Theorization Of Gender Research Articles

Rawr: Kitchen, rage, Judith and I

Through aggressive repetitions and superimpositions of sound and images, this video (essay) proposes to give an audiovisual form to Judith Butler’s theorisation of gender as a performance made of repetitions of stylised acts. This experimental film creates a formal or ‘autopoetic’ manifestation of the rage that generations of feminist theorists and filmmakers have expressed at the idealised and uninhabitable embodiment of gender.

Theorizing Gender in Online Privacy Research

Abstract. Given the frequent observation of gender differences in privacy-related outcomes, we wanted to investigate how these studies theorize gender. We conducted a content analysis of 107 studies on the topic of gender and online privacy to determine to what extent gender theory is implemented (Research Question 1), identify the function of gender theory within the study (Research Question 2), and demonstrate the specific gender theories in use in online privacy research (Research Question 3). A large share of the studies rely on earlier empirical findings when talking about gender; others make assumptions that implicitly correspond with an existing gender theory. Less than a quarter explicitly implement gender theory into their research. Gender theory is mostly used to derive testable hypotheses. It is further used to explain gender differences ex posteriori. Social role theory ( Eagly, 1987 ) is most frequently referenced, followed by the social web gendered privacy model ( Thelwall, 2011 ) and communication privacy management theory ( Petronio, 2002 ). We discuss the drawbacks of insufficient gender theorizing, such as reduced power to analyze, explain, and predict gendered outcomes, and the risk of gender essentialism, that is, the belief that group differences reflect inherently distinct natures. We conclude with a call and suggestions for gender theorizing in online privacy research.

Discursive construction of hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity in the textbooks of primary education: children’s discursive agency and polysemy of the narratives

ABSTRACT Gender-normative discursive representations in textbooks could have deleterious impacts on pupils’ gender identity development. This study sets out to explore the discursive construction of femininity and masculinity in anthology textbooks for primary education and scrutinize children’s sense-making of gender-normative discourses. Grounded in a poststructuralist theorization of gender and Connell’s [(1995). Masculinities. Oxford: Blackwell] theory of masculinities, this qualitative study employs a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) to explore the discursive positioning of femininity and masculinity in school manuals. Additionally, semi-structured group interviews were conducted in two Athenian elementary schools with 40 boys and 40 girls, aged 8–10 years old. The findings revealed that, in addition to androcentrism, textbooks were overwhelmingly defined by emphasized femininity and hegemonic masculinity discourses. Analyses of pupils’ accounts demonstrated that the children negotiated normative discourses in idiosyncratic ways, and that boys were less prepared than girls to subvert the anachronistic discourses of gender promoted by textbooks. It was also found that the mother’s employment status may exert a broadening influence on pupils’ understanding of gender.

On the Natal Body and Its Confusing Place in Mental Life.

These reflections concern ongoing confusions in holding together the gestalt of the natal body, sex, gender, and procreation. Highlighting theoretical confusions is the shifting history of relations among the material body, the "psychoanalytic body,":sex, and gender. Studying these confusions and collecting more data may help the field advance where a rush to theoretical foreclosure will not. Observe, for example, how commonly foreclosing are the terms "masculine" and "feminine" when automatically applied to the merely biological attributes of a sexed body. More confusions arise from theorizing gender identity using split-off images of body parts divorced from any natal referent. In a published clinical case, for instance, the role of the procreative body is characteristically ignored in gender theorizing. Apparently unspeakable horrors of the female body come with its birthing potential and may be a motive for erasure. Julia Kristeva, an exemplary writer, accepts simultaneously a sexed, procreative, and gendered layering in the mind. Her account of the "abject" can shed light on the suppressive horror in our field, which remains almost silent on the body's procreative potential in everyday life. By contrast, even Ice Age sculptors were engaged with procreative female bodies.

South African contributions to LGBTI education issues

ABSTRACTSouth Africa stands out in the African region for its protection of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) rights. This article examines South Africa’s contributions to local policy for LGBTIs and to work on LGBTI issues in education policy and education rights progress internationally. It also considers broader South African contributions to the theorisation of gender and sexuality. Data derive from an analysis of 102 interviews with key informants participating in high-level global networking for LGBTI students’ rights, and documentary analysis showing how stakeholders characterise South African contributions to transnational LGBTI education work. Informants identified how such contributions have a strong human rights emphasis, furthering post-colonial resistance to simplistic gender and sexuality classification schema imposed via imperial colonising dynamics. While South African work in this area has also promoted and facilitated research, it has at times been limited by ambivalence from its leadership. The nation’s early adoption of constitutional rights, relationship rights and educational equity provisions as acts of decolonisation contribute valuable African LGBTI work examples to the region. Their success encourages further funding for South-South transnational LGBTI education work.

Gender and Sexual Practice in Structural Context: Condom Use among Women Doing Sex Work in Southern India

In this study, we elaborate connections among gender, structure, and practice to suggest how social structural relations shape social sexual practice and, in the process, reshape gender relations. Using survey data from a study of a community mobilization intervention, we investigate the connection between institutional arrangements and condom use practice in sexual encounters with commercial clients and intimate partners among 410 women engaged in sex trade in a semiurban town in southern India. Multinomial logistic regression analysis uncovers the effects of 16 measures of gendered structural relations in three contexts—livelihood resources, household circumstances, and community mobilization intervention priorities. We compare women who practice either consistent or inconsistent condom use with both clients and partners with a reference group of women who practice consistent condom use with clients but not with partners. Results reveal the importance of household and community relations for consistent safer sex practice over and above the organization of sex trade. Our analysis advances gender theory in two interrelated ways: We contribute to gender theorizing in the implementation of health interventions, and to gender change more generally by thinking through possibilities emerging from recursive influences between reordered institutional configurations and altered expectations in interaction.

Gendered Social Institutions and Preventive Healthcare Seeking for Black Men Who Have Sex with Men: The Promise of Biomedical HIV Prevention.

Research on gender and health, including research conducted among Black men who have sex with men (BMSM), has primarily focused on how gender norms and roles shape healthcare engagement. Here we advance that work by demonstrating how a broader theorization of gender, particularly one that moves beyond gender norms and performance to incorporate structures such as the healthcare system and the labor market, can facilitate an understanding of how gender affects preventive healthcare seeking among BMSM, particularly the uptake of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a promising approach to alleviate HIV disparities. This article is based on a year-long ethnographic study conducted in New York City with BMSM (n = 31; three interviews each) and community stakeholders (n = 17). Two primary findings emerged: (1) the labor market systematically excluded the men in our sample, which limited their ability to access employer-sponsored healthcare. Such discrimination may promote overt demonstrations of masculinity that increase their HIV vulnerability and decrease healthcare seeking, and (2) healthcare systems are not structured to promote preventive healthcare for men, particularly BMSM. In fact, they constrained men's access to primary providers and were usually tailored to women. Applying a structural, gendered lens to men's health-in addition to the more frequently researched individual or interpersonal levels-provides insight into factors that affect healthcare seeking and HIV prevention for BMSM. These findings have implications for the design of policies and institutional reforms that could enhance the impact of PrEP among BMSM. Findings are also relevant to the management of chronic disease among men more broadly.

A suitable boy? Gendered roles and hierarchies in family business succession

Given the importance of family business to economies and societies, the persistence of gender inequality in succession requires further exploration. While gender theorizing has penetrated mainstream management theorizing, its application in family business literature remains underdeveloped: extant research conceptualizes gender as an objective property of individuals, synonymous with biological sex. In this paper, we adopt a social constructionist approach and study four cases of family business succession, revealing significant insights into how gender structures successor selection. We show how gender dynamics are more complicated than a binary view focused on gender category would imply. Specifically, we identify how family members, through discourses and interactions, socially construct the successor role, and how this gendered construction of the role frames a hierarchy of potential successors. This hierarchy is based on the combination of gender category and the extent to which an individual's traits and characteristics are perceived to align with that role.

Beyond action

Isaac Reed, like the great early work of Talcott Parsons, is focused on social action and continental theorization and largely blind to the broader American interactionist tradition. Absent are Blumer, Dewey, Mead, James (though Peirce appears fleetingly), or the more phenomenological tradition of Schutz or Garfinkel. Absent too is the relational theorizing of gender and race scholars. Given all that is in Reed, it is absurd to suggest that there isn’t enough. The point of this paper is different. It is simply that there are alternate important traditions that ethnographic work draws upon that might aid in pushing Reed’s arguments in different directions. I hope to show how an interactionalist perspective proves fruitful in moving us beyond some of the basic challenges of the classical tradition.

Undone Anatomies: Femininity, Performativity and Parody in Mário de Sá-Carneiro's <em>A Confissão de Lúcio</em>

2014 marked the centenary of the publication of Mario de Sa-Carneiro’s novel A Confissao de Lucio, a text defined by its complex articulations of sexuality, jealousy, and madness. While traditional analyses of the text underplayed the importance of sexuality and eroticism to the plot, more recent readings have revisited the novel to engage with the latent sexual tension between the novel’s male protagonists. Sa-Carneiro’s use of sexuality and gender as articulated through his two female characters, however, remains overlooked. This study explores the radical possibilities of these intriguing characters, using Judith Butler’s poststructuralist theorization of gender and sexual categories to provide a starting point for the development of new perspectives on Sa-Carneiro’s classic text.

‘…DAS NORMALE WEIB GEHÖRT DER ZUKUNFT’: EVOLUTIONISM AND THE NEW WOMAN IN LEOPOLD VON SACHER‐MASOCH, FRIEDA VON BÜLOW AND LOU ANDREAS‐SALOMÉ

ABSTRACTWhilst the treatment of Darwinian and other concepts of evolution in literary theory and writing by men around 1900 has recently received attention, little has been written on their influence over women writers and their theorisation of gender at this epoch. This paper addresses the impact of ‘Darwinism’, in particular sexual selection, on concepts of gender and writing practice in the representative women writers Bülow and Andreas‐Salomé. These are contrasted with works by Sacher‐Masoch and with Bölsche's construction of the feminine in Das Liebesleben in der Natur. It is argued that radical feminism emerged even in prominent feminist writers around 1900 in an inhibited form, and that the authority attributed to Darwinistic constructions of sexual selection was a factor in that phenomenalisation.

The role of theory in gender and information systems research

In response to claims emanating from recent assessments of the status of gender and IS research about insufficient theorizing of gender, a critical literature analysis of research papers on the topic of gender and IS that appeared in information systems journals between 1992 and 2012 was undertaken. While some research about gender and IS explicitly employs or develops gender theory, other research that claims to be about gender does not explicitly employ any gender theory to interpret research findings, relying, instead, on implicit gender essentialism as a theory-in-use. Research papers about gender and IS that do not explicitly employ gender theory typically use another IS or management theory as the sensitizing device to interpret the data. Still other research papers are gender atheoretical insofar as neither explicit nor implicit gender theorizing is evident in the papers. In gender and IS research, as in all research, gender theory can be used as a lens to guide the collection, analysis and interpretation of data — whether conducted with a positivist, interpretive or critical epistemology. Alternatively, gender theory can be used to interpret findings when gender is a factor that (expectedly or unexpectedly) results from a larger analysis. Finally, gender theory can result, inductively, from the data by means of grounded theory methods. In any case, the use of theory is to be directed toward understanding the phenomenon of gender in the context of IS (analyzing, explaining), establishing causality (predicting) or guiding action (design and action). This analysis of the role of theory in gender and IS research offers recommendations about the conduct of gender and IS research going forward.

Urbanistica di prossimità: competenza di genere o strategia miope? Reintroduzione delle valutazioni dell'impatto di genere nella pianificazione spaziale

The theorizing of gender, diversity and spatial planning began over three decades ago, both within and from outside the planning profession. It has evaluated from representing ‘specific –gender/role connected- interests’ to analysing the dynamics of inequality and difference. It is important to distinguish between approaches based on the concept of “women friendly” planning, which aims at the improvement of the every day life of women without trying to change “traditionally gendered” roles, and concepts that challenge the embodied gendered roles.

How gender hierarchies matter in youth activism: young people's mobilizing around sexual health in Ecuador and Peru

Despite a growing body of research on youth activism, few studies examine how this intersects with gender. Our study aimed to explore whether and how young activists themselves perceived gender hierarchies as needing to be addressed through their collective action on sexual health in Peru and Ecuador. Using Grounded Theory (GT), qualitative data were collected and analyzed from young activists across four cases. Cases ranged in complexity from a single youth organization operating at the district level to numerous youth organizations articulating at the national level. We linked the GT analysis to a conceptual framework based on contemporary theorizing of gender and social movements. Accordingly, young activists perceived gender, and even class, ‘race’ and age, as salient to their collective actions. These actions corresponded to the social movement concept of mobilizing structures that consist of preexisting structures, tactics, and organizations. Young activists understood gender and other social categories as imbued by power differentials and, therefore, as social hierarchies, within which their activism was embedded. The study thereby demonstrates the need for an enhanced conceptual framework for the study of youth activism and its intersection with gender hierarchies.

Whose/Who's Ligeia?

Theorizing gender frees female and male from somatic determination for semiotic freeplay. Of course this is real work, of course a lot more work is still to be done. But I want here to leap over the theorizing of gender to the theorizing of the theorizing of gender—to make a problem not of gender within human being but of human being within which gender is differentiated. This puts into question not that most traditional of binary oppositions within human being, at least not directly, but human being, itself, the grand hypostatizing that grounds all the sciences of man. And this requires positing an Other whose semiotic companionship with human being would be analogous to that of female and male within human being. Now, when “posthuman” is increasingly being thrown around in articles in PMLA, and Microsoft’s Jaron Lanier, the first contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s recent forum on “the defining idea of the next decade,” replies “The End of Human Specialness,”1 can a different reading of Poe’s “Ligeia” help to conceive an other-than-human being, an entity within which the differentiation between two genders might

What Is Migration History? (review)

Reviewed by: What Is Migration History? Patrick Manning What Is Migration History? By Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder with Donna Gabaccia . Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2009. 200 pp. $64.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). This overview emphasizes the gradual incorporation of migration history into the broader field of migration studies. Written for university students, it also raises issues for researchers, as it notes the benefits of comparing and contrasting a wide range of migratory experiences and analytical frameworks. This volume gives principal emphasis to long-distance migration—"international migration" across state borders and migration across cultural frontiers in the long era before state borders became solidified. The authors are the late Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, her husband. These two scholars worked on the study for some time; as Harzig's illness progressed, Donna Gabaccia completed parts of the work. Thus, three leading historians collaborated on this interdisciplinary approach to migration history. The authors emphasize the range of perspectives on migration. They identify "popular views" in societies of settlement that centered on immigration and assimilation, focused on westward movement, ignored gender and race, and treated much of the world as sedentary and immobile. Second, they present scholarly views as advancing from such popular conceptions to more comprehensive views after the 1960s. But even at the start of the twenty-first century, they argue that scholars have yet to account for the realities of "migrant practices." Thus, when scholars from the 1990s focused on "transnationalism," migrants were dealing with increasingly restrictive practices of states. [End Page 577] The book's strongest chapter focuses on theories of migration and cultural interaction. It is probably the most wide-ranging review so far, in that it addresses theories developed and applied over two centuries. The bibliography and endnotes survey major English-language writings on migration, with some citations in other languages. The review of theory shows how studies of migration have been segmented by region, time period, and social situation. To reaffirm and expand the authors' point: there is a need for more comparison of migration over time, more attention to the big literature on forced migration, and more attention to biological studies of migration in other species. One example is the continued segmentation of the literature on slavery and slave trade: this large and substantial literature, full of important implications for study of social change generally, has not yet been treated as part of the migration literature. The authors make a special effort to advance the theorization of gender in migration. They succeed in emphasizing the importance of gender as a factor, if not in theorizing specifically gendered components of migration. In the course of their discussion, however, they unfairly stigmatize the work of the present reviewer as privileging males over females in the study of migration. "Patrick Manning has presented a typology that asserts male predominance among cross-community migrants . . . migrations he sees as fundamental drivers of conflict, of accommodation, and thus of change in world history" (p. 120). In effect they allege that this work takes no account of "the gendering of human movements" (p. 121). Surely the point of migration analysis should not be to try to maximize the number of female long-distance migrants in the past, but to explore the similarities and distinctions in migration experience by gender and to show the participation in migratory processes both of migrants and those who did not migrate. 1 The Harzig-Hoerder narrative of human migratory human history takes the form of a condensed chapter of some forty pages (half from human origins to 1600, half from 1600 to the present). It is an admirable effort, though centering too much on lists of movements and not enough on the accompanying social changes. But to restate general references to "women" or "women and men" about once each page of [End Page 578] the narrative is to restate a basic fact of life rather than to conduct a gendered analysis. As a framework for appropriate theorization, the authors propose a "systems approach." Their system is an effort to describe and model all the aspects of migration in terms of successive stages of a migration process: migration decisions, societies of departure, voyages, receiving societies...

Mothers in the Field: How Motherhood Shapes Fieldwork and Researcher-Subject Relations

Mothers in the Field:How Motherhood Shapes Fieldwork and Researcher-Subject Relations Tamara Mose Brown (bio) and Erynn Masi de Casanova (bio) Ethnography as a qualitative research method has evolved over time to increasingly demand that social scientists become reflexive by analyzing the effects of their presence in the field. The emphasis on reflexivity means that the researcher acknowledges his or her subjectivity and the consequences of the fact that the ethnographer is, in the words of Robert Smith, "his own research tool" (2006, 351). The dynamics created by the researcher's presence and interaction with the research subjects may only become apparent once the fieldwork has been completed. Of course, not all ethnographic researchers see the value in having a reflexive approach to their work in the field, and many continue to give short shrift to the complexities of their "place" in the field when writing up their work. For researchers who are mothers, engaging in ethnographic fieldwork with women provides a unique opportunity to analyze the effects of motherhood in the research process and relations with participants. This essay is a reflexive analysis by two ethnographic researchers whose status as mothers became an important component of studies of working women in two very different urban research sites: one in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and one in Brooklyn, New York. We begin by discussing the use of reflexive analysis in ethnography and then provide brief descriptions of the two ethnographic research projects. In the rest of the essay we explore four dimensions of motherhood relevant to the ethnographic research process. Through the lens of motherhood, we show how social science research can be enriched by researchers reflecting on their multiple roles and paying attention to dimensions such as (1) motherhood as building rapport between participants and researchers, (2) researchers' and subjects' philosophies on disciplining children, (3) researchers' and subjects' philosophies and practices of child care, and, (4) motherhood as a component of methodology [End Page 42] throughout the research process. When useful, we shift into first-person narrative accounts. Ethnographic Reflexivity What many consider to simply be thorough ethnography, that which includes an analysis of the researcher's position in the field, stems in part from the core principles of feminist methodology that have been absorbed into sociological and anthropological research (DeVault 1999). Women have often been studied peripherally—in the context of men's lives—as evidenced in the works of Wacquant (2004), Duneier (1992), Liebow (1967), and others. Sociologist Dorothy Smith (1989) argued that women's lives should be studied ethnographically from the women's points of view and that this empirical work could lead to the theorizing of gender and power from women's "standpoints." Feminist researchers also put forth the idea that by having female researchers study female participants, a more open dialogue could be explored, allowing for deeper understanding of social issues. Women anthropologists responded emphatically to the claim by leading male scholars that women's writing was not innovative, pursuing such innovation in part by writing the (gendered) researcher back into the anthropological narrative (Behar and Gordon 1996). Matching the researcher and participants by gender, race, language, marital status, and culture, though, is not enough to eliminate the class and power differences that prevail while doing ethnographic research (Lal 1996; Warren 2001; Wolf 1996). An exploration of the effects of motherhood in the field humanizes the researcher in ways that are not always disclosed in academic writing, even in ethnographies that reflexively analyze the researcher's class/racial/gender identity. Carol Warren has pointed out that motherhood is a key marker of mutual identification between women researchers and participants (2001). With some notable exceptions (Allison 1991; Grasmuck 2005; Stack 1974), researchers who are mothers often leave these identities out of their written ethnographies. The discussions of ethnographic research presented here are attempts to fill the void in earlier studies, by following the lead of other women ethnographers who place themselves as both insiders and outsiders (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Joseph 1996; Lan 2006; Naples 2003; Stack 1996). Taking the position of insider on the basis of common characteristics that the researcher shares with her participants, in this case being mothers or doing "mother work," at times...

Historical Perspectives in Comparative Politics and Gender Studies

Historical perspectives form the backdrop and the context for much work on gender in comparative politics scholarship, yet history itself has rarely been incorporated as the lens through which the theorizing of gender occurs. The current growth of interest in gender studies in American political development is strangely not reflected in contemporary trends of historical institutionalism within comparative politics (see Gretchen Ritter's essay in this issue). Although scholars of comparative politics working on gender or women almost always incorporate historical perspectives in their analyses, history is generally drawn on as background or to provide context. History itself is generally not the primary focus of their analysis and historical processes are not used to generate theory. It has been only recently that scholars, especially in the field of historical institutionalism (HI), have begun to think about new ways in which history could be used to develop theory and create new empirical knowledge in the field of comparative politics and gender.

Putting sexuality (back) into HIV/AIDS: Issues, theory and practice1*

After more than twenty years of programming and activism aimed at stemming the sexual transmission of HIV (and addressing the needs of those most vulnerable to infection) the HIV/AIDS epidemic continues to grow worldwide. Taking up this concern, this paper argues that one of the reasons why HIV prevention has had limited success is because of inadequate conceptualization of human sexuality in such work. Giving sexuality a more prominent position in responses to the epidemic raises a range of issues, including theorization of gender, understanding of sexual subjectivity, the significance of pleasure (or lack of pleasure) in sexual decision-making, and conceptualization of sexual behaviour and culture. Taking these themes forward entails asking significant questions about the underlying paradigmatic and methodological commitments of mainstream HIV/AIDS research, especially the tendency to reproduce accounts of human sexuality as if it were a measurable form of conduct only. Advocating new approaches that take the meaning and symbolic value of sexualities into account complicates established orthodoxies in the field whilst offering potential for more effective HIV prevention strategies.

Issues in boys' education: a question of teacher threshold knowledges?

This paper exploresthe effects of specific teacher threshold knowledges about boys and gender on the implementation of a so‐called ‘boy friendly’ curriculum at one junior secondary high school in Australia. Through semi‐structured interviews with selected staff at the school, it examines the normalizing assumptionsand ‘truth claims’ about boys, as gendered subjects, which drive the pedagogical impetus for such a curriculum initiative. This research raises crucial questions about the need for the formulation of both school and governmental policy grounded in sound research‐based knowledge about the social construction of gender and its impact on the lives of both boys and girls and their experiences of schooling. This is crucial, we argue, in light of the recent parliamentary report on boys' education in Australia which rejects gender theorizing and given the failure of key staff in the research school to interrogate thebinary ways in which masculinity and femininity are socially constructed and institutionalized in schools through a particular ‘gender regime’. While some good things are happening in the research school, the failure to acknowledge the social construction of gender means that ultimately the school's programs cannot be successful.