Body Gender Research Articles

In bodies and homes: Gendering citizenship in Southern African cities

How do the everyday contexts in which ordinary women struggle to access and maintain a place on the peripheries of the city shape experiences of citizenship? This paper explores this question in George, a periurban Lusaka neighbourhood in Zambia and through experiences of Zimbabwean migrant women’s negotiation of a place on the peri-urban edges of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. In the logics of citizen-subjects, the experiences of these groups of women should be poles apart, the first with rights imbued in citizenship, the second migrants without. Here instead, we demonstrate the ways in which gendered political subjectivities embed in the hard, lived realities of home. In placing gender and everyday body politics at the forefront of our analysis, the paper makes visible the micro-realities of making home. We demonstrate that an assumed recursive relationship between citizenship and home, as a physical and social place in the city, is problematic. Building on debates on citizenship and its gendering in post-colonial African urban contexts, we demonstrate instead that citizenship and its gendered contestations and emergent forms in Southern African are crafted in quotidian activities in homes and everyday city contexts.

How (Not) to Translate the Female Body

How (Not) to Translate the Female Body Stephanie McCarter (bio) Not long ago, my three-year-old daughter drew all over herself with magic markers, as young children are wont to do. After we cleaned her up, she looked down and said, “There’s still some on my chest.” Her use of “chest” arrested me because, while it was exactly the right word for her to use, it’s one fraught with meaning. How long will she be allowed to simply have a chest? How long will she and her five-year-old brother run shirtless through the house, unaware of how much the world will soon differentiate their bodies? A woman’s body is burdened by language, marked as something other than the male body. There is nothing necessarily intrinsic about this—her body’s assigned otherness extends far beyond any sex characteristics that make the biological female body function in ways the biological male body does not. A woman’s body is largely a cultural invention, given expression through words that mandate what that body must signify, even what parts it must possess. The language we use chisels and molds the female form, like sculpture. [End Page 581] “The chest,” as Iris Young writes, “is an important center of a person’s being. . . . It is to my chest, not my face, that I point when I signify myself.” And yet too commonly we allow only men to have chests, whereas a woman can have a bust or, even more invitingly, a bosom, a place to rest one’s head. She has breasts, and these have a thousand names. English is particularly rife with words for a woman’s body that set it apart from that of her brothers, that make it more enticing and more strange, less a material that contains her—that is her—and more a thing that another can act upon, for someone else’s use and pleasure. The degree to which this binary is enforced varies from one language to another. A challenge translators face, or ought to face, is how to avoid imposing their own culture’s construction of gender and the gendered body onto the work they are translating, while simultaneously preserving how the source text constructs these, especially when it does so differently. Yet this is not often done. Because translation almost inescapably reflects its own place and time, it can illuminate what we modern Anglophones have too often and unnecessarily imposed upon female flesh. ________ Latin, now ancient but hardly dead, can, to be sure, demarcate differences between the male and female body, and does so both for praise and abuse. In his Epodes (30 BCE), for example, the Roman poet Horace explains why a woman cannot sexually arouse him. The problem, he claims, is her repulsive body. She is a catalogue of ugly parts. In my translation (all unattributed translations are my own): Yes, I am turned on by your chest with breasts that sag like udders of a mare [End Page 582] and by your flabby gut and skinny thighs fastened on top of swollen calves. (Epodes 1.8.7–10) There is really only one word here that marks this repulsive body as that of a woman: her breasts (mammae), which look like a mare’s udders. The part that makes her female also makes her an animal, not just different from a man but different from humanity. These breasts, however, are located on, and yet are distinct from, her pectus, “chest,” a part that everyone has. How should we translate that word? That is the real test for the translator. Those who have taken up the challenge of translating the Epodes have often declined (particularly before the modern era) to render this poem. It’s too crude—her body is too crude—for English. The 1914 Loeb edition of C. E. Bennett, for example, simply omits it. But those who do translate this poem refuse to grant Horace’s woman a chest. In Niall Rudd’s 2004 Loeb edition, she has a “bosom,” as she does in the translation of W. G. Shepherd (Penguin 1983). This word doubles her body’s alterity. David Mulroy (Michigan...

Illness of the Gendered Body, Freud’s The Uncanny, and “Being-in-the-World”

The study of illness narratives, or pathography, is an emerging discursive scholarship within the field of medical humanities. Centering the connection between narrativity and identity, illness narratives stand as a meaningful response to perceived medical subjugation. This paper turns to a particular case study of hyperandrogenism, a medical condition characterized by “excessive” levels of male hormones (androgens) such as testosterone. When identified in the female body, the increased androgens are associated with “masculinizing” symptoms including excess body and facial hair, male-pattern baldness, infertility, elevated sex drive, increased muscle mass, and absence of menstrual bleeding. For the purposes of imaging new ways to situate the phenomenological experience of hyperandrogenism and illness of the gendered body, a linkage can be made between such an illness and Sigmund Freud’s conception of the uncanny. In line with Martin Heidegger’s conception of phenomenology, I will turn to the lived experience of women with hyperandrogenism through their digital illness narratives (writings of their experience of illness in online blogs), and outline how the experience of hyperandrogenism distorts temporal reality by making “alien” both the past and future. I will show how the gendered body, and therefore self-identity and selfhood, become abnormal in the sense of Freud’s uncanny. Finally, I will discuss how the experience of hyperandrogenism and illness of the gendered body work to trouble the notion of the “everyday.”

What Is African Woman? Transgressive Sexuality in 21st-Century African Anglophone Lesbian Fiction as a Redefinition of African Feminism

The article argues that emerging African lesbian fiction in English is radically redefining African feminism, femininity, and society, imagining a social change toward respect for otherness and the recognition of individual human rights. By proposing the African woman's right to self-determination outside of traditional identities, it distances itself from 20th-century Afrocentric feminist theory and chronicles a radical epistemic shift in the formation of African women's subjectivity. Its move toward feminist individualism signifies a disappointment with the African postcolonial nation that has not served its citizens and especially women, whose gendered bodies have been used to prop up oppressive traditions. Women's experience of sexual pleasure in woman-to-woman sexual acts is figured as an expression of freedom, power, and agency that heterosexual relationships, corrupted by patriarchy, do not provide.

Of Monsters and Malinches: Signifying Violence in Edgar Clément's Operación Bolívar and Tony Sandoval's El cadáver en el sofá

In this article, I show how Mexican artists Edgar Clement and Tony Sando-val work through representations of mutable, gendered bodies to explore the manifestations of neoliberalism and the kinds of violence that are encouraged or facilitated within that socioeconomic framework. More specifically, I argue that both artists make use of a wide range of monsters and monstrous characters to revelatory effect as they employ a series of specifically Mexican monsters to relate multifaceted stories of violence on a personal and systemic level. This is particularly true regarding their construction and positioning of la Malinche or malinchista characters as the monstrous/revelatory centers of each text. Lastly, I argue that the use of an open medium such as comics/graphic narrative provides both artists with an ideal platform to relate issues of drug-related violence and trauma for two reasons: first, it interrogates what Oswaldo Zavala has called the critical limits of narconarrative, as both texts refuse to present drug or other violence as disconnected from the nation and the state. Secondly, this interroga-tive power is due in part to the way in which the Mexican reading public has historically been trained to consume and interact with graphic narrative.

Breaking gendered boundaries? Exploring constructions of counter-normative body hair practices in Āotearoa/New Zealand using story completion

ABSTRACTDo women with body hair continue to evoke disgust? Are men without body hair read only as athletes and/or gay? To explore contemporary sense-making practices around apparently counter-normative gendered body hair practice, we developed a two-stem story completion task. We collected stories from 161 undergraduate students (129 women and 32 men) about David, who had decided to start removing body hair, and Jane, who had decided to stop removing body hair. We analysed the data thematically within a constructionist framework, resulting in three themes: secrecy and shame; the personal benefits of going against the grain; and the personal is political. The personal benefits theme included four distinct (gendered) subthemes: increased heterosexual attractiveness; increased sporting prowess; removal of a hassle; and liberation from conformity. These story data gave access to familiar but also somewhat different accounts than those collected through typical self-report measures.

Saartjie Baartman, Nelisiwe Xaba, and me: the politics of looking at South African bodies

Dance Artist/Choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba’s They Look at Me and That Is All They Think (2006) ‘refers to the story of Sara[tjie] Baartman […] the “Hottentot Venus”’ (2006. 9th Jomba! Contemporary dance experience 2006 programme, p. 7) who was taken from her homeland South Africa, and exhibited in Europe in the nineteenth century. After Baartman died in 1815, her remains were displayed in a museum in Paris until 1982. Xaba parallels the story of Baartman to her own experience of performing in Europe as a black South African woman. This article considers how They Look at Me and That Is All They Think exposes the politics surrounding the act of looking at a particular racial and gendered body in both the historical and contemporary context, and how the concept and articulation of the ‘superior’ European subject was dependent on the classification of Baartman, and other black Africans, as exotic others. In my practice-based research project How I Chased a Rainbow And Bruised My Knee (2007), which was a choreographic response to Xaba’s work, I theatricalize my identity as a white South African woman to make visible whiteness, its associated privilege, and how it is dependent on the representation of a particular type of blackness.

How can a heterosexual man remove his body hair and retain his masculinity? Mapping stories of male body hair depilation

ABSTRACTThis study explores the gendered body hair removal norm and the meanings of male body hair by examining young people’s sense-making around male body hair removal. The novel technique of story completion was used to collect data from 102 psychology undergraduates. They were presented with a story “stem” featuring a young man (David) deciding to start body hair removal and asked to complete the stem. David was most often portrayed as a young heterosexual man who was excessively hairy, in the “wrong” places, was often subject to teasing and bullying, and was concerned about his diminished sexual capital. Hair removal did not always end “happily ever after” for David. While in some stories he “got the girl,” he was punished for his vanity and foolishness in others. These different endings arguably reflect currently ambivalent meanings around male body hair depilation. The production of a hairless, or less hairy, male body is both desirable and a potential threat to masculinity. The data spoke strongly to the power of social norms surrounding body hair practices and suggest that story completion provides a useful tool in interrogating the discourses that sustain these norms.

The Sex and Race of Satire: Charlie Hebdo and the Politics of Representation in Contemporary France

This essay argues that we cannot fully grasp what has been at stake in discussions following the January 2015 attacks in Paris, nor the symbolic place Charlie Hebdo has subsequently come to hold in French society, unless we pay attention to the ways in which gender, sex, and race have shaped both Charlie Hebdo’s visual register and contemporary representations of Frenchness and difference. Within the French context, difference has historically been assigned to bodies that are imagined to disrupt the proper gendered and sexual ordering of the nation, focusing recently on “Arab” and “Muslim” gendered bodies, just as Jewish bodies had been caricatured earlier in the twentieth century. This essay therefore argues that understanding Charlie Hebdo’s satire requires examining how the sexualization of race in representations of those deemed different, especially Muslims, has become incredibly banal in contemporary France. The magazine participated in rather than exposed what came to be seen as commonsense beliefs that both Left and Right relied on and that marginalized Muslims from the republican order.

The Shape of Desire

The Shape of Desire

Gender and innovation policy in Canada and Sweden

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a comparative case study of national innovation system in Canada and Sweden from the perspective of gender equality. The case study focuses on public policy to illuminate the formal aspects of innovation systems as they are conceived by the state in relation to gender, diversity and social inclusion. Formal policy measures are contrasted with interview data to provide a holistic picture of innovation policy as it relates to gender equality in both countries.Design/methodology/approachThis paper relies on data from 44 qualitative interviews with innovation leaders in the public sector, private sector and academia in Canada and Sweden, as well as a sample of innovation and gender experts at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in Paris, France, between 2012 and 2014. The theoretical framework draws on feminist institutionalism to explain the gendered interactions of institutions in innovation spaces.FindingsThis study finds that Sweden is a global policy leader in the development of gender-conscious innovation policy, while Canada has yet to consider a gender-conscious approach to innovation policy. Gender-conscious innovation policy norms have not traveled across the OECD because of administrative solos and political opportunity structures.Research/limitations implicationsEach of the people contacted to sit for an interview was chosen primarily on their professional title and their ability to speak from a place of knowledge about innovation in their country and or industry, and this creates a success bias within the study focusing on the knowledge of elites in the field.Practical implicationsThis study explores how policy might be reimagined to support gender equality and diversity, thus changing the institutional landscape to support a wider range of innovations and distributing the benefits of innovation in a more equitable way.Social implicationsThis paper challenges assumptions about the social and economic power dynamics reflected in current innovation systems in Canada and Sweden.Originality/valueThis is the first study of its kind in comparative public policy to explore differences in gender equality and innovation policy in Canada and Sweden. This research also contributes more widely to the existing body of gender, public policy and innovation literatures in Canada and Sweden, respectively.

The Likeness of Modernism in Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction

ABSTRACTThis paper examines Marilynne Robinson’s view of metaphor and her deployment of metaphor in the novels Lila and Housekeeping for a model of how modernism functions in new writing. Robinson sees the metaphor as fundamental for literary imagination, precisely because it aims at understanding even as it demonstrates the limits of language and comprehension. Her fiction, specifically in her dramatisation of metaphor as a “likeness” and in the metaphor of the permeable, unstable house, participates in metamodernist oscillation, although largely devoid of the attendant despair of modernism and the irony of postmodernism. The metaphors of the house and the gendered body—especially for drifters like Lila and the main characters of Housekeeping—act as modernist markers of form, a form that negotiates fragments and wholes, interior and exterior, itinerancy and home.

Brooms of Doom: Notes on Domestic Bodies Gendered to Death in Mughal-e-Azam, Fire, and Earth

This essay explores how current trends of xenophobic and class-based violence target women of color in a throwback to postcolonial studies. Representational discourses produce these subjects as gendered bodies whose ultimate difference lies in a postcolonial biology of difference that opens them to death. In particular, I unravel the tight braid of domesticity “at home” with the necropolitical prerogative of patriarchal hegemons in three key Hindi films: K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam and Deepa Mehta’s Fire and Earth. I begin by recalling various theories of representation of women of color in relation to the othering of gendered and racialized bodies, and then link them to regimes of gender that are allegorized by the “brooms” of domesticity. I focus on the women protagonists, and demonstrate that these three films, with respect to their varying historical periods, deposit gendered domesticity as the occasion and justification for women protagonists to encounter obliteration – a sweeping act that renders them “brooms of doom.” In conclusion, I return to the present context to frame my readings of these “brooms of doom” that sweep through these films into a history of the present that continues to render precarious the lives of women of color.

Inside/out: women’s movement and women in movements

ABSTRACTAbout 20 years after Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana’s acclaimed essay ‘Problems for a contemporary Theory of Gender’ was written, suddenly women – of different ages, castes, classes, from diverse regions, and with various religious affiliations – have again taken the centre stage from the power corridors of policy-making to the debates in student organisations. In the last few years there has been an exponential increase in the coverage of violence against women in the media, several Government policies on the girl children have been launched, both sexual harassment and gender sensitisation have attained the status of everyday vocabulary amongst a significant section of the population, and yet feminism has remained a rather exclusive term from which the gentlefolk of urban India tends to keep a safe distance.The question remains, how do we make sense of this new visibility – which becomes glaring and blinding at the same time? Are we experiencing a resurgence in Women’s Movement? Is it a result of the nation-wide shockwave after the Delhi Gang rape in December 2012 when middle-class India came down to the streets? Is it the first wave of the new movements that are sweeping through university campuses and the ways in which new Dalit mobilisations are articulating economic and social rights? Is it connected to the visibility of protesting bodies on streets along with virtual solidarities in social media platforms, indicating debates on the layers of inequality and discrimination that accrue at this juncture of economic liberalisation and consumer culture? Probably it is all of them and more. This is an effort to engage with different ways of seeing, different genealogies of vision vis-à-vis gendered bodies in both public and private domains and explore the configurations of collective mobilisation around ‘women’s issues’. While voice and speech have been part of critical feminist discussions for the last three decades, the turn to visual constructions of gender is a recent one with brilliant but sporadic predecessors like Donna Harraway’s ‘Situated Knowledges’ (1988). This essay intends to conjoin vision with voice in understanding gender politics in India and unpack the ways in which multiple registers of women’s agency connect with each other.

The Feminist Question in Realism

Feminist standpoint theory and critical realism both offer resources to sociologists interested in making arguments that account for causal complexity and epistemic distortion. However, the impasse between these paradigms limits their utility. In this article, I argue that critical realism has much to gain from a confrontation with feminist theory. Feminist theory’s emphasis on boundary-crossing epistemologies and gendered bodies can help critical realism complicate its notion of the bifurcation between epistemology and ontology. But taking feminist theory seriously also involves careful attention to the risks of epistemic violence, to questions about credible witnesses. I argue that both paradigms will be improved by better theorization of (1) ideology as part of social ontology and (2) interactions between the context of knowledge production and social ontology. Attending to what is missing, distorted, or occluded between the knower, knowledge, and object of knowledge can provide resources for theorizing social ontology.

Diabetes mellitus and hyperglycemia control on the risk of colorectal adenomatous polyps: a retrospective cohort study

BackgroundColorectal cancer (CRC) develops from colorectal adenomatous polyps. This study is to determine if diabetes mellitus (DM), its treatment, and hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) level are associated with increased risk of colorectal adenomatous polyps.MethodsThis was a retrospective cohort study that included patients who had at least one colonoscopy and were continuously enrolled in a single managed care organization during a 10-year period (2002–2012). Of these patients (N = 11,933), 1800 were randomly selected for chart review to examine the details of colonoscopy and pathology findings and to confirm the diagnosis of DM. Multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed to assess the associations between DM, its treatment, HbA1c level and adenomatous polyps (our main outcome).ResultsAmong the total of 11,933 patients with a mean (standard deviation) age of 56 (± 8.8) years, 2306 (19.3%) had DM and 75 (0.6%) had CRC. Among the 1800 under chart review, 445 (24.7%) had DM, 11 (0.6%) had CRC and 537 (29.8%) had adenomatous polyps. In bivariate analysis, patients with DM had 1.45 odds of developing adenomatous polyps compared to those without DM. This effect was attenuated (odds ratio = 1.25, 95% CI: 0.96–1.62, p = 0.09) after adjusting for confounders such as age, gender, race/ethnicity, and body mass index. There was no significant association between type or duration of DM treatment or HbA1c level and adenomatous polyps.ConclusionsOur study confirmed the known increased risk of adenomatous polyps with advancing age, male gender, Hispanic race/ethnicity and higher body mass index. Although it suggested an association between DM and adenomatous polyps, a statistically significant association was not observed after controlling for other potential confounders. Further studies with a larger sample size are needed to further elucidate this relationship.

Wearable cameras, in-visible breasts: intimate spatialities of feminist research with wearable camcorders in Istanbul

Video-based wearable technology such as actioncams and optical head mount devices lead to various kinds of visualities and interrelations between camera vision, bodily visibility, immersive viewing and public visibility of the body-wearing-the-camera. These interrelations are not neutral and in order to claim wearable visual technology's potential for critical, feminist research, it is essential to problematise the contexts and frictions that precede and/or surface during and after the bodily experience of shooting with a wearable device in a research context. In this article, I problematise the common approaches to video-based wearable research technology by engaging participants' particular ethical, emotional, political positions and embodiment of camera's prosthetic vision during mobile visual research in Istanbul. This work was realised as part of the ongoing study on memories of violence and wellbeing in Istanbul and the specific questions that guide my discussion are: what wearable camcorders as mobile research tool do to bodies; how they co-constitute the norms of visibility, movement and gender of particular bodies and what practices and emotional responses emerge from these intersections. A major aim, therefore, is to situate the camera experience as in physical and social relations of moving, seeing and be seen as gendered bodies in specific (research) settings. Drawing on ‘the embodied nature of all vision’, the article provides a close-up, chest-specific analysis of the implications of doing wearable visual research and presents breast-space as an emergent research site in my Istanbul study.

“Black” Comics as a Cultural Archive of Black Life in America

Set in the fictitious African nation of Wakanda, the six volumes of the Black Panther comic book weave plots that are faithful to superhero tropes and aware of Black nationalist discourses. The storylines focus on deterring white dominance, tribal warfare, and mineral exploitation. Creating characters conscious of the threats to their autonomy is an opportunity to reframe the “Black power” trope. This photo essay explores how iterations of raced and gendered figures in mainstream and independent comics are used to mediate and meditate on certain social anxieties. The images and their associated captions explore how Afrofuturism in “Black” comics not only provides illustrative cases of actual Black social life and political crossings engaged with cultural Black archives, but stimulates complex engagements with Black feminist thought in order to advance the liberation struggles of mutant, racialized, and gendered bodies seeking empowerment and social justice.

Serum Uric Acid Reduction Is Associated with Gender Differences and Body Fat Distribution after Laparoscopic Sleeve Gastrectomy

Background: Uric acid is believed be an important modulator in glucose and lipid metabolism. This study is aimed to estimate the efficacy of laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG) on obese patients and find out the relationship of serum uric acid (SUA) to body fat distribution in both male and female of Chinese patients. Methods: A total of 65 obese patients (32 females and 33 males) who underwent LSG were enrolled for this study. Their body composition was measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA). The data of anthropometric measurements, glucolipid metabolism and SUA was collected before and 6 months after LSG separately. Results: More significant reduction of SUA was observed in the female group than the male group after LSG (female (17.98±12.72)% vs. male(3.22±15.66)%, p<0.001). Furthermore, changes in SUA showed significantly positive correlation with visceral adipose tissue (VAT) in female patients (r=0.542,p=0.011). And it was also positively correlated with changes of the area under the curve(AUC) for glucose during 75g oral glucose tolerance test(r=0.567,p=0.002), fasting insulin(r=0.505,p=0.006) and natural logarithm of HOMA-IR (r=0.427,p=0.023). Post-surgery high-density lipoprotein (HDL) levels significantly increased from 0.89±0.19 to 1.18±0.23 mmol/L (p<0.001) in males. The reduction of SUA in male patients were positively associated with changes in neck circumference(r=0.617,p=0.000)and hip circumference(r=0.381,p=0.042), and negatively correlated with changes in HDL levels (r = -0.422, P = 0.018). It was also positively correlated with changes of fat content in upper arm, legs and gynoid area (r=0.450, r=0.650, r=0.432, respectively; all p<0.05), while unrelated to visceral fat in the male group. Conclusions: The efficacy of LSG on glycolipid metabolism may be associated with gender-related differences in body fat distribution. Uric acid may be a gendered modulator of glucose and lipid metabolism. Disclosure X. Zhang: None. F. Mei: None. J. Gao: None. X. Cheng: None. L. Bu: None. C. Zhu: None. S. Qu: None.

Keeping abreast of gendering practices in health and physical education and physical culture: breastwork, breastism and breast pedagogies for (de)gender justice

ABSTRACTAt an embodied and personal level this paper plays with what Evans, J., & Davies, B. (2011. New directions, new questions? Social theory, education and embodiment. Sport, Education & Society, 16(3), 263–278) suggests are ‘the complexity and nuances of biology in culture and the influence of body pedagogies in the production of social inequalities and hierarchies.’ (p. 263). Despite extensive attention to gender order, sexualization, sexual subjectification, sexual and gender representation in physical culture (sport, active lifestyles and health and physical education), research/scholarship has paid little attention to the positioning of and constitution of practices by body parts, such as breasts specifically. Given that gendered cultural pedagogies teach humans how to understand their selves, physical culture has potentially extensive affordances for learning the self. Drawing on narrative inquiry and content analysis, six diverse participants’ breastories are examined for breast pedagogies and how the materiality of breasts constructs and position humans and their gendered representations in physical culture. This paper suggests the recognition of breastism and employment of breastwork to work towards gender justice and dismantling some of the oppressions of gender. While others argue that productions of the gendered body lead to discipline and control of body parts, actions, and gender presentation, I consider instead the material and symbolic role of body parts, their actions and the gendered construction of those parts and how these gendered constructions act to discipline and control body pedagogies and engagement for more equitable futures in physical cultures.