Hegemonic Constructions Research Articles

Virtual gifting on China’s live streaming platforms: hijacking the online gift economy

This paper presents an exploratory case study on the nascent “virtual gifting” feature of China’s live streaming platforms. At the nexus of technological infrastructure, social organization, and interpersonal relations, the authors aim to explicate the complex dynamics between the gift economy and the commodity economy in the context of the increasingly platformized Chinese society. This paper will first discuss how the platform infrastructure is geared toward maximizing content monetization through virtual gifting. The paper then examines how corporatized streamer guilds foreground the moneymaking capacity of virtual gifting at the expense of its potential for building communitarian and reciprocal relationships. Based on these structural dynamics, the commodification of virtual relations is further analyzed to demonstrate how the hegemonic construct of virtual gifting is perceived and reproduced at the individual level. The paper concludes by offering a reconsideration of the role of critical communication studies in turning the tide of China’s live streaming industry.

Introducing ‘Intimate Civility’: Towards a New Concept for 21st-Century Relationships

Introducing ‘Intimate Civility’: Towards a New Concept for 21st-Century Relationships

Masculinities of the Husbands in the Genealogy of Jesus (Matt. 1:2-16)

Abstract From a narrative approach, and through the lens of masculinity studies, this article examines a particular group in the genealogy of Jesus: the men associated with a woman in their “begetting”: Judah with Tamar, Salmon with Rahab, Boaz with Ruth, and David with the wife of Uriah. What traits characterize this specific group of biblical men put forth as Jesus’s ancestors? What kind of husbands and fathers are they? What is the effect on readers as they peruse this list of masculine prototypes? These male figures are then compared to Joseph and to Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew does not present the masculinities of Joseph and Jesus in the same way as it portrays those of others in the genealogy. Basically, the genealogy supports and subverts ancient hegemonic constructions of masculinity, by proposing a reversal of the values associated with masculinity.

International Trade as Discourse: Construction of a “China Threat” through Fakes

ABSTRACTChina’s fish exports are hindered by association of the county with fakes. This negative image of China as a Country-of-Origin means its fish exports are disadvantaged by the hegemony of the “original”, the view that products from developing countries are adulterated. Against this hegemony, the article is sensitive to the plurality of meanings of food safety and uses a poststructuralist approach to interpret food scares as hegemonic narratives that (re)create reality. At an ontological level, the food scare is read as “logic” of Othering, the construction of a “China threat”. This article uses the “food scare” news in Kenyan newspapers to describe how international trade is part of processes of fixing the meaning of Country-of-origin and creating a “China threat”. Utilising discourse theoretical analysis, the article describes the food safety news as part of the national hegemonic construction of a “China threat” through economism, scientism and political myths.

The Core of Resistance: Recognising Intersectional Struggle in the Kurdish Women’s Movement

Abstract The paper addresses the women’s movement in the Northern Syrian region known by Kurds as Rojava, a movement whose central role in building an autonomous political project has its roots in the Kurdish nationalist struggle, specifically that organised by the Kurdish Worker’s Party, also known as the PKK, in Turkey. This study brings to the fore reflections on the power relations that cross the struggle carried out by these women, who, for their part, are crossed by the intersection of gender, ethnicity and class, which feeds and composes the critical praxis of this organised struggle. The Kurdish women’s political path is approached through the contradictions and ambiguities they encounter when they face the challenge of becoming aware of their own place in a political project, which at first had a nationalist character and is now beginning to gain new contours. The presence of the female figure in a political context of armed conflict endows these women with the role of challenging the boundaries on which the foundational elements of international politics rely, namely, the boundary between public and private spheres and gender roles played socially and politically. The Kurdish women’s movement in Rojava disturbs the foundational boundaries of the modern nation-state alongside the hegemonic constructions of masculinity and femininity, and the militarised character of politics, which are constitutive of the modern imaginary of political community.

On Being a “Good” Indonesian Muslim Woman: An Autoethnography

In this study, I propose through my own voice, attachment, and representation an expansive and inclusive construction of Indonesian Muslim middle-class women that may pose a challenge to the hegemonic construction of Indonesianness. I explore the renegotiation of the self, using the definition of Ibuism, state laws, and Islamic teachings as the frameworks through which the “good” Indonesian Muslim woman is constructed. Ibuism, derived from Ibu, an Indonesian term for “mother,” refers to the social construction of Indonesian womanhood within the household domain, as imposed by the authoritarian government for nearly 32 years (1966–1998). I use reflexive notes as my data to explore how the postauthoritarian era has affected me as a representative subject. Autoethnography offers a space to find that others’ assessment of my Muslimness is an effective lens through which I view my being and my becoming as a woman, an Indonesian, and a Muslim.

The Entanglements of Migration and Marriage: Negotiating Mobility Projects among Young Indonesian Women from Migrant-sending Villages

ABSTRACTIn Indonesian society, both ‘migration’ and ‘marriage’ are important social markers that signify transition to adulthood. This paper examines how young Indonesian women reconcile labour migration aspirations with hegemonic constructions of marriage and gendered household roles, where women are depicted as household ‘managers’ subordinate to their husbands who are the ‘masters’. From interviews with 29 young women from migrant-sending villages known for its high international migration rates, we highlight how they negotiate the interplay of (gendered) labour migration opportunities which promote their mobilities, and marriage ‘destinies’ which valorise their immobilities. We use young women’s discussions of their aspirations and views towards migration as a departure to analyse the entangled relationship between labour migration and marriage (prospects). Using a relational approach complemented with ‘logics for aspiring’ (Zipin et al. 2015), we argue that their constructions of mobility projects are dynamically negotiated in the interstices between individual aspirations and social (gendered) obligations.

Consent, Conjugality and Crime: Hegemonic Constructions of Rape Laws in India

‘Promise to marry cases’ are those in which a victim is deceived into having sex with the defendant, based on a dishonest promise of marriage. Rape laws in India are designed to punish such defendants. These cases represent a significant proportion of rape cases in the legal system but remain under-researched. Drawing from postcolonial feminism and intersectionality theory, this article provides a socio-legal exposition of ‘promise to marry’ cases. This analysis is based on the total population of judgments in promise to marry cases, which were issued by Delhi trial courts from January to June in 2014 and 2016. It is found that courts propagate a heteronormative, intracaste, intracommunal construction of marriage while enforcing seemingly neutral rape laws. Given the prejudicial application of law, it is concluded that the use of criminal law in promise to marry cases is inappropriate.

Beyond the Pale: Whiteness, Masculinity and Empire in the British Union of Fascists, 1932–1940

This article seeks to intervene in the debate over the legacy of the British Empire, using the British Union of Fascists (BUF) as a case-study. It will argue that, during the interwar period, the BUF drew heavily on earlier constructions of racialized imperial masculinity in building their ‘new fascist man’. The BUF stand out in the period following the First World War, where hegemonic constructions of British masculinity were altogether more domesticated. At the same time, colonial policymakers were increasingly relying on concessions, rather than force, to outmanoeuvre nationalists out in the Empire. For the BUF, this all smacked of effeminacy and they responded with a ‘new man’ based on the masculine values of the idealized imperial frontier. By transplanting these values from colony to metropole, they hoped to achieve their fascist rebirth of Britain and its Empire. This article charts the BUF’s construction of this imperial ‘new fascist man’ out the legacy of earlier imperialists, the canon of stories of imperial heroism, and the gendered hierarchies of colonial racism.

Decolonizing property in Taiwan: Challenging hegemonic constructions of property

Indigenous Tayal experiences of dispossession in Taiwan reflect a familiar pattern of state-sanctioned property rights precluding recognition of Indigenous rights. This paper examines Tayal customary institutions and how they have governed, and continue to govern, land interests in customary domains. In an agricultural economy encompassing patterns of mobility and long-term movement between areas, Tayal people maintain continuing rights in land that is not currently or permanently occupied or used. However, following Second World War and Taiwan’s occupation by the Chinese Nationalist Kuomingtang party, a new system of individually registered property titles was established, only allowing registration of individual land in settled fields that were occupied and cultivated. Interests in fallowed land were not registrable and such land was reclassified as State property. The system’s enforcement in the 1950s was central to the dispossession and non-recognition of Tayal rights and parallel discourses making Indigenous people invisible. We argue that unpacking the ontologies behind hegemonic understandings of property in Taiwan offers ground for recognizing the plurality, messiness and openness that articulate contestations over time, space and property. In the context of Taiwan’s 2016 Presidential Apology to Indigenous citizens, we conclude that contested constructions of temporality and spatiality are fundamental to challenging Indigenous dispossession.

Building and Being a Community Control

Building and Being a Community Control

Traveling Criticism and the Worlds of Literature

AbstractThis article contends that world literature is necessarily plural, and that its generative mechanism is the dialogue of globally circulating criticism with local political and aesthetic concerns. By examining Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents, and the debates over Rabindranath Tagore's 1924 visit to China, the article seeks to illustrate how the interaction of local and global criticism selectively authorizes texts as part of a world literature. The resulting literary constellations, though claiming cosmopolitan legitimacy, are not necessarily visible as such from other localities despite a shared critical vocabulary. Those localities may be distributed geographically, as in Ghosh and Miller's encounter, or ideologically, as Tagore's varied Chinese receptions showed. However, rather than mourning the impossibility of a singular, utopian world literature, these examples suggest that embracing the fundamental fragmentariness of global literary production offers insight into both the obstacles that hinder cross-cultural exchange as well as the processes that enable it. Moreover, taking the contingency of worlds of literature as a ground for inquiry offers a mode of resistance to aggressively hegemonic constructions of a singular world literature.

CONTESTING ‘DEFORESTATION’: CIVIL SOCIETY MOVEMENTS AND KNOWLEDGE CO-PRODUCTION IN INDONESIA

This article explains the emergence of civil society movements around deforestation issue in Indonesia as contestation over knowledge claims that defines ‘deforestation’ as a political term. The term ‘deforestation’, which is translated into ‘perusakan hutan’ in Indonesian forestry laws and regulation, is a product of political epistemology that serve the needs to sustain state-reinforced developmentalism. It is imposed by valorization of modern scientific and technocratic values as well as bureaucratization of the forestry sector. Engaging with critical political ecology literatures, this study unpacks the constitutive interactions among various ways of seeing that redefine state forestry and its implications to the reproduction of political order. ‘Perusakan hutan’ is continuously re-negotiated in the relations between the state and its formative societal elements. Knowledge on addressing deforestation is organized around three contesting epistemologies: conservation, redistribution, and indigeneity. Each epistemology seeks to claim political space in the institutionalization of knowledge that fortifies state’s policies in the forestry sector. Politics of knowledge co-production operates at two levels: between hegemonic knowledge construct and its counter knowledge formation, and within the formation of counter-knowledge through alternative epistemologies.

The Ancestral Room of the State? Scotland and the United Kingdom on Jamie’s Great Britain

This article analyzes how Jamie Oliver’s show Jamie’s Great Britain represented Scotland in 2012, when the referendum on Scottish independence had already been announced. It follows Anderson, Bourdieu, Bhabha, cultural studies, and the idea that the nation is a hegemonic construction. Biosemiotics provides useful perspectives on the representations of Nature and Culture. Semiotic analysis interprets representations of the nation on the show. The results show that, while Oliver identifies English and Welsh food cultural origins with the Industrial Revolution and the Coal Boom, respectively, he finds Scotland’s food origins in the Vikings. Scotland is a land of ancestral habits and people, where Nature is inhospitable. Oliver represents England and Wales through the cultural categories of indices and symbols, while crude iconic representations of Nature are used to depict Scotland. Moreover, the Vikings also originated England and Wales (and Ireland), and in the end, the Vikings are constructed as the common roots of the nation that Oliver celebrates, the United Kingdom. Thus, Scotland is only represented as a part of the state-nation, a kind of ancestral room of the big house of the United Kingdom.

Education Agendas and Resistance With the Teaching and Learning of Freshwater and Extreme Freshwater Events

AbstractDespite the essentiality of freshwater to all life on the planet, the populous has inadequate understandings of water. Formal education plays a key role in shaping how individuals and communities make sense of water, its accessibility, management, consumption, and hazards. This article seeks to bring attention to the influence of cultural framings of freshwater and extreme freshwater events (such as flood and drought) in government-mandated school curricula in two water-vulnerable geographical regions of Australia and Canada. We seek to identify and respond to hegemonic social constructions that become naturalised if left unexamined. By examining the agendas and language around freshwater and extreme freshwater events in formal educational curricula, we gain a better understanding of the perceptions and assumptions made about freshwater. The results highlight that freshwater and extreme freshwater events are minimally conceptualised within these curricula as ‘nature-based’, rather than being part of a dialectical relationship with societal agendas and practices. This article discusses the implications of this framing and the psychological barriers that may affect the acknowledgment and investigation of extreme freshwater events. We conclude by offering curricular suggestions that invite community-based understandings of the dialectic relationship freshwater has with communities and regional ecosystems.

Counter hegemony in post-compulsory art and design and gallery education, through Sartre and Foucault

ABSTRACTAusterity politics in Britain are edging towards compressed learning and teaching identities, driven by competition for resources and normative standards. Policy changes since 2010 have impacted particularly on the arts, and have had an adverse effect on cultural diversity across society. This situation has international resonance for those encountering protectionist reactions to globalisation. Practitioners in creative fields face dilemmas of agency, as they seek to maintain the presence of their roles, and ability to make choices. This paper focuses on how practitioners in post-compulsory art and design and gallery education challenge hegemonic constructions of the self through practice. It reflects on Herne’s research of relational differences between teachers and gallery educators, raising points for connective interventions as boundary work. A comparative lens draws upon theories of agency to support critically engaged practice. Empirical data is investigated through Sartre’s concept of free will, and Foucauldian negotiations of autonomy.

German and Mexican Hegemonic Constructions of Masculinities and Femininities in 19th Century and Its Relevance in Mexico’s Twenty-First Century’s feminicidio and genocidio

German and Mexican Hegemonic Constructions of Masculinities and Femininities in 19th Century and Its Relevance in Mexico’s Twenty-First Century’s feminicidio and genocidio

Changing Conceptions of Masculinity in the Marital Landscape of Africa

Abstract Recent critical studies of men have focused on multiple masculinities and the need for a change in theorizing the hegemonic constructions of gender. This growing body of scholarship has influenced literary studies, particularly in the readings of male characters as presented in literary works. The portraiture of the male characters in Aidoo’s Changes and Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood has attracted the attention of critics who examine the conflicted hegemonic constructions of masculinity mediated by the powerful forces of colonialism and modernity. These critics contest the patriarchal privileges of masculinity and redefine the gender constructions of both sexes to reflect current studies which focus on the plurality, fluidity, and complexities of masculine roles. This paper argues that Aidoo and Emecheta’s novels depict a hybridism of masculinities, in the context of marriage, in which both the male and the female characters strive to maintain a balance between their traditional African roles as husbands/wives, fathers/mothers and maintain an imitated eurocentric display of love and affection in enacting their roles in the marital enterprise.

Skin and Bone: Beauty as Critical Praxis

That so many hegemonic constructs have been devised to exoticize and belittle beauty should be evidence enough that something about beauty is devastating to power, something just below the skin. And in revealing patriarchy’s sleight of hand, we may begin to see that beauty is skin, deep as skin, moving into muscle, bone, marrow. This essay seeks to explore beauty as a critical praxis; not a gender-only matrix, beauty’s critical strength is in the conscious sociocultural construction of bodies, their colors, shapes, sizes, and abilities. Beauty as a critical praxis is a personally, politically, willfully wanton utopian performative. That so many hegemonic constructs have been devised to exoticize and belittle beauty should be evidence enough that something about beauty is devastating to power, something just below the skin. And in revealing patriarchy’s sleight of hand, we may begin to see that beauty is skin, deep as skin, moving into muscle, bone, marrow. This essay seeks to explore beauty as a critical praxis; not a gender-only matrix, beauty’s critical strength is in the conscious sociocultural construction of bodies, their colors, shapes, sizes, and abilities. Beauty as a critical praxis is a personally, politically, willfully wanton utopian performative.

Educators’ perceptions of learners with intellectual disabilities’ sexual knowledge and behaviour in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Over the past two decades, comprehensive sexuality education has increasingly been recognised as a measure that positively impacts on the sexual behaviour of young people in Africa. Despite this, and a political call to scale-up the use of comprehensive sexuality education in schools in South Africa, learners with disabilities continue to be left behind. Besides contending with negative hegemonic constructs of disabled sexualities, educators of learners with disabilities lack skills and resources to teach sexuality in accessible formats. Based on this premise, a comprehensive sexuality education approach – Breaking the Silence – was developed and piloted to assist educators of learners with disabilities to provide access to comprehensive sexuality education in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. This article presents results from the formative evaluation of this pilot work and discusses educators’ perceptions of their learners with intellectual disabilities’ sexual knowledge, agency and behaviour after implementing the approach. Although educators appeared to situate learners with intellectual disabilities as sexual agents, their implementation of the approach was dependent on the cognitive ability of learners, and discourses of culture, gender and protection from violence.