Gender Scholars Research Articles

Undoing religion, redoing gender: sexual stories of religious exit

ABSTRACT Drawing on life story research in the UK and the Netherlands, this article foregrounds women’s experiences of sexual embodiment in leaving religion. It approaches religious exit as a trajectory of transformation entangled with power and relationality. The article considers sexual embodiment as shaped by discourses of boundary-making that construct notions of religion, gender, sexuality and race. From this perspective, the article analyses women’s sexual stories of religious exit focusing on modesty, purity, sex and abuse. Its main argument is that women’s trajectories are involved in undoing religion and redoing gender, sexuality and race. The article encourages scholars of leaving religion to take gender, sexuality, race and embodiment seriously as formative for religious exit. Moreover, it calls for scholars of (lived) religion and gender to pay more attention to those who cannot or do not stay.

Telling Feminist Stories in an Affective Atmosphere of Anti-Genderism: Swedish Gender Scholars Reflect Upon Their Position

ABSTRACT The last decades have witnessed a widespread rise in populist, right-wing, anti-gender movements targeting gender-equality politics and gender studies throughout Europe. While the situation for Swedish gender studies remains relatively stable, with institutionalized gender departments, this paper focuses on how Swedish gender studies scholars conceive of their situation and the status of gender studies in the current era. Through an interview study drawing on the concept of “affective atmosphere”, the article explores how the anti-gender discourse induces a precarious situation that produces a sense of apocalypse and a crisis of hope for gender studies. As such, the anti-gender discourse calls upon scholars to react and engage. In the interviews, the future of gender studies was discussed as being at risk, while at the same time the interviewees described gender studies as an academic success story. However, to avoid falling into the trap of being either too optimistic or too pessimistic about the current state of the art, the authors argue that the knowledge production of gender studies as such can be reconfigured as a site for resistance, for detecting openings and creating possible pathways into the future that extend beyond the hegemonic neoliberal, authoritarian one.

Anti-Trans Attacks: Interrogating “Gender” in Politics and Gender Scholarship

This essay considers the rapid uptick in anti-trans legislation that targets transgender girls and women as an occasion to critically interrogate the ways that gender is conceptualized and operationalized in political science (Murib 2022). I argue that the disciplinary tendency to view gender as a single-axis facet of identity that is static and rooted in biology needs to be reconsidered in light of two problems. First, collapsing biological sex and gender naturalizes the gender of non-trans women and men as static, normal, and self-evident; transgender people, in contrast, are locked into perpetual processes of gendering themselves against this biological baseline (Enke 2012). Second, and as a result of this limited view of gender, political scientists face difficulties anticipating, understanding, and addressing recent mobilizations invested in maintaining White, heterosexual, and reproductive families as the cornerstone of what it means to be a proper citizen (Alexander 1994).

Queering Masculinities in the Middle East (SWANA) and South Asia

One of the most important shifts in gender scholarship is the attention now being paid to discourses and practices of masculinity in the Global South. This issue of Men and Masculinities contributes to this growing field in three important ways. First, we foreground scholarship on masculinities in two interconnected, but understudied regions of the world, specifically the Middle East, which is also known as South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), and its neighbor to the east, South Asia. In particular, we demonstrate the ways in which queer identities and communities are being formed across these two regions, connected as they are by historic trade routes, migration pathways, and transregional cultural flows. Second, we point to the vibrant masculinities scholarship that is emerging from these regions. But we focus specifically on non-normative masculinities—or the queer, trans, and other genderqueer masculinities—which have been historically present in these two regions, but which have been much less represented in masculinities literature. Third, we look to identity formation, or the ways in which young cis-gender, trans, and queer men come out in their communities and seek authentic lives of desire, pleasure, and participation. At the same time, we highlight the ever-present precarity within queer communities in the Middle East/SWANA and South Asia, especially given postcolonial nationalist and ethno-nationalist agendas, which promote normative heteropatriarchal masculinities and concomitant homophobia and transphobia.

Between Inevitability and Surprise

Using personal trans narrative toward framing a transgender historical method, this essay describes the large-scale historical trends that have led to the present moment in the history of trans people, the way that the Internet provides a place for everyone to act as their own historians, and the potential insights that transgender auto-historiography offers to feminist and gender scholars. This essay is part of a PHR forum on the theme of “Personal Reflections on Feminist Historical Methods,” with additional essays by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Natalie Marine-Street, and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela. The forum is part of a larger PHR special issue, Feminist Histories.

Relational Virginity and Nonbinary Gender: La vie de sainte Euphrosine and La vie de saint Alexis

ABSTRACT “Virgins,” to quote Sarah Salih, “are good to think with.” This holds true for medieval saints and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary critics alike. Scholars of medieval gender have demonstrated that virginity functioned as a sexuality, a form of devotion, and even a gender unto itself in the Middle Ages. In that spirit, and drawing on recent work in transfeminist studies, this article proposes virginity as a form of nonbinary gender—as opposed to femininity, androgyny, or third gender, as it has previously been understood—in Old French hagiography. Works like La vie de sainte Euphrosine and La vie de saint Alexis ask us to account for virginity’s relationality and its embrace of contingency, a convergence that transfeminist medieval and virginity studies can together provide. Virginity as nonbinary gender, in turn, points to the relationality of all gender, to the inherent disorganization and enmeshment of gender itself.

How Gap Measures Determine Results: The Case of Proportional Systems and the Gender Mobilization Gap

Abstract How scholars conceptualize and measure the gender gap in mobilization can have profound consequences for substantive conclusions. Scholars typically refer to a difference between women and men's turnout (difference-in-proportions measure) or a fraction of women voters among all voters (proportion measure). Using the case of proportional representation (PR) reform in Norway, I demonstrate that, in the context of low men's turnout, the proportion measure indicates that PR narrows the gap, while the difference-in-proportion measure indicates that it widens the gap. This is because mobilizing fewer women than men widens the difference between women and men's turnout, but may constitute a greater proportional increase in women's mobilization compared to men when only a few men (and even fewer women) vote. These findings bring together seemingly opposing arguments in the PR-gap debate and have wide implications for the study of ‘gaps’ within and beyond gender scholarship.

Emotional stoicism and affective masculinities in Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding

ABSTRACT Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) offers a compelling phenomenology of contemporary masculine affect in the story of troubled young white men on a college baseball team who struggle with ‘emotional stoicism’, a term gender scholars use to describe how boys and men are taught to hide feelings and vulnerabilities that Western culture has long associated with girls and women. Harbach’s novel explores the association between masculine ‘stoicism’ and the eponymous philosophy of Stoicism, which developed exercises to extirpate emotions. Harbach finds in the impossible quest for Stoic apatheia an analogy to the similarly futile pursuit of hegemonic masculinities, both fruitlessly following the logic of what Lauren Berlant terms ‘cruel optimism’, a concept that can help vividly illustrate how some Stoic philosophy distorts the affective lives of men. Yet the novel redeems elements of Stoicism, revealing how masculinities that encourage a competitive and controlling orientation toward others fundamentally contradict central Stoic ethical teachings. A re-envisioned, non-sexist Stoicism, the novel implies, might help boys and men to avoid the most harmful manifestations of hegemonic, ‘stoic’ masculinity.

Mobilising language, gender and sexuality studies

This introduction frames the special issue ‘Mobilising Language, Gender and Sexuality Studies’, situating the contributions in relation to interdisciplinary scholarship on migration, gender, sexuality and language. In particular, this introduction draws attention to Global South theorisations of migration as resistance, suggesting that scholars of language, gender and sexuality can build on such approaches to trace forms of agency that otherwise might go unnoticed. The contributions to this special issue investigate how gender and language circulate in dominant migration discourses and are contested by mobile communities, linking normative ideologies to individual bodies and lives through the use of stereotyped figures. The introduction also highlights how themes of time, place and nation weave through the contributions and calls for a scalar approach that resists the widespread downscaling of migrants’ own discursive acts. It concludes with a call to action that urges scholars to consider how they might support the ways in which mobile communities are making sense of and taking action in the world.

Children, Agricultural Labor, and Engagement à Temps in the 1820s Senegal River Valley

I examine the preference for children under engagement à temps (indenture) in Senegal, especially the Senegal River Valley, in the 1820s. In the late 1810s and early 1820s, Senegal’s administrators wished to build cotton and indigo plantations in the Senegal River Valley to replace profits lost after the turbulence of the Age of Revolutions, especially the loss of colonial Haiti, which had been France’s most profitable colony. However, France’s 1817 prohibition of the slave trade signaled to administrators that they would have to obtain non-enslaved workers for the plantations they wished to build. Thus, they created rachat (redemption) and engagement à temps. Under this system, Senegal’s administrators, colonists, and habitants bought captives on African slave markets, “redeemed” the captive from slavery, then forced a fourteen-year engagement à temps contract on the individual with the promise of eventual “freedom” from servitude. Senegal’s administrators, especially Governor Jacques François Roger, prioritized obtaining children, whom they defined as anyone under the age of sixteen, for this practice because they saw children as a docile labor force which would more easily take root in the colony, especially in its nascent plantation sector. By acquiring children, Roger hoped to create highly coercible workers committed to agriculture who would not abandon the plantations after the expiration of their contracts. Using correspondence among Senegal’s administrators, I trace the reasoning behind the preference for people under the age of sixteen, in addition to the two primary mechanisms used to acquire children. The first mechanism was rachat. An examination of rachats registered at Bakel in 1825, located in the notarial archives of St Louis at the Archives nationales du Sénégal, reveals that 59.5 per cent of rachats involved people under the age of sixteen. Second, the September 28, 1822 decree that regulated engagement à temps in the colony stated that any child born to a mother working as an engagée à temps had to work for the mother’s engagiste until the age of twenty-one, the age of majority in French legislation, in exchange for the care they had received in childhood. While this group of children did not experience rachat, the law enabled administrators to take advantage of their physical labor in addition to the reproductive labor of their mothers. I argue that the abolition of the slave trade forced French administrators, colonists, and habitants in 1820s Senegal to envision new ways to build a stable laboring population for the plantation economy they hoped to build along the Senegal River; because of free labor shortages in the region, rachat and engagement à temps appeared to be a solution. Children, seen as malleable and more coercible than adults, came to be seen as a key component of this workforce because administrators and colonists hoped they would grow up to be adults loyal to the French colonial economy. I also argue that historiographical methodologies pioneered by scholars of gender and reproduction under Atlantic slavery provide a useful way of grappling with the perspectives of people forced into engagement à temps. Overall, a focus on the importance of children to engagement à temps allows us to probe the continuities that tie together slavery and the slave trade, on the one hand, and on the other, the forced labor practices proliferated alongside abolition.

A feminism of the soul? Postfeminism, postsecular feminism and contemporary feminine spiritualities

Increasingly popular ‘feminine spiritualities’ urge women to foster personal transformation and social change through spiritual empowerment and healing of ‘the feminine’. However, in spite of feminist undertones, feminism is rarely explicitly evoked, and is often even rejected. Gender scholars have debated over the ambivalent feminism of contemporary spiritualities, which are readily seen as closer to postfeminist rather than feminist ideals, or framed as a form of old-fashioned cultural feminism. While some recent analyses do explore the feminist potential of feminine spiritualities in more positive terms, the debates often lack practitioner perspectives on feminism and deeper considerations of the practitioners’ own self-definitions. Based on ethnographic interview material across Finnish and Anglo-American contexts, this article explores how adherents of feminine spirituality imagine feminism, and whether they consider their spirituality to be feminist or not and why. I argue that while practitioners hold varying, often ambiguous positions in relation to feminism, the narratives iterate shared themes that render feminism and feminine spirituality as incompatible: an emphasis on femininity over feminism, and a focus on spirituality instead of politics. Furthermore, practitioners critique mainstream feminism for being too secular, while often simultaneously agreeing with feminist criticisms of both cultural feminist and postfeminist ideals. I suggest that failing to take the voices of spiritual women into account prevents constructive dialogue and solidarity among secular and spiritual feminists as well as non-feminist women, and offers little room for emerging postsecular feminist identities.

Mapping embodiment across the nexus of gender, tourism, and entrepreneurship

Informed by critical perspectives on embodiment, our article demonstrates how gendered assumptions reproduce and sustain particular bodies. We investigate how bodies are constructed across academic and policy literatures within entrepreneurship and tourism domains. To do so, we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis of relevant entrepreneurship, tourism, and gender scholarship and mapped thematic embodied tensions. These five thematic tensions - visible vs invisible, active vs passive, desired vs problematic, labouring vs redundant, and insider vs outsider bodies – then guided our analysis of tourism and entrepreneurship policy within Wales. Our findings highlight implications of the limited exploration of embodiment in both academic and policy literatures. Moreover, we emphasise the risk that – separately and relationally – current perspectives are epistemically recursive through the reinforcement of idealised bodily subjects.

Women in Zimunya and the musha mukadzi or umuzi ngumama philosophy for sustainable livelihoods

The musha mukadzi (Shona) or umuzi ngumama (Ndebele) is an African gendered philosophy that means women make up the home. This philosophy has been researched in African traditional religions (ATRs) and is interrogated from interdisciplinary angles in academia. African feminist research has highlighted how this philosophy can be derogatory, stereotyped and oppressive to women if it is naïvely used in domestic contexts. As a result, contemporary African feminists and gender scholars attempt to expose both the liberative and oppressive nature of this philosophy. This study seeks to interrogate how women from the grassroots understand this philosophy. It draws from in-depth interviews with women from Zimunya, Mutare, in Zimbabwe who describe this philosophy as a resource for sustainable livelihoods. Methods used to collect data involved in-depth interviews from a sample of 10 women whose ages ranged from 35 to 50 years. The findings highlight that for both single and married women in Zimunya, the musha mukadzi or umuzi ngumama philosophy has empowering traits that enhance women’s agency and sustainable livelihoods in the domestic household. They describe how this philosophy has empowered them to initiate income-generating projects that include rearing of poultry (road runners), membership to a sewing club, selling dried traditional foods and money savings (mikando).Contributions: This article explores an African gendered philosophy, musha mukadzi or umuzi ngumama [women make the home], and how this has been used as a resource by women in sustaining livelihoods.

Queer Narratives in Nordic Sami Literature: Coming-Out Narratives and Final Exposures in Savior of the Lost Children (2008) and Himlabrand (2021)

ABSTRACT This article explores how two queer narratives in Nordic Sami literature challenge, expand and change norms and stereotypes related to queer indigenous experiences. Characteristic for these narratives is the ambition to highlight taboos and challenge stereotypes in Sami contexts. In the article, I explore the characters’ coming-out processes and relate them to larger narrative traditions. To shed light on the obstacles the characters meet in the process of coming out to themselves and to their communities, and the genres through which the stories are told, I turn to gender scholars Judith Roof, Andrea Gutenberg and Anne Mulhall. I make use of their perspectives to explore whether the coming-out processes take different shapes when the individuals in question are Sami and thus doubly minoritized. Insisting on the importance of coming out not only to oneself, but also to the Sami community at large, they take on an important activist role, transcending the perspective of the individual. The primary texts are the young-adult novel Himlabrand (“Heavenly fire”) (2021) by Moa Backe Åstot and the blog novel The Savior of the Lost Children (2008) by Sigbjørn Skåden.

DecolonialMovidas: María Lugones's Notion of Decolonial Aesthesis through Cosmologies

Decolonial<i>Movidas</i>: María Lugones's Notion of Decolonial Aesthesis through Cosmologies

Queer Transgressions in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction: Gender, Nation, Politics

Queer Transgressions in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction: Gender, Nation, Politics

Is Ibn al-‘Arabī a Feminist?

Muhyiddīn Ibn al-‘Arabī is a very significant figure from 7th/13th-century Andalusia who made a paradigm shift in Sufism. He constructed a metaphysical doctrine and wrote about many issues including femininity and gender. His thoughts about the metaphysical state of women and femininity caused his approach to be interpreted as a source for Islamic feminism. He advocates for spiritual equality between men and women because of sharing “humanity” and asserts that women can attain the highest level of sainthood (qutbiyya). For his views on women’s imamate, testimony, and veiling, he is portrayed as a pro-woman thinker by some contemporary scholars. On the other hand, calling a great master “feminist” or at least “pro-feminist” is unacceptable for orthodox Muslims because of the pejorative connotations of feminism in mainstream Islamic thought. By explaining feminism through main feminist texts, and critically analyzing Ibn al-‘Arabī’s approach to gender through his works and books about gender issues in his philosophy, this paper attempts to introduce Ibn al-‘Arabī to gender scholars and feminism to Islamic scholars, and discuss his approach to women and gender.

Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work

Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work

‘Knowing’ Palestinian Women: Interrogating Western International Feminist Assumptions, Governance, and Social Science Discourses

This paper traces Palestinian women’s political mobilization for social change emphasizing historical and contemporary involvements in national struggles against colonial occupation and patriarchal oppression. Second, critical Middle Eastern feminists’ analyses, through their attunement to gendered orientalism, unmask a troubling pattern of culturizing categories of violence against women (VAW) within global feminist and human rights discourses. In particular, culturized framings of gender-based violence in the lives of Palestinian women ignores the multiple sources of violence and power of settler colonialism as ongoing everyday realities. Third, I share how social science instruments like the Conflicts Tactics Scale (CTS), criticized by US gender scholars, is widely used as a measure of VAW in the global South. By overestimating interpersonal gender-based violence among Palestinian women, Global feminist discourse and the otherness of women outside the West continue to reciprocally constitute each other. Thus covertlsolidifying global feminist discourse universalistic assumptions in scientific and objective forms.

Beyond social equity: Talking social justice in public administration

Public Administration ReviewVolume 83, Issue 2 p. 229-240 EDITORIAL Beyond social equity: Talking social justice in public administration Camilla Stivers, Camilla Stivers Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, USASearch for more papers by this authorSanjay K. Pandey, Sanjay K. Pandey Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USASearch for more papers by this authorLeisha DeHart-Davis, Leisha DeHart-Davis School of Government, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USASearch for more papers by this authorJeremy L. Hall, Corresponding Author Jeremy L. Hall jeremy.hall@ucf.edu School of Public Administration, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA Correspondence Jeremy L. Hall, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA. Email: jeremy.hall@ucf.eduSearch for more papers by this authorKathryn Newcomer, Kathryn Newcomer Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USASearch for more papers by this authorShannon Portillo, Shannon Portillo School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona, USASearch for more papers by this authorMeghna Sabharwal, Meghna Sabharwal Public and Nonprofit Management Program, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas, USASearch for more papers by this authorEiko Strader, Eiko Strader Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USASearch for more papers by this authorJames Wright II, James Wright II Askew School of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USASearch for more papers by this author Camilla Stivers, Camilla Stivers Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, USASearch for more papers by this authorSanjay K. Pandey, Sanjay K. Pandey Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USASearch for more papers by this authorLeisha DeHart-Davis, Leisha DeHart-Davis School of Government, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USASearch for more papers by this authorJeremy L. Hall, Corresponding Author Jeremy L. Hall jeremy.hall@ucf.edu School of Public Administration, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA Correspondence Jeremy L. Hall, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA. Email: jeremy.hall@ucf.eduSearch for more papers by this authorKathryn Newcomer, Kathryn Newcomer Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USASearch for more papers by this authorShannon Portillo, Shannon Portillo School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona, USASearch for more papers by this authorMeghna Sabharwal, Meghna Sabharwal Public and Nonprofit Management Program, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas, USASearch for more papers by this authorEiko Strader, Eiko Strader Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USASearch for more papers by this authorJames Wright II, James Wright II Askew School of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 26 February 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13620 *Editor-in-Chief's Note: PAR Editorials seek to raise the salience of important public administration themes. Social justice is one of the defining themes of our times and in this editorial statement, we clarify some basic issues and offer a vision for future scholarship and practice. This statement is co-authored with notable public administration scholars, many affiliated with the Consortium of Race and Gender Scholars (CORGES). I am especially grateful to Cam Stivers, Sanjay Pandey, and Leisha DeHart-Davis for their leadership in crafting this editorial statement. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume83, Issue2March/April 2023Pages 229-240 RelatedInformation