Gender Space Research Articles

Gender, space and counter-conduct: Iranian women’s heterotopic imaginations in Ramita Navai’s City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran

Thus far, studies on the politics of gendered identities and spatial (in)justice in the Islamic Republic of Iran have mainly focused on the negative role of spatialization in the formation and perpetuation of a heteropatriarchal normativity. Little attention has been paid to the dialectical relationship between space and power as well as to the possibilities of women’s agency in challenging, contesting and reconstructing gendered spaces. This article aims to illustrate the multifaceted-ness of women’s spatial experiences by foregrounding two points: the permeability of the hegemonic spaces and the fluidity of the women’s identity as being both objects and subjects of conduct. Ramita Navai’s topographical life writing City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran offers unique insights into women’s everyday navigations of space in the capital city of Iran. It is argued that the central and historic street of Vali Asr is depicted as heterotopia or the locus of incompatible—i.e. multiple, heterogeneous and inherently paradoxical—spaces. While the oppressive power wants the street and the city as a closed system, female citizens use various strategies of refusal such as creation of secret gatherings, annihilation of the self and production of counter-memories and counter-histories to open up the spaces and reimagine an other form of subjectivity. It is concluded that the existing socio-spatial dialectic allows the possibility of interpreting gendered spaces in Tehran as social processes of symbolic encoding, decoding and recoding.

Cyber Harassment: Fenomena Hate Comment Di Era Pandemi Covid-19 Pada Akun Tik-Tok @Y***Q

The era of the covid-19 pandemic, the popularity of social media shows an increasingly significant trend, especially in Indonesia. This fact is directly proportional to the emergence of various kinds of social media that offer various interesting features, one of which is the Tik-Tok application. Along with its development, many internet citizens (netizens) have used the comment feature on the content presented in the Tik-Tok application. However, this feature is used as a vehicle for self-existence through comments that are vulnerable to being included in the cyber-harassment category. This article tries to elaborate on the case of cyber harassment in the Tik Tok application in the form of hate comments on the @y***q account that occurred during the covid-19 pandemic era. Based on the theoretical framework of Social Identity, it can be explained how the phenomenon of cyber harassment is present as a consequence of technological developments which ultimately leads to Kekerasan Berbasis Gender Online (KBGO). Tik-Tok as social media is not friendly in presenting a gendered space that is used by women to express themselves through video content wrapped in the existence of self-identity, opposing discrimination, and denying the perpetuation of the definition of beautiful women based on other people's constructions (netizens).

Rethinking privacy and publicity: Reading the spatial reflections of gender through Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

This article deciphers socio-spatial characteristics of the London scene in the early twentieth century. Analyzing excerpts from Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a novel written by one of the prominent modernist and feminist writers, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), the literary space analysis aims to ascertain how the narrative elucidates the relation between assigned gender roles and spatial practices of the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway. Revealing the abundance of socio-spatial information hidden in literary fiction, the three-partite spatial analysis that examines Mrs. Dalloway’s living environment within the contexts of private (domestic) space, public space, and ‘internal’ space highlights new layers of textual meaning. Thus, the study exposes the spatial hints of Woolf that guide readers to understand the confined social position of a high society lady. Touching upon controversial issues that nurtured the private-public dichotomy, the study broadens the discussion of gendered space, discussing Woolfian space as a challenge to patriarchal codes. Excerpts examined throughout the article reveal that the author's critique on unequal power relations between men and women reveals itself in spatial portrayals in the novel. Therefore, scrutinizing Mrs. Dalloway allows rediscovering, reinvestigating, and rethinking privacy and publicity in the early twentieth century through modern fiction.

Cultural and linguistic struggles and solidarities of Emirati learners in online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented shifts in higher education worldwide, with some nations more adversely affected than others. Since the onset of the crisis, almost all education abruptly moved to ‘emergency remote teaching and learning’. While the United Arab Emirates has been praised for its swift and effective responses, unique cultural and linguistic dynamics in this region present additional challenges for teaching and learning. This article presents empirical data from a qualitative phenomenological case study investigating female Emirati university students’ (n = 69) perspectives on the use of video cameras and microphones in online classes. Students’ reflective writing and researcher observations in autumn 2020 revealed discomfort using video cameras and microphones due to a range of cultural and linguistic factors. Such factors include Islamic beliefs relating to modesty, home as a gendered space, noise considerations, concerns about privacy, struggles with language in their English-medium instruction university and fear of judgement from peers. Data are interpreted thematically using intersectionality together with Goffman’s theories of everyday interaction, stigma and relative deprivation, through which complexities of learner identities are explored. Practical suggestions are made on ways to adapt online learning to better suit the cultural and sociolinguistic realities of periphery and Global South contexts. It is argued that greater efforts need to be made toward inclusion of marginalized learners during the COVID-19 period.

An Analysis of Gendering of Space in Historical Hospitals of Anatolia

Medical ethics, clinical practices, as well as privacy considerations affected the gender-space relationship in spaces of healing. Researchers to date have been analysed the historical hospitals of Anatolia in terms of their architecture, planning, art history, history of medicine, and even in terms of their functional systems, but not yet regarding their gendered space segregation. There are also limited studies related to the gender, religion, and secularism in historical hospitals outside of Anatolia. Hence, in this paper, historical hospitals of Anatolia have been chosen as case studies and analysed from the point of gendered perspective including how privacy, religion, culture, and gender issues shaped their architecture and planning. In Ottoman Empire, it is known that among the palace elites, there was limited access of women patients to the male doctors, but documented evidence of female attendants being employed in Ottoman hospitals belongs to later periods. In Ottoman dynasty there were also female patrons constructed hospitals for women and for the general public, demonstrating the power and status of women in the Ottoman palace. In addition, based on travellers’ accounts, old drawings, gravures, and archival resources, it is understood that there were separate units for women in Anatolian historical hospital. Those units included the patients’ rooms, wards, latrines, and even courtyards. The research showed that in Anatolian hospitals as the spaces for physical healing and medical training, gendered-space segregation have been acknowledged, at least to some extent in some certain space arrangements.

Ruang Gender Haruskah Selalu dipisah? Ruang Kelola Wilayah Adat dan Pendekatan Ekologi Politik Feminis

Gender space generally separates space and place of land and natural resources management and utilization based on gender. The assumption these gender space segregation with firm boundary lines implicated demand to showing women's control, utilization, and management of the land and natural resources on the participatory mapping result that is mostly facilitated by JKPP in Indonesia. One of the purposes of this demand is to include women's interests over space in every decision-making process that has an impact on the women's production areas. In fact, not all places have separated the control, utilization, and management of the land and natural resources based on gender. In an agrarian society, like in Indonesia, most of the areas for control, utilization, and management of the land and natural resources are communal based, which is means that the land and natural resources are joint management by men and women. In one indigenous territory, at two different places and times, gender based management can undergo changes. Taking the case of the Balai Juhu in Hulu Sungai Tengah Regency, South Kalimantan, using a feminist political ecology framework, this article examines the complexities of gender segregation on indigenous territory

A Gender Perspective on Language, Ethnicity, and Otherness in the Serbian Higher Education System

ABSTRACT As borders and political systems change, members of some nations become minorities, resulting in multifaceted changes to those communities. This paper draws on Otherness and intersectionality in problematizing the interplay of gender, ethnicity, and language within Serbian academia for ethnic minority female students. I examine the narratives of ethnic-minority Hungarian female students when they explain their experience of Otherness through language in the Serbian higher-education system. Additionally, I examine the narratives of Serb majority-female academics, when they narrate about their experience with the minority students who struggle with Serbian language skills. I highlight how language becomes an element of Otherness for the ethnic minority female students, and how it has a different effect in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) compared with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The paper raises important issues relating to research into gender and ethnic spaces of higher education systems in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

Chinweizu and Woman’s Place: A Response to Anatomy of Female Power

Abstract This article examines the reality or illusion of the perceived ‘paradises’ of ‘female power’, the purported façade of patriarchy and the claimed pervasiveness of matriarchy in Chinweizu’s Anatomy of Female Power. By deconstructing the extreme essentialist perspectives of AFP, and in line with womanism, the article interrogates the perceived covert matriarchal power sites of the masculinist creation and argues that they essentialize woman’s place in fixed biologically defined gender spaces, hence negating the concept of societal power as exercised rather than possessed. These placements, while trivializing woman’s role in the public sphere, obviously obfuscate the acknowledged dual-sex political system in some African and Nigerian settings. Responding from the generally African and specifically Igbo experience, the work offers an alternative womanist conceptualization, beyond matriarchy-patriarchy and other gender stereotypic binaries; a humanistic form of gender fluidity where the synergy of the two genders will engender complementarity, collaboration, compromise and cooperation.

Female leaders as ‘Superwomen’: Post-global financial crisis media framing of women and leadership in investment banking in UK print media 2014–2016

The print media is an important and powerful social arbiter. It both reflects and crafts societal opinion, and consequentially has received significant scholarly attention. This article analyses the media framing of women and leadership in Investment Banking (IB) post the GFC (2014–2016) to understand both the framing content, and how it has or has not changed. Utilising an institutional perspective, and the concept of IB as gendered social space, we reveal the existence of an overarching meta-frame which illustrates IB as a setting characterised by unequal power relations between men and women and the sustainment of hegemonic norms. This meta-frame did not change significantly during the period analysed. Our analysis reveals a meta-frame which emphasises ‘deficiency’ and is underpinned by three key interpretive repertoires, each giving expression to different dimensions of IB as a gendered social space. We found evidence of contradictory interpretive repertoire and media framing ignored issues of female agency, the male perspective on leadership in IB and the domestic context of female leaders. While the media did champion certain ‘superwomen’, the framing of women’s absence from senior roles was embedded with stereotypes about gender relations and suggestions that women’s lack of progress could be attributed to their supposed internal weaknesses rather than IB organisations. The characteristics of IB as a gendered space and their role in maintaining unequal gender power dynamics are less frequently highlighted in media framing. In addition, while media framing makes attempts to positively frame female leaders in IB, overall very little has changed.

Spatiality and accounting: The case of female segregation in audit firms

This paper aims to examine how organisational ‘space’ is implicated in gendering practices in auditing and contributes to impeding the entry or progress of women within the profession. Specifically, we investigate how women auditors experience a formal segregation in the workplace in Big Four audit firms located in Saudi Arabia. Drawing upon and developing Lefebvre’s (1991) work on the ‘production of space’, we conceptualise spatiality both in terms of the physical environment and the social relations and subjective processes within these space(s). Our case reveals the interplay between the discourses and codifications of the ‘female-only section’ as a ‘well-intentioned’ locale of domination and control of female labour conceived by the State and firm managers, and how women auditors experience the physical manifestations of prohibition and divide, the hindrance of audit work and productivity and a constant anxiety about non-compliance to cultural diktats. Furthermore, the disconnect between professional activity and its attendant social relations, and forced homogenisation borne out of politico-religious rationales underlying the State’s spatial planning policies generate a gendered space which constrains the participation and development of women in the profession.

Called to the ministry: Narratives of career choice amongst female pastors in South Africa

Orientation: There is a noted entrance of females into careers that have been a preserve traditionally of males. One such cohort needing understanding concerns females entering the pastoral ministry. Research purpose: The study explores the career choice issues of female pastors into the pastoral ministry. Motivation of the study: Calls have been made within the local and international literature for studies that give attention to understanding issues related to career development through the prism of calling, faith and religiosity. Research approach, design and method: A narrative inquiry using a sample of 15 females who have studied for the pastoral ministry within a leading Christian protestant denomination was utilised. Main findings: Three main narratives emerged. First, the entrance to the pastoral ministry as an answer to the voice of God and also made clear through signs from God. Second, an entrance to the pastoral ministry is a result of support from significant others. Finally, an entrance to the pastoral ministry is due to the need to challenge the status quo and give more female representation to a perceived gendered space, the church. Practical/managerial implications: Career counsellors may need to be aware of the issues that surround females entering careers often classified not their own. Strategies can be proposed based on such an understanding within contemporary career counselling practice. Contribution/value-add: This study contributes to the growing body of knowledge, focusing on the need to understand how issues of calling, faith and religiosity affect individual career choice and, subsequently, career development.

GENDERED SPACE IN THE JAVANESE NOBLE HOUSE OF PANGERAN MERTADIREJA III

Javanese traditional house are built to reflect the microcosm and microcosm of the Javanese philosophy of living. For the Javanese, duality and balance are two important concepts, which is reflected spatially through the how their houses are organized: inside and outside, left and right, rest area and activity area, as well as masculine and feminine spaces. This research discusses the meaning of gendered space in the house nDalem Pangeranam Mertadireja III. Gendered space is the main focus of discussion because gendered activities both shape and are shaped by gendered spaces. Ndalem Pangeranan Mertadireja III is a traditional Javanese house built in 1901 by the 17th Banyumas Regent, Pangeran Adipati Aria Mertadireja III. The house is located in Banyumas, Central Java. The purpose of this study is to analyze how gender is reflected in space, and how gendered resistance can then be observed spatially. This research concludes that within the Mertadireja house, masculine spaces are open, clean, and located in the front and right side of the house. In contrary, feminine spaces are closed, dirty, and located in the back and left side of the house. However, resistance is reflected spatially when women make use of masculine spaces.

Leadership and Politics of Belonging in a 2015 FeesMustFall Movement: A Case of UPrising

ABSTRACT This article examines UPrising, a student-led movement that emerged at the University of Pretoria’s Hatfield campus during the 2015 Fees Must Fall protests in South Africa. Using the notion of politics of belonging, the articles shows how internal dynamics in UPrising sought to fragment students and student leadership solidarity as they challenged the state and the university on the imminent tuition, residential fees and food price increases as well as other campus-specific issues. We use the concept of politics of belonging to argue that toxic student politics that manifested through contestation for control of campus political space and politics of gender resulted in inclusion and exclusionary practices among student leaders. These contestations were mainly visible through actions of various campus-based student political formations within themselves and towards UPrising leadership. In light of these setbacks, UPrising and women student leaders and activists were able to respond and keep UPrising united and focused on the struggle at hand. This study draws from the authors’ personal participant observation, in-depth interviews and social media during 2015 Fees Must Fall protests in South Africa.

Social Memory, Iconicity, and Gendered Spaces in Tuareg Sedentarization and Urbanization

This article explores selective memories of nomadic gendered spaces, as expressed in the iconicity of housing built forms and their surrounding motifs and practices in terms of their meanings in relation to changing social contexts among the previously more nomadic Saharan Tuareg in sedentarization and urbanization. The approach here takes the apparently temporal idea of historical change in a formerly nomadic society and connects it to the spatial continuities and transformations in settled and urban organization and practice, analyzing their impact upon gender constructs and relations between the sexes, and exploring ways women and men actively respond to and manipulate these new spaces through evoking selective memories of their rural nomadic milieu. It is shown how local and national social constructions of memory and history sometimes converge, sometimes diverge, and have changed under wider pressures, while Tuareg women's lives and their place as makers of much material culture have been transformed. It is argued that agency in gendered spaces in oases and towns of Niger and Mali alternately obliterates and commemorates important gender constructs central to cultural identity. More broadly, this article argues that spatial and iconic meanings emerge only when animated by practices focused on both remembering and forgetting, practices not always rigidly opposed or mutually exclusive.

The Paradox of Schizoid Self: A Critical Reflection on Gender and Spirituality in Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geometry of God

This study seeks to explore the paradox of Schizoid-self, which is split, fluid and in a constant flux, since it is situated in the interstitial space of gender and spirituality in Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geometry of God (2008). The present study aims to yoke together Postmodernist implicit dangers of centrelessness, divergence, fragmentation, and chaos on a central pivot to bring resolution, harmony, and reunion in both distinct and shared human experiences. This research employs Postmodernist notions of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1972/1977) about Schizoid-self and further juxtaposes in a single real space several incompatible spaces to unearth the interlink between gender and spirituality. This inquiry is informed by deconstructionist ways of interpreting text through the interstitiality of schizoid-self and gender with its potentials and perils and, thus, traces its spiritual purpose. The present study proposes a circular connection between gender, spirituality and multifaceted self and marks it a way forward in resolving the conflict between males and females regarding their practical and mystical outlook. Moreover, the findings reveal and underwrite that pluralism is a measuring stick of human rights and gender justice in this age of human crisis.

Shin-Ōkubo as a feminine ‘K-pop space’: gendering the geography of consumption of K-pop in Japan

Studies of the global spread of South Korean popular culture have often neglected the role that space plays in this transnational fandom and consumer culture. Explicitly exploring the geography of Korean popular culture consumption in Japan, this article draws upon a walking ethnography of Tokyo's ‘Koreatown’ of Shin-Ōkubo and interviews with selected consumers to reveal how ‘K-pop spaces’ within Japan have become tied to young women's consumer culture. We argue that spaces of K-pop promotion and consumption within Tokyo are inherently ‘feminised’ due to their linkage to pre-established promotional strategies in consumer districts specifically targeting young women. Through an ethnography of Shin-Ōkubo and interviews with K-pop fans who regularly visit this district, we further reveal how this ‘ethnic enclave’ has been reconfigured as another ‘feminised’ consumer space that caters to particular behaviours and attitudes based in K-pop fandom. Overall, this article charts the emergence of ‘feminine’ consumer spaces in Tokyo and interrogates how the ethnic enclave of Shin-Ōkubo has transformed into a gendered space tied to Japanese K-pop fandom.

Violencia feminicida: abordaje desde una geografía feminista

Este trabajo aborda la violencia feminicida como un proceso social enraizado en el patriarcado y el capitalismo salvaje que menosprecia, invisibiliza y ataca a las mujeres. Identificamos los elementos de conexión del sistema legal y la contienda social. De la geografía feminista crítica a la posibilidad de cambio y el compromiso de transformar condiciones injustas, plantea el espacio de género como una producción social de alta complejidad. Aquí vemos con precisión cómo el movimiento feminista, conformado por activistas, agrupaciones y familias de mujeres víctimas de violencia, incluyendo la academia y diversas corrientes feministas presentes en el ámbito político, ha impulsado cambios a nivel jurídico. Sin embargo, estas transformaciones han desatado resistencias en grupos conservadores. En los Censos Nacionales de 2018 se elaboró un estudio empírico con base en estadísticas de la procuración e impartición de justicia. A partir de estos datos de las entidades estatales se elaboraron mapas nacionales que permiten dar cuenta de la resistencia a clasificar los delitos contra las mujeres como feminicidios. Considerando el marco teórico basado en la tríada metodológica constitutiva del espacio, nos referimos a la creación de espacios libres de violencia, la complejidad que conlleva y la resistencia que se debe superar a través del movimiento feminista y la transformación de los marcos legales.

Hizbullah’s Post-Islamist Trends in the Performing Arts

This article outlines Hizbullah’s shift to post-Islamism and its various cultural activities in Lebanese society that underpin this shift. The Party’s involvement in these activities is integrated in current research on post-Islamism and its various social, political, and cultural manifestations. In its Islamist stage, Hizbullah anathematized the Lebanese political system and state institutions. In its post-Islamist phase, Hizbullah became pragmatic by embarking on a policy of opening-up (infitah) in politics along with cultural and social practices. This article studies Hizbullah’s popular culture and lifestyles by focusing on its purposeful art or ‘resistance art’, which is a cultural resistance against oppression, domestic deprivation, disenfranchisement, and repression, as well as foreign aggression, invasion, occupation, and subjugation. Hizbullah exploits the concepts of cultural citizenship and cultural politics to encourage, in mixed gender spaces, purposeful performing arts: music, dancing, singing, revolutionary theater, and satire. Hizbullah appears to equate modernity with European art forms rather than indigenous forms. In its ideology and politics, Hizbullah fluctuated between Islamism and post-Islamism. While in its performing arts, Hizbullah conveyed a post-Islamist face legitimized by the principle of maslaha (public interest).

Building the ‘House of Industry’: Factory Citizenship and Gendered Spaces at Cadbury’s and Rowntree’s

This article examines the case studies of Cadbury’s and Rowntree’s to show how two particular factories have been transformed into what could be called middle-range experimental spaces. It demonstrates how one particular setting of industrial ‘governmentality’ was established, based on cooperation, ‘mutual understanding’, and ‘empowerment’ in order to overcome confrontational approaches in personnel management as well as outdated modes of ‘benevolent paternalism’. Cadbury- and Rowntree-style social engineering, the article argues, redefined its task to create what one could call ‘factory citizenship’. Within this context, it was the metaphor of building a house that made it possible to foster workers’ ‘responsibility’ without making too many concessions to a more radical version of industrial democracy. Since these concepts had a strong gender bias, the article interprets this particular kind of social engineering as an effort to turn factories into ‘gendered spaces’.

Between the state and the yard: gender and political space in Haiti

This article examines the gendered political geography of postcolonial Haiti. It draws from the author's long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP), a peasants' movement established in 1973, to highlight the experience of rural women on Haiti's high Central Plateau. It mobilizes foundational work in feminist geography to address a lack of attention to the political in analyses of gender and rural life in Haiti. In so doing, it shows how militant women question and challenge patriarchal power in their daily negotiation and transformation of political space. This article proposes that women's practices of economic and sexual autonomy enact a vision of liberation that seeks to resolve the tension between the anticolonial and patriarchal dimensions of political power in Haiti. It first traces a political genealogy of the postcolonial Haitian state, and then shows how women have long been active, if unrecognized, participants in left political struggle. Next, it looks more broadly at how patriarchal power inflects agrarian space through gendered norms of property and personhood. Finally, it proposes the lakou (yard) as a space of transformation in relations between gender, land, and capital, and shows how women have cultivated and defended political space between the state and the yard.