Gold Diggers Research Articles

Language that denigrates women in selected isiXhosa poems

Language plays a critical role in isiXhosa poetry. Through the play and interplay of morphemes, words, phrases and lines, poets carry their messages to the intended audience. In investigating five (5) isiXhosa poems, we discovered that poets do use language that denigrates women. This language manifest itself in isiXhosa poetry by words, phrases, and lines that paint women as gold diggers, robbers, lacking intellect, promiscuous, properties of men. The discovery was made through the use of qualitative research approach and critical discourse analysis design. The selected data was analysed through the lenses of African feminism, which examines the experiences of women in literature, such as oppression of women, traces of gender inequality, role of women, as well as representation of women. Main findings of the study demonstrate that language used in isiXhosa poetry upholds the ideals patriarchal ideology and logic. It uses language that is gender bias, sexist and anti-feminism. This form of language contributes to gender-based violence, as it represents women as objects of men, lacking intellect, promiscuous. In this paper, we recommend that poets find alternative language in criticising women; using language that uphold dignity of women will not compromise their message. Furthermore, poems that uses language that denigrate women must not be selected to be studied in basic education.

Unblurring the lines: Exploring the images of women in Ghanaian rap music

Women have been portrayed in a variety of ways in Ghanaian rap music, popularly known as hiplife. These discursive constructions represent the subjective interpretations that artists assign to women based on societal gender stereotypes, which present women as inferior and subordinate to men. Using a qualitative content analysis of nine purposively selected hiplife songs released in the past decade, this paper explores the lyrical depictions of women's persona and roles in their relationships with men. From the analyses, three gender-related themes – women as sexual objects, women as ‘gold diggers’, and women as ‘heart breakers’ – predominantly prevailed. Going beyond the content analysis, this paper further underscores the paradox of hiplife music in the (mis)education of its growing listeners.

Desis’ identity crisis in America: examining cultural and racial politics in Samira Ahmed’s Love, Hate and Other Filters (2018) and Sanjena Sathian’s Gold Diggers (2021)

ABSTRACT This paper examines literary representations of Desis, who are commonly associated with the South Asian American diaspora, in terms of their simultaneous identity formations as ethnic Indians and American citizens. It analyses the vulnerabilities of second generation Desis in America while growing up in the post-9/11 era. Poststructuralist philosopher Judith Butler’s concept of a precarious life is critically employed to investigate sociopolitical agendas that underpin racial and cultural othering of Desis. Through a comparative analysis of Samira Ahmed’s Love, Hate and Other Filters (2018) and Sanjena Sathian’s Gold Diggers (2021), the cultural and psychophysical vulnerabilities of the second generation Desis for whom success is configured in the political construct of the American dream are discussed. This critical attention to an emergent genre of Indian diaspora fiction in English paves the way for nuanced understandings of marginal identities within America’s sociopolitical and cultural locales.

Violence and the Performance of Masculinity in Dudu Busani Dube’s Hlomu the Wife and Sue Nyathi’s The Gold Diggers

Violence and the Performance of Masculinity in Dudu Busani Dube’s Hlomu the Wife and Sue Nyathi’s The Gold Diggers

Without a male breadwinner: “deserted wives” seeking poor relief from the Destitute Board, Adelaide, South Australia, 1855-1856

When destitution reached its peak in South Australia in 1855-1856, “deserted wives” became the focus of the Destitute Board, Adelaide’s attention. Left behind by their husbands in favour of the Victorian gold diggings, these women were subsequently publicly censured in the government and national press. The present study sought to establish a demographic and destitution sketch of these destitute women and their families; to explore the factors that influenced their destitution; and, to discover what happened to them after the mid-1850s. The usefulness of the Destitute Board’s admissions register for genealogists was also evaluated. Using matched record linkage and family reconstitution methods, evidence was found that challenges the Destitute Board’s discourse. Only about one-half of absent fathers were recorded at the gold diggings, while about one-third of families experienced temporary desertion. Examination of these findings within the social and economic contexts of the period offers a unique view of the deserted families and provides a useful foundation for further research. Evaluation of the Destitute Board’s admissions register demonstrates its value to the genealogical community, despite a few limitations.

EXTRALINGUISTIC INFLUENCE ON THE NOMINATION PROCESS

Statement of the problem. The author proceeds from the idea that the study of the mechanisms of lexical nomination should be carried out taking into account the influence of extralinguistic factors on the linguistic means correlated with them. This article is devoted to the study of the nomination in Australian slang determined by extralinguistic factors. The author notes that there is no direct correspondence between the events taking place in the social life of people and the emergence of new linguistic phenomena. Neoplasms in the language are stipulated by the language structure. The aim of the work is to show how the events taking place in the country and the world are reflected in the nominative process of Australian slang. Results. The subject of the study was 1174 vocabulary units of Australian slang, which were analyzed in a diachronic way from the point of view of extralinguistic impact on the ways of creating new words. This study revealed the dependence of the nominative activity in Australian slang on a complex of external influences. So, at the initial stage of the development of Australian slang there could be traced two mechanisms of nomination, these are borrowing from aboriginal dialects and the creation of new lexico-semantic variants of borrowed words. Later, under the influence of significant events that took place in the country (the expulsion of convicts from Great Britain to Australia, increased sea traffic between the green continent and the outside world, gold digging, World wars I and II, strengthening contacts with other English-speaking states, the development of sports), the arsenal of nominative mechanisms in Australian slang gradually expanded. This was also facilitated by the deepening of relationships between people in Australian society. As a result, today, the inventory of lexico-nominative mechanisms in Australian slang is quite extensive including: the creation of new lexical-semantic variants of words, the creation of set phrases, borrowing, compounding, suffixation, truncation of the stems of words, supplemented by suffixation, contraction and pragmatonymy. Conclusion. This study revealed the dependence of nominative activity in the field of Australian slang on a complex of historically formed and currently emerging external influences. The article shows lexico-nominative mechanisms operating in different historical epochs under the influence of extralinguistic factors.

Emotion, Money, and Beauty: Variation and Innovation in the Story of Shuang Jian and Su Xiaoqing

Abstract: This paper explores the circulation, recension, and reception of the story of Shuang Jian and Su Xiaoqing. This understudied story is one of the three most popular stories of the Song, Jin, and Yuan periods, appearing in zhugongdiao, zaju, and sanqu . The variations in how Yuan sanqu writers narrated, appropriated, and interpreted the story reveal three ways of portraying Su Xiaoqing: as a virtuous, victimized courtesan who mirrors her scholarly lover; as a gold digger who chooses wealth over talent; or as the primary agent who dominates all of her relationships. The juxtaposition and interconnectedness of these narrative systems manifest the flexibility and inclusiveness of the textual space of the Yuan and the distinctiveness of sanqu as an independent literary genre.

Our Hero and That Kind of Woman: Imaginaries of Sexuality, Masculinity and Femininity in the Discussion of the Rape Allegation against Cristiano Ronaldo in Portugal

Kathlyn Mayorga’s rape allegation against Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo was mostly met in his home country with disbelief, prompting a strong wave of support for the national icon. Mayorga was often perceived as a ‘gold digger’. This article explores how traditional gender norms, sex scripts and rape myths underpinned the resignification of the rape allegation into a case of extortion, naturalizing sexual abuse regarding ‘immoral women’. It examines how the intersection of local patriarchal traditions with the neoliberal order produced a morality which normalized the commodification of women’s and men’s bodies as a path to social mobility. It looks at the commodification of Ronaldo’s body, his key to success as a ‘super-body’ whose exceptional sports performance granted him respectability, an exceptional social status and access to women’s sexualized bodies. Then, it examines the construction of Mayorga’s body as a sexualized body with less moral and/or commercial value, operating in an area perceived as indecent (sex as a ‘gold digger’ or sexual transactions as a prostitute) and whose inflicted harm could be compensated through money.

Resource Flows, Uses and Populations Territorial Attachments: The Case of the Oyapock Watershed (French Guiana, Amapá State of Brazil)

This article presents a stakeholders’ mapping exercise in 2017 and 2018 in the Oyapock watershed. Ninety-two maps were obtained covering almost the entire watershed. Results show that roads are becoming a more significant spatial reference to people, apart from the population minority living along the river. This latter polarizes itself into Brazilian colonization down and midstream, legal farmers on the Brazilian side, illegal gold diggers on the French Guiana side, and an Amerindian demographic growth upstream, both at the expense of the historical Saramaka/Creole area. Recent roads sticking each bank of the Oyapock River to their hinterland, Brazil, and France, respectively, like rubber bands, are separating them slowly, despite the bridge, primarily useless for now.

The Promise of Gold. Gold and Governance in China’s Borderlands, Then and Now

Eagleback Village is located in Eya Naxi Autonomous Township, deep in the mountains of southern Sichuan Province, an area whose history has been intimately bound up in the search for gold since at least the Ming dynasty. In the People’s Republic of China’s Reform era, efforts to extract Eagleback’s remaining gold resources have been fraught with controversy. Since 1984, reforms allowing individuals to pursue their own economic interests, combined with the difficulty of monitoring gold digging in such a remote area, have created a ‘grey area’ regarding ownership of the valley’s gold resources. A gold rush began when speculators, villagers and township cadres alike began engaging in artisanal and small-scale mining for gold in the hope of being able to participate in China’s growing economy and improve the standard of living of their families. At the county level in the early 2000s, efforts began to act on development and poverty alleviation policies, in particular the ‘Three Connects’ (三通) policy which aimed to connect every settlement in the county with roads, electricity, and water. County officials looking for contractors able to build roads made a deal with a Hunan gold mining multinational corporation (MNC) for mining rights throughout the county. However, when the project reached Eya Naxi Autonomous Township the damage done to the Longda River by the use of large-scale mining equipment led to a civil uprising in which villagers protested, eventually succeeding in bringing the mining to a halt in 2010. This chapter takes a historical approach while drawing on ethnographic fieldwork to present an example of ‘rightful resistance’ that offers a more nuanced understanding than that frequently offered with regard to state–society relations in China.

Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema

Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema

Teams of gold diggers: Phenomenon of the past or the image of the future?

Teams of gold diggers: Phenomenon of the past or the image of the future?

Toward De-exceptionalizing Migration: Intra-African Diasporic Writing in South Africa

Migration has never before occupied such a prominent place in African cultural production as it does today. Yet, notwithstanding an increasing focus on intra-African migration in the social sciences, literary migration scholarship has largely focused on African migration to the West, as the growing body of studies on outward-oriented Afropolitan migration novels indicates. In this paper, I examine how the Afropolitan consciousness that structures South-North migration novels is reframed in literature of continental migration and mobility in post-Marikana South Africa. While the themes of xenophobia and migration have emerged as central preoccupations in South African literature from the early 2000s onward, there has been a shift in literary production more recently with the publication of a range of works by African diasporic writers in South Africa. Drawing on Ekow Duker's Yellowbone (2019), Rémy Ngamije's The Eternal Audience of One (2019), and Sue Nyathi's The Gold Diggers (2018), I argue that these texts interrogate South Africa's complex relationship to "Africanness" and forge new pathways for continental dialogue that allow us to resituate South African-based writing within larger debates in contemporary African literary studies. This category of intra-African diasporic fiction calls into question simplifying binaries of outward, Western-oriented African writing and locally produced popular, yet internationally disregarded, texts (Harris). Rather, it scrutinizes the idea of "Africa" in global literary circuits from the position of intra-African diasporic subjectivities. Drawing attention to the long history of intra-African mobilities, the cross-continental thrust in many of these works also productively speaks to recent scholarly efforts to reframe migration studies in ways that insist on the de-exceptionalization of migration and the breakdown of binary formulations of migrant and non-migrant identities.

The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne: New Evidence

The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne: New Evidence

Implementasi Program PKK Bidang Pemberdayaan Pendidikan Dalam Meningkatkan Kesejahteraan Masyarakat Gampong Lancong

The PKK Program for Educational Empowerment is a program that aims to improve the community's well-being by enhancing the education of Gampong Lancong's youth. Because Lancong Village is a rural village in West Aceh, the Lancong community must participate in order for the program to be implemented correctly, despite the fact that the Lancong community has very low literacy and even low levels of education. The goal of this study is to examine and learn about the PKK program's educational empowerment policies in Lancong Village, Sungai Mas District, West Aceh Regency. With a case study methodology, data collection techniques employing purposive sampling with a total of six respondents, and research phases through interviews, observation, and documentation, the research method employed is qualitative. The research findings based on these four factors were obtained, but not effectively applied, with socialization not being implemented even for lancong community aid in the form of scholarships. People's knowledge and understanding of education is still limited; lancong people prefer to work at a young age and refuse to attend school because they believe that education does not guarantee people's lives, however working as farmers or gold diggers does. As a result, it is possible to conclude that this strategy has not been implemented effectively and efficiently.

A Paradox of Ethics: Why People in Good Organizations do Bad Things

This article takes a novel approach to explaining the causes of unethical behavior in organizations. Instead of explaining the unethical behavior of employees in terms of their bad organization, this article examines how a good organization can lead to employees’ unethical behavior. The main idea is that the more ethical an organization becomes, the higher, in some respects, is the likelihood of unethical behavior. This is due to four threatening forces that become stronger when an organization becomes more ethical. These forces are the upward, downward, backward, and forward forces. Each of these forces is illustrated with two effects and each effect is explained by a specific theory. The effects are the effects of the gold digger, high-jump bar, retreating-cat, forbidden-fruit, cheese slicer, moving-spotlight, repeat-prescription, and keeping-up appearances. This paradox of ethics, when goodness breeds badness, opens new research directions.

Sugaring as a deviant career: Modes of entering sugar relationships and social stigmas

ABSTRACT While the research on sugaring has expanded in recent years, there are still many gaps in our understanding of these relationships and how women begin them. Therefore, in this paper I draw from 48 in-depth interviews to understand the methods by which women enter into sugar arrangements and the extent to which this process is intentional, inadvertent, or coerced. Specifically, I draw from the literature on deviant careers to discuss three modes of entry which include drifting, entering via conscious decision, and entering defensively. Additionally, I focus on the public and enacted stigmas women experience once they enter the sugar lifestyle. Specifically, these stigmas came in the form of others conflating sugaring with prostitution, receiving negative reactions due to the age disparity between sugar partners, being labeled immoral, and being called a “greedy gold digger.”

OUP accepted manuscript

OUP accepted manuscript

Cracks in the Ornament: Spectatorial Relationships and Labors of Looking in Gold Diggers of 1933

Siegfried Kracauer’s “The Mass Ornament” is a foundational text of the early twentieth century, detailing a predominant visual structure echoed in the New Objectivity and cinematic German Expressionist movements. The mass ornament which Kracauer defines consists of human bodies arranged in spectacular geometric patterns, often through showgirls in dance routines. This visual structure utilizes the human body as something inherently machinelike, de-individualizing the participants. The musical numbers of Busby Berkeley in 1930s Hollywood pushed the ornament to its foremost cinematic potential, demonstrating not only the unique spectacle of this modernist visual arrangement, but the potential for it to harness voyeurist and nationalist fervor.

Book Review: American Gold Digger: Marriage, Money, and the Law from the Ziegfeld Follies to Anna Nicole Smith By Brian Donovan

Book Review: <i>American Gold Digger: Marriage, Money, and the Law from the Ziegfeld Follies to Anna Nicole Smith</i> By Brian Donovan