Hegemonic Norms Research Articles

New Face of International Law From Western to Global Construct

The modern international law, not only imitates, but the substance is truly the European values and traditions. The European nations produce the norm of international law with a clear objective is to divide the world into "selves" (European nations) and "others" (non-European nations). This is exacerbated by European colonialism and imperialism, which allow their values and traditions to become hegemonic norms that ultimately produce the paradigm of "otherness" in international law. Non-European nations are "others", which are considered only as users of the European values. The “otherness” paradigm in international law is resulted from the universal claim of the European values. It is a hegemonic technique. The paper argues that International law should move from the “otherness” to the “togetherness” paradigm. This requires a new approach in the making of international norms, from claim to consent, and now it has led to the global values approach. The paradigm of togetherness requires an inter-civilizational approach, and universality is the keyword. Universal norms should not be put on an abstract level; they need transformation into the particular idioms. Universality is not a matter of claim; it is a respect and acceptance of cultures and values of other nations. International law requires a paradigm shift, from Western to Global Construct.

Mujeres indígenas con educación superior ante las normas hegemónicas de género

Este artículo se enfoca en el análisis de las posiciones de sujeto que emergen con la confrontación entre las normas hegemónicas de género y las situaciones reales de las mujeres que se incorporan a la educación superior. A partir de la narrativa de 21 mujeres indígenas de Chiapas, se recupera el concepto de posiciones de sujeto desde el planteamiento de Alcoff (1989), para demostrar que las mujeres pueden estar en situaciones que se consideran pasivas, negociadoras o resistentes en relación con otras posiciones, lo que les permite tener poder para ampliar o reducir sus márgenes de acción. Los hallazgos advierten el surgimiento de cinco posibles posiciones, con un nexo de adaptación-resistencia, que implican conflictos subjetivos y malestares emocionales. Entre la adaptación y la afirmación positiva se encuentran una gama de actos de adaptación y resistencia ligados entre sí, que muestran las circunstancias materiales y simbólicas en las que ocurren sus expectativas de profesionalización.

On Integrity and the Risk of Generational Loss: Narratives of Preservation and Threat Underlie Policies Restricting Natural Testosterone in Women Athletes

Abstract Though its claims to “leveling the playing field,” are dubious, sex verification remains part of elite women's athletics. One of its latest iterations, testing and treatment for “excessive testosterone,” is championed by sports governing bodies on the grounds of “preserving the integrity of female competition.” I examine this claim in light of the decade of scrutiny South African runner Caster Semenya has endured regarding her sex. Contextualizing Semenya's case historically and in light of current science reveals two imperatives driving sports governing bodies' hyperandrogenism policies: (1) promoting a historically and structurally bounded idea of how athletic female bodies should look; and (2) presenting the performance capacity of visually concordant athletic female physiques as the measure of female athleticism. Testing and treatment for “excessive testosterone,” applies science in service of hegemonic norms regarding physique, prowess, and heterosexual appeal. Hyperandrogenism testing preserves integrity of type, not integrity of competition.

Cosmopolitan Revolutionaries: Masculinity, Migration, and Gender Performativity in Latin American London

This article explores the relational dynamics by which a particular group of young Colombian men strategically construct and perform masculinity within context of Latin American London. Focusing on quotidian experience and seeking to move beyond stereotypical narratives of masculine “loss” or “adjustment” relating to machismo, it demonstrates how “traditional” hegemonic norms are resourced as constitutive elements in the articulation of new modalities of gendered orientation. Observing that with migration Latin American men are often placed under contradictory pressure to both conform to and subvert cultural stereotypes of machismo and hegemonic masculinity, here young male Colombian migrants are seen to harness vernacular cosmopolitanism as an important moral orientation through which to creatively rearticulate machismo, dynamically reframing their subjectivities in ways that meaningfully engage with their life predicaments. What emerges are expressions of a subject position referred to here as the ‘cosmopolitan revolutionary,’ a performative orientation that encourages the expression of masculine authority and decisiveness while also emphasising anti-authoritarian and egalitarian principles of positive reciprocity and worldly care.

BANGTAN SONYEONDAN IN AMERICA: SOFT MASCULINITY PERFORMANCE AND AUDIENCE RESPONSE

Before their name resonates in American music charts and award shows, BTS experienced a shift in their display of masculinity, from showcasing complicit masculinity towards hegemonic norms to challenging the socially accepted values of being men by performing soft masculinity. Nonetheless, they still manage to snatch tens of thousands of fans' hearts, especially in the United States. Since female fans dominate the fandom, BTS's male fans are often overlooked in existing studies. With the purpose of analyzing BTS’s display of soft masculinity and comparing female and male fans' perceptions of non-hegemonic masculinity, this research studies BTS’s performances and does not only focus on female fans' views on soft masculinity but also those of male fans. Online surveys and in-depth interviews were conducted to unravel American fans' perception of soft masculinity. Using Jung’s concept of soft masculinity alongside with Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, this research found that although soft masculinity is widely accepted among American BTS fans, hegemonic masculinity continues to remain among male audience.

Reproductive Anxiety and Conditional Agency at the Intersections of Privilege: A Focus Group Study of Emerging Adults’ Perception of Long‐Acting Reversible Contraception

AbstractPublic health officials and major health care organizations in the United States have identified long‐acting reversible contraception (LARC) as the first‐line option for preventing unintended pregnancy. Existing research on LARC focuses on efficacy and usage rates, generally effacing women's lived experiences with these historically controversial devices. We take a critical, reproductive justice‐informed approach to LARC promotion efforts in this qualitative, focus group study. Across six groups of undergraduate women ages 18–24 (N = 30, majority White), we explore how the individuals targeted by contemporary LARC promotion efforts—emerging adult women who have never given birth—negotiate (not) acquiring these devices. We introduce reproductive anxiety and conditional agency as key terms through which our participants made meaning out of LARC. Though participants reflected socially normative discourses of empowerment and choice, our findings suggest that these relatively privileged respondents experienced their choices to use or not use LARC in neoliberal terms. Specifically, we suggest their responses avert attention from the multifarious ways that women's reproductive capacities are differentially disciplined by hegemonic norms. We conclude by suggesting that sexual and reproductive health policy must foreground issues of structural intersectionality—rather than cost or efficacy—so that health promotion efforts do not inadvertently exacerbate inequalities.

Faithfulness as Subhegemonic Antidote to a Precarious Existence: A Response to Peter-Ben Smit

ABSTRACT In this response to Peter-Ben Smit’s article in this volume, two questions are discussed. The first intends to review critically one of the main tenets of Peter-Ben Smit’s contribution by asking exactly how fluid and discursive the construction of gender in the Pastoral Epistles was. The second question is whether hegemonic performance of masculinity is the best explanation for the manner of expressing authority in the Pastorals. As a mostly additional yet partly challenging perspective, a related interpretive frame is introduced: philosophical imitation in virtue. As authority is expressed in terms of imitation in virtuous living, it can be better understood as a form of, in Smit’s vocabulary, “subhegemonic” masculinity: a critical rephrasing of the cultural hegemonic norm in terms of self-control that enables participation of “every body,” male and female. Crucial to this philosophical ideal of masculinity is control over one’s self (sōphrosunē) instead of the hegemonic ideal of control over the world outside. In addition to this virtue, it will be argued that in all three Pastoral Epistles the virtue of pistis, “trust” or “faithfulness,” functions to create a reciprocal, inclusive, and divinely modeled network of imitation. Rather than supporting the author’s masculine self-presentation, as Smit holds, pistis functions to balance hegemonically gendered power play.

Navigating equity work in engineering: contradicting messages encountered by minority faculty

ABSTRACTThe lack of diversity in engineering and perpetuation of inequities through engineering designs have motivated the rise of new curricula centred on the integration of traditional technical content with social aspects of technology. However, the ‘revolutionizing’ of curricula has primarily been spearheaded by junior faculty, women and faculty of colour. This article uses an autoethnographic approach to explore the development of social justice-oriented curricula within engineering from the perspectives of junior women and faculty of colour. Drawing on feminist and critical race theory, we discuss how power dynamics within the school, university and engineering more broadly have shaped the development and teaching of justice-oriented engineering. Through the lens of our experiences, we show that, despite the support from some institutional allies and administrators, stereotypes, hegemonic norms and microaggressions can undermine efforts for social and structural change in engineering education, even as such changes are supported and promoted by the institution.

The social butterfly: hunted subjectivity and emergent masculinities among refugees

ABSTRACTIn refugee worlds, young men’s masculinities are moulded through experiences of safety and danger. This leads some to contest normative ideas of gender roles and create an alternative migrant masculinity that counters the hegemonic norm. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Greece in 2012–2015 among leftist solidarity movements. Through analysing interviews and fieldnotes, I detected five elements influencing the development of alternative performances of masculinities; the men’s own struggle for rights in their lands of origin; the men’s experiences through their irregular journeys; marginalisation on multiple levels; an environment that encouraged safety for diverse identities; and lastly, leaders with transnational and local connections, who openly practice support for transgressing the boundaries of gender and sexual orientation. Through their assigned ‘hunted’ identity, the men would negotiate problems in external structures such as religion, politics, border controls, work and education. These problems were often internalised, but solutions were sought through respecting freedom of choice while simultaneously caring for fellow human beings. While the inclusive practices and discourses were not without ambiguities, the solidarity networks allowed cis heterosexual refugees the supportive space to visibly endorse the rights of other marginalised groups and to demonstrate their emergent masculinities.

The Liberatory Potential of Dawson's Creek: Panicked Reactions to Teen Sex and Television in 1990s US Culture

Even before the teen-oriented serial Dawson’s Creek (The WB, 1997–2003) premiered, it drew widespread criticism for its mediation of teen sex. As the New York Post put it, the show was “an immoral exploitation of youthful curiosity about sex.” While Dawson’s Creek embraced a relatively permissive discourse on teen sexuality beyond what was sanctioned by the conservative politics of its time, the series’ depiction of sex actually adhered closely to hegemonic norms. Reading Dawson’s Creek in its circuit of culture—including TV Parental Guidelines, abstinence-only sex education, and the Kaiser Foundation’s 1996 Sex on TV study—this article argues that panicked reactions to the series resulted from a widespread belief in media effects and the series’ mere potential ability to offer young adults access to sexual knowledge.

‘You have to coin new things’: sexual and gender identity discourses in asexual, queer, and/or trans young people’s networked counterpublics

ABSTRACTEmergent gender and sexual identity discourses that circulate on social networking sites in spaces organised around non-normative genders and sexualities (i.e. networked counterpublics) challenge dominant conceptions of gender and sexuality. These emergent discourses increasingly represent sexual and gender identities as pluralistic, potentially infinite, and able to be tailored to the individual. Using interviews with asexual, queer, and trans young people (AQTYP; n = 16), we examined how AQTYP in networked counterpublics appropriate hegemonic norms of identity construction to creatively articulate new sexual and gendered subjectivities. We employ thematic discourse analysis to trace how AQTYP use these labels to navigate and complicate sexual and gender self-labelling imperatives in counterpublic contexts. We conclude that AQTYP engage with gender and sexual identity discourses in online counterpublics in ways that challenge many, but not all, parameters of hegemonic identity discourses. Ultimately, we argue that new understandings of sexuality and gender in AQTYP’s networked counterpublics are a form of queer world-making in which the feelings and relationalities that constitute sexual and gendered subjectivities cannot be considered self-evident, stable, or universal.

Pray the White Way: Religious Expression in the NFL in Black and White

Athletes, particularly players in the National Football League, have repeatedly invoked God in order to glorify, praise, or even credit the divine with success on the field. This essay examines the ways in which different types of religious language used to bring God onto the gridiron are received and evaluated along racial lines. I seek to show that speech by athletes, in particular black football players, that communicates a God who is partisan and intervenes in action on the field is routinely dismissed by fellow players, the media, and religious authorities who favor a God who either intervenes softly and generally or is above the game altogether. I contend that a double standard is applied to this theological debate due to a disregard of historical African American theology and to hegemonic white evangelical norms that police such discourse.

Heteronormativity in Norwegian Social Work Journals

The purpose of this review was to examine whether heteronormativity is reproduced or problematized within Norwegian social work journals. It is based on a study that explored how sexuality is addressed in social work journal articles and extends past reviews by also analysing heterosexuality. The data comprised of 572 articles published in the major Norwegian social work journals between 2002 and 2014. A keyword search and a thematic analysis was used to first determine how many articles addressed sexuality and second to develop a closer analysis of how sexuality was addressed in the identified articles. Queer theory guided the analysis. Findings revealed that heteronormativity was problematized in five of the six (1%) articles that addressed sexuality, indicating that heteronormativity is reproduced in Norwegian social work journals and that those in position in authority in the field of social work routinely deploy heterosexuality as a taken-for-granted resource. If power asymmetries are to be destabilized, strategies that counteract the power basis of the hegemonic norm are necessary, such as addressing the binary opposition of heterosexuality vs. non-heterosexuality, and naming heterosexuality.

Introduction to “Sport and Failure”

This Special Issue is a collaborative project on the study of sport and failure. In dialogue with a range of works, queries, objects of study, and fields, these interdisciplinary sports studies scholars use a variety of approaches to ground and provide innovative critical entanglements to understand how sports types, players, cultures, worlds, and industries create, reproduce, and resist dominant ideas and structures. Collectively, these authors consider how sporting failures can articulate a “counterhegemonic discourse of losing” that challenges a world obsessed with power, prestige, privilege, and various other articulations of success. In this Issue, the authors explore how failure can catalyze acts of liberation from and resistance to restrictive and unequal modes of being in “societies structured in dominance.” Failure in this capacity can help to imagine alternatives to hegemonic norms, structures, and identities.

Balloon warriors for North Korean human rights activism: a critique of North Korean defector-activists’ post-humanitarianism

ABSTRACTWhile the identity politics of North Korean defector-activists at home and abroad is revealed by unraveling the discursive complexity of their activism, little attention has been paid to the way in which that activism compromises the discursive dynamic of the defector community desiring to contest the power of a ruling paradigm within political culture. A critical analysis of North Korean defector balloon warriors who have crusaded against the North Korea regime through airborne leaflet drops at the South–North Korea border illustrates how their uncritical and unquestioned acceptance of liberal human rights can only leave the defector community vulnerable to charges of being politically-futile disparate citizens. The invocations of transnational liberal hegemonic norms obscure and undermine North Korean defectors’ agency of collective engagement in acts of liberal democratic citizenship. Understanding the propagandistic dimension of their dissenting voices can help expand the scope of analysis of liberal democratic posthumanitarian citizenship.

Dissent Dressing: The Colour and Fabric of Political Rage

Dissent Dressing: The Colour and Fabric of Political Rage

Smokeless Tobacco and the Rural Teen: How Culture and Masculinity Contribute to Adolescent Use

Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of disease, disability, and death in the United States. Smokeless tobacco (SLT) is primarily used by younger, rural males and often in the presence of other males. This formative study examined how hegemonic masculinity and male norms can lead to initiation and continued use of SLT by rural adolescent males and females. Survey data collected from high school sophomores in 4 rural high schools (n = 293) explores perceptions of masculinity and male norms’ contribution to SLT uptake and use. About 22.5% of total sample reported lifetime use (34.4% male, 13.7% female), 10.9% reported past-month use (20.0% male, 4.2% female). Logistic regressions show a one-unit increase in adherence to traditional perceptions of masculinity more than doubled the odds of ever using SLT and significantly increased odds of 30-day use. Having male household family members who uses SLT significantly increased the odds of lifetime and 30-day SLT use for both genders, while having male family members who smoke cigarettes was not a significant correlate. Recognition of health warnings on SLT packaging was negatively associated with SLT use for both genders. Implications for inclusion of masculinity and male role models in SLT prevention intervention strategies are discussed.

African by Exposure: Caregivers, Madness, and the Contagious Other in García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

The following article discusses Gabriel García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Specifically, this article will discuss the parallel ways that two novels critique the nature of postcolonial development in the Caribbean, particularly in regard to race and hybridity. Within the novels, the child protagonists and their African/black creole nursemaids follow surprisingly similar plots, though the settings, contexts, and styles of the two texts differ greatly. In these two novels while the white protagonists both die because of their hybrid navigation of their environment, their nurse/mothers survive, largely because of their maintenance of African practices. In many ways, the nurse mothers’ survival and attempts to heal their charges present potential antidotes for the “disease” produced by slavery. The purpose of this paper is to explore those parallel developments in plot, and to look at the ways the two texts disrupt and reinforce colonial hegemonic norms through their depictions of both the nurses and their charges.

Antisocial Feminism? Shulamith Firestone, Monique Wittig and Proto-Queer Theory

Recent iterations of feminist theory and activism, especially intersectional, ‘third-wave’ feminism, have cast much second-wave feminism as politically unacceptable in failing to centre the experiences of less privileged subjects than the often white, often middle-class names with which the second wave is usually associated. While bearing those critiques in mind, this article argues that some second-wave writers, exemplified by Shulamith Firestone and Monique Wittig, may still offer valuable feminist perspectives if viewed through the anti-normative lens of queer theory. Queer resists the reification of identity categories. It focuses on resistance to hegemonic norms, rather than on group identity. By viewing Wittig's and Firestone's critique of the institutions of the family, reproduction, maternity, and work as proto-queer — and specifically proto-antisocial queer — it argues for a feminism that refuses to shore up identity, that rejects groupthink, and that articulates meaningfully the crucial place of the individual in the collective project of feminism.

El trabajo de alimentar: proceso alimentario entre trabajadores y trabajadoras agrícolas migrantes en Miguel Alemán, Sonora

El artículo analiza desde la perspectiva de género las prácticas del proceso alimentario entre migrantes pendulares y asentados en Miguel Alemán, Sonora. A partir de observaciones y entrevistas a profundidad a 21 migrantes, analizamos la relación entre el tipo de migración, estado civil, edad y tiempo de residencia en el lugar de destino. Para migrantes asentados, la participación de los hombres se relaciona con procesos de enfermedad y embarazo de las mujeres, mientras que los migrantes pendulares solos contratan servicios de comida, a pesar de que los más jóvenes saben cocinar. Concluimos que la participación de hombres en la alimentación es un cambio temporal, a nivel de prácticas y no cuestiona de fondo las normas hegemónicas de género.