Negotiation Of Gender Research Articles

Beyond ‘Token’ Firefighters: Exploring Women's Experiences of Gender and Identity at Work

Despite the increasing percentage of women entering masculinized workplaces, certain organizations consistently see little change in the gender makeup of their staff. Contemporary scholarship suggests that women in rigidly gendered organizations are often assigned a token status and are victimized due to their gender. This study relocates the conversations of women as tokens towards a fresh conversation of women's agency in masculinized workplaces. This paper uses ten qualitative interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to discuss how female firefighters navigate their gender at work. This article draws on reflexive accounts of everyday gendered negotiations to look at how the female firefighters ‘do gender’ within a specific fire service in Australia. I argue that emergency services, such as firefighting, create a contradictory field where women are located in (1) a paradoxical environment where the ‘female body’ is problematized (2) a work environment where they have to repeatedly prove their cultural competence in order to confirm their professional identity. The findings suggest that while female firefighters do have agency, tokenism locates many of them in a ‘never quite there’ bind that challenges their ability to progress into leadership roles within the service. This article concludes that the nuanced difference between, and at times, within the women's narratives problematizes the bounds of personal agency and cultural change. This consequently results in resistance to policies by some women that may benefit like-situated women, such as affirmative action.

Funny peculiar: Lucille Ball and the vaudeville heritage of early American television comedy

ABSTRACTIn this essay I examine the traces of vaudeville performance in the first season of the early American television comedy series I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–1957), proposing that while sitcom may be regarded as a narratively conservative format, it may also harbour eccentric figures; the funny peculiar. American vaudeville offered a space in which normative heterofemininity was both upheld and subverted. As one of the direct inheritors of that theatrical tradition, early sitcom could embody complex negotiations of gender and identity. The first season of I Love Lucy is inflected by the performance traditions of American vaudeville, while its development was enabled by a theatrical tour to promote and establish the show. Funding for the pilot came from a vaudeville agency and key actors, producers and writers for the series had a background in this comedic tradition. Vaudeville comedy allowed some female performers licence to explore and explode the feminine ideal and early television comedy offered a similar potential. Lucille Ball's performance as Lucy Ricardo is exemplary in this regard.

Live like a king, y’all: Gender negotiation and the performance of masculinity among Southern drag kings

This paper draws upon interviews with 27 drag kings in the South to examine why individuals perform drag, the range of performance experiences, and how drag kinging challenges dichotomous ideas about gender. We use these interviews to demonstrate the importance of context in understanding the drag king culture. We clearly show that in the South the performance of masculinity in the form of drag differs from other areas of the country. Our findings indicate that Southern drag kings, in general, do not overtly challenge the gender status quo as previous research assumes. Rather, they turn to drag as a safe and fun outlet for female masculinity and as a place to test the waters of transsexuality. Despite their often individualistic rationales, we argue that the act of performing drag still challenges the gender order and enables others to engage in political thought and push for change in our society.

What's a Masculine Negotiator? What's a Feminine Negotiator? It Depends on the Cultural and Situational Contexts

AbstractGender‐related categorization is a key feature of the literature on gender in negotiation. While previous literature focused on context‐free traits such as warmth and competence, we examine how people categorize specific negotiation goals and behaviors as masculine and feminine across the United States and China in different negotiation contexts, illustrating the role of cultural and situational contexts in gender‐related categorization. Two studies found that while American participants categorized competitive goals and behaviors as masculine and cooperative ones as feminine across business‐to‐consumer (B2C) and business‐to‐business (B2B) negotiation contexts, Chinese participants' patterns depended on the negotiation context. In B2C contexts, Chinese participants categorized competitive goals and behaviors as feminine and cooperative ones as masculine; in B2B contexts, they made further distinctions, categorizing competitive goals and behaviors that are socially inappropriate as feminine, but competitive ones that are socially appropriate, and cooperative goals and behaviors, as masculine. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Young women’s negotiations of gender, the body and the labour market in a post-feminist context

This article explores the ways the body and femininity is understood and negotiated in relation to employment. This article draws on interview data from an Australian study which aimed to explore what it meant to be a ‘young woman’ in neoliberal late modernity, and in relation to the paradoxes of post-feminism. Though there has been an unprecedented rise in youth post-secondary school participation in Australia and elsewhere, girls’ and young women’s increased investment and participation in education has not provided the same gains as for their male counterparts. All interview participants described being aware of gender inequalities and gender discrimination in the workplace, including the glass ceiling, the gender pay gap, and demands and pressures on women to balance career and motherhood, however many did not associate these issues with ‘feminism’. We explore the dynamics of notions of equality, difference and the body in participants’ discussions of work and their anticipation of motherhood and the logics by which gender inequalities are sustained.

Looking the Part: Negotiating Work Clothes, Gender and Expertise in Retail

This article explores work clothes as a site for negotiations of gender in relation to expertise in retail. Pointing to the importance of studying dress for the understanding of contemporary labor processes, the purpose of the article is to understand cultural and gendered meanings of work clothes by analyzing how workers handle expectations of their appearances. Based on qualitative methods and interviews with workers in fashion stores, beauty stores, home improvement stores, and home electronics stores, three different ways are identified in which workers compensate for the loss of perceived expertise as a result of not belonging to the expected gender. When female workers were the norm, as in fashion stores, male workers had no trouble fitting in, but still compensated by identifying with management. In home improvement stores, female workers compensated for their lack of masculinity by wearing men’s clothing, thereby enacting sameness. In home electronics stores, female workers desired more feminine clothing, thereby compensating for lack of masculinity by enacting difference. These different tactics illustrate the key roles in negotiations around expertise that work clothes play and that the meanings and effects of gendered garments vary contextually.

“Wheel Me Over There!”: Disability and Colin’s Wheelchair in The Secret Garden

This article approaches Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden from a disability studies perspective, with particular attention to how gender and class interact with (dis)ability, to reveal how traditional notions of class and gender underpin Colin Craven’s narrative of recovery. To become the able-bodied, masculine, upper-class “Master Colin” by the novel’s conclusion, Colin must both marginalize and differentiate himself from his female cousin, Mary Lennox, and the working-class Dickon Sowerby. Colin’s wheelchair is the primary locus for the text’s negotiations of gender, class, and (dis)ability. Ultimately, although much in its representation of disability is stereotypical, the novel usefully shows the ways in which disability is socially constructed.

Gender Negotiation of the composer Kaija Saariaho in Finland: The Woman Composer as Nomadic Subject.

This essay is my interpretation of the gender negotiation of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho in Finland. I demonstrate, by examining the public's reception of Kaija Saariaho and her own experiences, how the gender negotiation of gender identity and the presentation of a woman composer take place, as ongoing processes, between the realms of conventional otherness (the socially constructed category of women composers) and real-life experiences of the individual. The analysis is done through the theoretical lenses offered by DE LAURETIS (1988) CITRON (1993), FOUCAULT (1984) and the epistemology of nomadic transitions by BRAIDOTTI (1991, 1994). I claimed that Saariaho has negotiated her gender not “within” the male-dominated system but “with” it, defining a new gender subject position: the position of the nomadic subject.

Playing like a girl? The negotiation of gender and sexual identity among female ice hockey athletes on male teams

While no one can deny the rich history of girls and women in sport, they continue to face obstacles to their full participation and representation in mixed-sex sport environments. Sex integration in sport is often contentious for those female athletes who participate in sports traditionally played by men, such as ice hockey. We do not know enough about the lived experiences of girls and women who navigate these gendered sport spaces. With this in mind, this study qualitatively explored how seven female ice hockey athletes negotiate their identities as female athletes, in such a way that focuses on the social constructions of gender and sexuality. Findings of this study highlight the tensions and contradictions of being a female athlete in a traditionally male sport and the rigid categories used by the women interviewed in negotiating their gendered and sexual identities while playing on male ice hockey teams.

Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies ed. by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot (review)

Reviewed by: Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies ed. by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot Ariel Nereson DANCE ON ITS OWN TERMS: HISTORIES AND METHODOLOGIES. Edited by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013; pp. 456. Since the mid-1990s, dance studies has integrated with other disciplines, including performance studies, visual studies, cultural studies, and others. The 1997 volume Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance set a standard for this kind of interdisciplinary work, and others—Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (2001) and The Routledge Dance Studies Reader (2010)—have sprung up in response to the field’s increased visibility in academia. In their new collection, editors Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot aim to re-center dance studies onto dance itself: onto movement and its phenomenal and material qualities. They argue that dance studies’ interdisciplinary forays, while rich and provocative, have compromised the study of dance on its own terms: “[i]n their eagerness to adopt theoretical language from other disciplines, dance scholars have lost fluency in their own language” (4). This language emphasizes familiarity with particular schools of movement analysis and notation, allowing for scholarship that springs from dancing itself rather than beginning with external concerns about the body as a site or sign. Dance on Its Own Terms provides great depth in terms of modeling strong, dance-centered scholarship, but represents a fairly narrow range of dance itself. The editors divide the volume’s sixteen chapters into three sections that emphasize, respectively, spectatorship and reconstruction, physical/kinesthetic dance histories of particular figures, and methods of dance notation. Section 1 begins with Karen Eliot’s analysis of canon formation in British ballet circa World War II, including her timely reminder that “the mechanics and politics of canon formation … do not operate uniformly across the disciplines” (13). Ann Dils’s reflective chapter on restaging the challenging Jean Cocteau/Darius Milhaud farce Le Boeuf sur le Toit (1920) for a contemporary college audience provides a clear analysis of race and gender issues within the work, and also a model for imagining our pedagogical practices alongside our artistic ones. Deborah Friedes Galili offers the highly useful notion culture of reconstruction, terminology that frames her investigation of the “institutional structures and artistic and scholarly discourses” that determine reconstruction practices across geographies (67). Betsy Cooper convincingly demonstrates that the Production Code Administration’s censorship assessments about the “decency” of a dance in Golden Age Hollywood films were linked to a high art/popular entertainment binary that reified balletic movement, even if those choreographies [End Page 586] technically violated the code. Harmony Bench reads Beyoncé’s viral “Single Ladies” choreography (2008) as a negotiation of gender and sexuality within internet culture, offering an exemplary integration of a dance-centered perspective (movement analysis of the choreography itself and its lineage) with contemporary theoretical concerns (kinesthetic transfer through digital media). In section 2, Catherine Turocy’s strong essay on how dancers (and scholars) in the present might enter into the spatial world of Baroque dance includes an invaluable series of exercises for readers and dancers that demonstrates the Baroque understanding of space, physicality, and aesthetics. Bales’s own excellent chapter in this section, a comparative movement analysis across three different interpretations of pas de deux (Marius Petipa, George Balanchine, and William Forsythe), connects movement itself across the three dances and to disciplinary questions in dance criticism and history in rich and compelling ways. Carrie Gaiser Casey examines the shape of maternal relationships between Anna Pavlova and her ballerinas through a feminist lens, arguing that we acknowledge the contradictions inherent in these relationships “as an integral part of dancer experience” (226). Geraldine Morris carefully parses the collaborative strands of Frederick Ashton’s 1937 ballet A Wedding Bouquet (music by Gerald Berners, text by Gertrude Stein) to argue for an integrated analysis of movement, music, and literature. In her Laban-based analysis of Anna Sokolow’s 1945 solo Kaddish, Hannah Kosstrin performs vital recovery work, tracing the evolution and adaptation of the choreography through several dancers, including Sokolow herself. Finally, Jessica Zeller focuses on the uniquely American pedagogy of ballerina Rochelle Zide-Booth to provide a useful overview...

Double-trouble: Negotiating gender and sexuality in post-colonial women’s rugby in Fiji

Although women’s exclusion in sport has attracted significant attention in the western context, similar issues in relation to post-colonial societies have remained in the margins of the sociology of sport. By analysing primary, interview-based evidence, in this article we explore the challenges female rugby players face regarding gender and sexuality in Fiji: a male dominated post-colonial society. In particular, we focus on participants’ resistance to dominant cultural practices and ways in which they (re)negotiate gender norms and sexuality in a double-bind struggle against both traditional and sporting male hegemonies. We argue that the case of Fijian women rugby players illustrates an interplay between a multiplicity of power relations in sport in a post-colonial society and the resilience with which the athletes negotiate and respond to them, as well as the dynamic nature and the transformative potential of their everyday practices.

A queer learner’s identity positioning in second language classroom discourse

This case study examines the classroom participation of a Korean queer (transgender) learner of English as a second language at a language institute for international adult students in the United States. To understand the dynamics of this learner’s participation, we focus on how she constructed gender identity and learner identity in interaction. Our analysis indicates that although the class content was not designed to elicit biographic information from students, this learner agentively managed her gender identity expression, which, at times, was met with challenge by her peers. As a second language learner, she self-positioned both as a lazy student and an effective language user – contradictory positionings that might be explained by the disconnection between the class content and the cultural capital that she sought to gain. Our study extends research on investment in second language learning by examining identity positioning in actual discourses and by linking classroom interaction and the learner’s experiences outside of the classroom. The analysis can also inform researchers and teachers about the complexities and nuances of gender identity construction and negotiation in classroom discourse.

Telling the Sudanese story in Athens through a gender lens

This article analyses the part that gender negotiations are playing in the making of Sudanese identity in Athens at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In an attempt to define the Sudanese version of the Athenian story, Sudanese men and women who undertake collective action rework differentiate them from newcomers and other Africans. The vindication of Arabness requires boundary work in which women and men perform different tasks in order to get recognition and elaborate their mobility story. The positioning of the Sudanese in the ethnic constellation of Athens is made possible through a gendered division of symbolic and material labor that takes place within the frame of the Sudanese Women’s Association.

Brother Anna (1963): A Jewish woman is a very queer woman

Abstract O Adelfos Anna / Brother Anna (Grigoriou, 1963) is a Greek film about Anna, a Jewish girl who cross-dresses as a monk in a Christian monastery in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The film’s negotiation of gender and religious identities is peculiarly subdued: unlike other cross-dressing films (such as Sylvia Scarlett or Yentl), both Anna’s disguise and her subsequent identity disclosure do not lead to paradoxical situations that can invite queer interpretations, and her Jewishness recedes into the background. Yet, the fact that Anna resides in an oppressive environment, which stipulates female sexuality as profane and punishes its manifestations, marks her own, queer trajectory of identity disclosure: being initially saddled with a non-gendered identity that helps her avoid female oppression, Anna experiments with religious, Christian pathos to sanctify her own sexuality. At the same time, she unknowingly but actively explores the negative stereotype of a Jewish temptress to seduce her male object of desire to Christian morality. Even though Anna will finally embrace a conventional heterosexual bonding, both her non-normative, religious expression of sexuality and her overturning of the negative connotations that female Jewishness entails leads to her acknowledgement of female sexuality as something inherently positive, which does not require validation from a conventional, Greek Orthodox marriage scheme.

Feeling sexual transgression: subjectivity, bodily experience, and non-normative hetero-erotic practices in women's cross-border sex in Costa Rica

Participating in sexual tourism and cross-border sex, heterosexual Euro-North American women are a targeted social group whereby accusations, such as ‘fucking gringa’, label them as sexual transgressors for violating multiple boundaries of heteronormativity. The complex power dynamics of women's cross-border sex are due to negotiations of race, gender, and class that are played out in specific locales and political economies of desire. Within these dynamics, women are agentive social actors and exert considerable sexual agency in their desires for local men who are positioned unevenly vis-à-vis tourist women's mobilities within erotic markets. Yet women's hetero-erotic sexual practices, which are experienced at the level of the body, cannot be assumed; looking at the lived experiences of women as sexual trangressors in these spaces promises to complicate non-normative heterosexuality and the gendered dynamics of (straight) transnational sex. Using critical ethnography and a performance approach to writing that places subjectivity at the center of the ethnographic record and analysis, this article conveys an ‘insider’ or emic account of women's transnational sex taking place in a Caribbean region of Costa Rica renown for women's sexual and romance tourism. In taking this approach, I aim to show how heterosexuality, hetero-erotic practices, and cross-border sex are not always what they seem and a glimpse into ‘the subjects’ worlds in their words' (Madison, Soyini. 2005. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. London: Sage, 174) has implications for theory concerned with the body and performance as fundamental to the social production of sexual transgression.

Gender constructions and negotiations of female football fans. A case study in Denmark

While both the media and the academic literature focus primarily on male fans, in particular on violence and the prevention of hooliganism, little is known about female football supporters. This is also true of Denmark, a country that is known for its high degree of gender equality. This article aims to give insight into gender constructions and negotiations of female football fans in the stands. Drawing on a social constructivist perspective to gender and Bourdieu’s (1984) approaches to field, capital and habitus, we explored the experiences and opinions of female fans. The methods employed were stadium observations as well as qualitative, guideline-based interviews with female supporters of three different clubs. The observations and interviews reveal that traditional gender norms, prejudices and sexism are widespread in the fan stands, and are often accepted and trivialised by the female fans themselves. Female fans have to comply with specific rules of conduct in the stadium, where “masculine” behaviour for both male and female supporters is regarded as ideal fan behaviour. However, there is also space for gender negotiations as long as female supporters display neither “hypermasculinity” nor “emphasised femininity” in their gender performances. Female fans do not only comply with and reproduce the rules of conduct in the stadium but also apply different forms of resistance against sexism and the domination of men in the stadium – both on the field and in the stands. The founding of a women’s fan group can be interpreted as means of opposition to the dominance of men.

What is a Masculine Negotiator? What is a Feminine Negotiator? Depends on Who You Ask and When

Universal gender-related social categories such as warmth and competence have previously been used to explain gender differences in negotiation behaviors and outcomes. By conducting a qualitative study and a quantitative study, we demonstrate that people's understanding of gender in negotiations is contingent on cultural and contextual factors, such as for American people, masculinity is about maximizing economic capital and femininity is about maximizing relational capital and this category have the same manifestations across negotiation contexts, whereas for Chinese people, masculinity is about maximizing relational capital and femininity is about avoiding so and this category have different manifestations across negotiation contexts. The results revealed that while Americans categorized aggressive negotiation motives and behaviors as masculine and non-aggressive ones as feminine across all negotiation contexts, Chinese people had a different pattern that depended on the negotiation context. In business...

‘The Untold Story’: The mediated female ghost in England’s Blenheim Palace

Designated a World Heritage site, Blenheim Palace demonstrates the use of technology and gender in tourist destinations to re-package cultural sites. A multi-media exhibit entitled ‘The Untold Story’ updates the site by using new media not to emphasize the great public triumphs, but instead to reveal private family relationships. Told by a projected apparition of the first Duchess’ lady’s maid, Grace Ridley, the exhibit addresses the tourists by including them in intimate, behind-the-scenes views of 300 years of family stories. The ghostly female narrator stands in for the tourist, a feminized outsider fascinated by the gossipy version of family history. Examining ‘The Untold Story’ provides insight into gender negotiations within tourist sites. This particular combination of new media and a female ghost exposes the emphasis in traditional heritage sites on elites, as well as anxiety about the estate’s dependence on servants in the past and tourists in the present.

Negotiations of Gender in Early Childhood Settings

Guest Editors: Anette Hellman and Mia Heikkila Gender research has long focused on arguments that gender is constructed through discursive and overlapping social processes. However, there is still a minimal body of research concerned with how young children learn gender through social interaction in educational settings. This point has been made by a number of authors (Arlemalm-Hagser and Pramling Samuelsson 2009; Davies 2003; Martin 2011; Paecher 2007; Thorne 1993). Taking this as the starting point for this issue, we present new research and analyses that investigate negotiations in which young children from different parts of the world ‘engage’ with different aspects of gender. All papers focus on early childhood settings where children themselves in different ways negotiate and react to gender. Questions raised include: How can negotiations of gender be described and analyzed within early childhood education? When, where and by whom are gender relations produced? Influential global discourses about children in research and policy documents discuss concepts such as competent children, children’s rights, and children’s influence. Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence (2007) noted that ideas about children and childhood are often constructed and negotiated through conflicting discourses. Children can be categorized as ‘competent’ while in another global discourse children are seen as ‘not yets’ and viewed, in the early childhood years, as only

The relationship of gender expression, sexual identity, distress, appearance, and clothing choices for queer women

The purpose of this research was to explore how queer women today negotiate gender expression and sexual identity through clothing and appearance and its relationship to negative stress or distress. Data related to 20 queer identifying women were collected via an initial in-depth interview, daily diary entries for two weeks, and a follow-up interview at the end of each diary week. In the diary, participants were asked to rate how distressed they were when getting dressed and when wearing their outfits in different spaces throughout their day. Data were coded and the authors looked for emergent themes and patterns. The authors found that identifying as queer influenced how the interviewees chose to dress and style themselves, and that performing queerness in their appearance for a number of women caused distress in both straight and queer spaces.