese society, which has a long tradition of patriarchal families within Confucian culture. This research suggests that family practices in the multi-local household setting are often closely implicated with practices of gender, class, mothering, and social norms. By focusing on these often-neglected groups, this study opens a new avenue to examining the diverse strategies employed by people in varied living arrangements, to negotiate gender roles and everyday family practices.

Beautiful and good woman: gender role negotiation among Taiwanese women who belly dance

Confucian values have strongly influenced gender stereotypes in Taiwan. Contrary to traditional gender expectations, the display of the female body is exceptionally encouraged in belly dancing. Utilizing data collected from 21 experienced dancers in Taiwan, this study examines the conflicts that women face when taking part in belly dancing, but also how they merge belly dancing with ideal gender images without conflict. The results show that, whilst few of the women experience inner conflicts, some experience external conflicts, usually with family members. However, by viewing belly dancing as a leisure exercise, a frugal and natural approach to acquiring femininity and beauty, the participants sought to differentiate themselves from the ‘bad others’ to construct a ‘beautiful-and-good’ female image. More generally, we have sought to demonstrate that critical analysis of the physically active female body must always be cognizant of the specific characteristics of those societies towards which the research is directed.

The Unintended Consequences of Temporary Migration from Eastern Europe

This article sheds light on the unintended consequences of temporary migration from Eastern European by combining Merton’s functional analysis with Levitt’s work on social remittances. The article presents a juxtaposition of the non-material effects of earlier migration from Eastern European, dating from the turn of the twentieth century, with those of the contemporary era of migration from Eastern European since the 1990s. The analysis shows that some aspects, such as negotiating gender roles, the changing division of household labour, individualistic lifestyles, new skills and sources of social capital, and changing economic rationalities are constantly being transferred by migrants from destination to origin communities. Contemporary digital tools facilitate these transfers and contribute to changing norms and practices in Eastern European society. The article demonstrates that migration fulfils specific functions for particular sections of Eastern European society by replacing some functions of the communist state and by facilitating their adaptation to changing conditions.

Indirect Remittances: A Case Study of Originating Country

This paper sheds light on the unintended consequences of temporary migration from Eastern European by combining Merton’s functional analysis with Levitt’s work on social remittances. The article presents a juxtaposition of the non-material effects of earlier migration from Eastern European, dating from the turn of the twentieth century, with those of the contemporary era of migration from Eastern European since the 1990s. The analysis shows that some aspects, such as negotiating gender roles, the changing division of household labour, individualistic lifestyles, new skills and sources of social capital, and changing economic rationalities are constantly being transferred by migrants from destination to origin communities. Contemporary digital tools facilitate these transfers and contribute to changing norms and practices in Eastern European society. The article demonstrates that migration fulfils specific functions for particular sections of Eastern European society by replacing some functions of the communist state and by facilitating their adaptation to changing conditions.

Exclusion and Inclusion in the Legal Professions: Negotiating Gender in Central and East Central Europe, 1887–1945

This article examines the struggle by women to gain access to higher education opportunities in law and to secure the right to work in the legal profession between the 1880s through the 1940s in Central and East Central Europe. Activists challenged the exclusion of women from universities and the field of law by testing meritocratic and democratic principles or holding to account constitutional commitments to equality. The lawyers’ movement they subsequently created acted as a spearhead for the legal wing of the women’s emancipation movement that sought to reform women’s rights in national legislation and the civil codes. These processes were integral to the negotiation of gender roles in Central European countries from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Moreover, the rise of pan-European female lawyers’ associations illustrates the broader significance of these legal struggles. In the history of the women’s rights movements, the right to work in the legal professions and in civil service was also integral to the larger struggle for full citizenship rights.

Exploring the normative context for women’s entrepreneurship in Pakistan: a critical analysis

PurposeThe role of women in Pakistani society – largely embedded in its patriarchal socio–cultural environment – has important implications for women’s entrepreneurial activity in the country. This study aims to investigate and analyse the influence of informal institutional factors on women’s entry into entrepreneurship in Pakistan, and determine how women exercise agency to cope with the constraints posed by such factors.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative approach is used to explore the normative context and lived experiences of women entrepreneurs in relation to the influence of socio–cultural beliefs and attitudes on their entrepreneurial career choices.FindingsThe findings suggest that women’s entrepreneurial career choices both revolve around and are shaped by a complex interplay of socio–cultural influences. Pakistani women entrepreneurs exercise their agency as a means of negotiating gender roles within both household and society, using religious descriptions as a means to justify their entrepreneurial activity.Research limitations/implicationsWhile every effort has been made to ensure that the data were objectively interpreted, and the derived findings were robustly analysed, the research team acknowledges the many difficulties associated with adopting a social constructionist approach. As articulated by Fletcher (2011), the key issues of contextual objectivity (i.e. where the researcher judges what is important), reflexive turn (the need for the researcher to constantly reconnect with the subject) and potential multiplicity of contexts (the various contextual and potentially conflicting influences on the researcher) presents ongoing challenges for researchers in this field.Originality/valueThis study offers valuable insights into the impact of the informal (socio–cultural) institutional factors on women’s entrepreneurial activity, opening up new avenues for further research. The study also contributes to the women’s entrepreneurship literature from the perspective of an Islamic developing country.