Negotiation Of Gender Research Articles

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This article aims to discuss the complexity of stability and change in terms of the relation of gender and work in traditionally male-dominated workplaces, and more specifically in the Swedish mining industry. Mining has for a long time had a close relationship to men and masculinity. From the 1980s until 2005, the proportion of women miners increased from three to six per cent, but during the last ten years the proportion of women miners has increased more rapidly and today the number of women is 15 per cent. What made and makes this change possible? In this article, we merge previous studies concerning mining, gender and organization with new empirical material. Interviews with 20 miners, both men and women, were carried out to present a framework for understanding the contemporary negotiations of gender and work. Our conclusion is that the change in gender patterns can be understood through the following three interlinked processes of stability and change concerning: 1) mining work 2) the relationship between professional identity and masculinity and 3) the companies’ work towards gender equality. Together, these processes create a different outcome than before. Although much is changing in the mining industry, the stability characterizing its gendered relations is at the same time both notably durable and persistent. There is a remaining theoretical challenge to better understand these processes of change, stability and negotiation concerning the relationship of gender and work.

Gender and Sustainable Negotiation,

Gender and Sustainable Negotiation,

“What about the child issue?” Group negotiations of gender and parenthood contracts in recruitment situations

ABSTRACTMen and women becoming parents are supposed to have equal opportunities in working life. However, inequality and discrimination are not easily avoided. The aim of this study was to investigate how argumentation related to parenthood and careers takes form in group discussions of a fictional recruitment situation, and how stereotypes such as competence and warmth are manifested in such discussions. Thirty-five ad-hoc groups of university students were asked to make a choice between three candidates for a consultancy position. The first two candidates were a man and a woman, while the third alternately was described either as a man or a woman described as having a newborn child. Parenthood was sometimes seen as reducing competence, but it was more often viewed as adding to competence. Parenthood was also considered to add warmth to the organization. Interestingly, all groups avoided relating the parenthood issue to gender. Three conversation patterns were found, differing in the amount of elaboratio...

Gender Negotiations of Female Collegiate Athletes in the Strength and Conditioning Environment

Female athletes often negotiate their meanings of femininity and athleticism due to restrictive cultural norms, with muscularity at the center of this negotiation. Using a critical feminist interactionist perspective, this study seeks to understand how female collegiate athletes negotiate their meanings of muscularity and femininity within the strength and conditioning environment. Negotiation strategies emerged from the data, including the gendered body and the weight room environment. The findings suggest that while the strength and conditioning coach is responsible for training athletes in power and speed, they must do so within the cultural context that often attempts to limit women’s physicality.

Innovation and gendered negotiations: Insights from six small‐scale fishing communities

AbstractThere has so far been limited investigation into gender in relation to innovation in fisheries. Therefore, this study investigates how gender relations shape the capacity and motivation of different individuals in fishing communities to innovate. We compare six fishing communities in Cambodia, the Philippines and the Solomon Islands. Our findings suggest that gendered negotiations mediate the capacity to innovate but that wider structural constraints are important constraints for both men and women. Our findings show that men's and women's capacity to innovate is strongly mediated by the behaviour of their marriage partner. Consequently, we argue that gender research from a social relational perspective has an important contribution to make in understanding poor fishing communities where new ways of doing things or new technologies are being promoted.

Gender constructions in breaking

Drawing on the perspectives of youth involved in breaking, also known as breakdance, the aim of this article is to explore how their experiences contribute to the doing, redoing and undoing of gender. The negotiation of gender is highlighted through the female breakers’ experiences in a male-dominated culture. The analysis is based on fieldwork and qualitative interviews with young breakers in Norway. The results show that the female breakers challenged the perception of masculinity and femininity as they extended their practice of gender. Their desire to disprove the gendered expectations of female breakers resulted in a mixing of masculinity and femininity. Accordingly, the gender regime among the breakers was simultaneously re-constructed and challenged. We argue that both male and female breakers challenge normative perceptions of doing gender. Consequently, breaking has the capacity to dismantle the gender binary, and to redo and undo the gender order.

Variability in /s/ among transgender speakers: Evidence for a socially grounded account of gender and sibilants

AbstractSibilant consonants are well-established as resources for the negotiation of gender and sexuality, but the origin of these links is less clearly agreed upon. Some researchers have pointed to sex differentiation in the vocal anatomy as a potential cause for gender differences in /s/, though a review of the literature indicates that learned articulatory patterns play a critical role. This article focuses on the spectral qualities of /s/ among 15 English-speaking transgender men and transmasculine individuals. Because their early socialization and physiological development is not normatively aligned with their self-defined gender identities, trans people are well-positioned to illuminate the relative contribution of physiology and identity to the gendered voice. Two analyses are presented, one of which focuses on inter-speaker variation among all 15 participants, and the other of which compares one bilingual speaker’s productions of /s/ in English and Spanish. Together, these analyses demonstrate that sex category does not determine the gender-linked acoustic characteristics of /s/. Instead, a more complex, multidimensional framework for gender that distinguishes between gender assignment, role, identity, and presentation is necessary to account for the full range of gendered phonetic styles that speakers can employ and hence to understand the process through which gendered voices arise.

Climate Change and Paying Lipservice to Women: What is the Role and Representation of Gender in the COP21 Negotiations?

The gathering of global leaders to discuss climate change, known as COP21, in Paris in 2015 has been trumpeted as a success due to the high number of countries that have positively participated. COP21, or the Conference of Parties, is the governing body for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an environmental treaty aiming to tackle the problems associated with greenhouse gases. However, there are post-COP21 reports suggesting that despite 123 out of 195 countries so far agreeing to a set of policies to curb climate change, many important elements of the conference were not given the platform promised to them, including gender issues. Indeed, there are significant voices that say gender was strategically marginalised. Yet, prior to Paris in 2015, the COP21 president, French foreign affairs minister Laurent Fabius, claimed gender would be central to the negotiations. This was an acknowledgement that the impacts of climate change are overall more disadvantageous to women and girls. The purpose of the research is to examine the scope and importance of gender in the negotiations through a review of documentation and qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles.

Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies by Shiho Satsuka

Reviewed by: Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies by Shiho Satsuka Okpyo Moon (bio) Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies. By Shiho Satsuka. Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2015. xii, 263 pages. $89.95, cloth; $24.95, paper. According to author Shiho Satsuka, Nature in Translation aims at exploring the following questions: What is the appeal of magnificent nature to Japanese travelers? How has the vast scale of nature in Canada served as a site for young Japanese to transform their subjectivities at this historical moment? What do their experiences tell us about the subjectivity of flexible workers who were pushed into transnational labor markets? How are the guides’ experiences shaped by the larger historical context of cultural encounters in asymmetrical global power relations? (p. 2) As can be surmised from this list of research objectives summarized by the author herself, this book is more about young Japanese tour guides and their lives, experiences, and perceptions than about Japanese tourism to the Canadian Rockies per se. Nor does it seek to analyze how different understandings of “nature” are translated by the guides and conveyed to tourists from Japan, affecting the ways the latter appreciate and consume the destination. Satsuka does show by a few examples how the role of the guides may influence the Japanese tourists’ understanding of Canadian nature, but her main focus throughout is on the experiences of the guides rather than those of the tourists. I must say, therefore, that Nature in Translation slightly sidestepped the original expectation I had about the book’s content when I was first given the title for review. Largely on the basis of doctoral fieldwork conducted at a Japanese tour guiding company operating in Banff National Park in western Canada in 2000–2001 and through her own experience as a guide, Satsuka offers a detailed description and analysis of the life trajectories of a dozen or so Japanese tour guides, of what motivated them to move to Canada and to choose to become tour guides, and of how their lives have been transformed by their work experience in the tourism business in the Canadian Rockies. [End Page 214] As background for this specific type of transnational labor migration, Satsuka discusses in chapter 1 the deteriorating and increasingly precarious conditions of the Japanese economy and job market during the postbubble period that have disillusioned and driven some young people to “escape” Japan and its deep-rooted corporate culture, family obligations, and gender expectations in search of more freedom. Satsuka then goes on in chapter 2 to explore the characteristic features of the cosmopolitan aspirations of those young people in which Canada with its vast nature is imagined as a space of freedom. Canada was chosen because, in Japan, the dominant image of the West that had been represented by the United States during the postwar years is being gradually replaced by an alternative model of Canada or west European countries that are supposed to be less competitive, less materialistic, and therefore more humane. In this connection, the chapter specifically examines the influence of a well-known television entertainer, Ōhashi Kyosen, in redirecting “Japanese fascination with overseas travel from American culture to Canadian nature” (p. 35). Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to detailed description and analysis of the meaning of tour guides’ experiences including their transformation through the guide-training program. It is true that many guide trainees are placed in situations of being commodified in their new role as a guide despite the fact that they feel they have escaped the commercialized society and workplace of Japan. Satsuka argues, however, that they interpret the commodification of self in their new work roles as an opportunity to develop a unique individuality rather than as an expression of the alienation or decay of an authentic self. The Canadian natural landscape plays a significant part in this conflation of commodification and performative construction of individual subjectivity. This theme of subjectivity construction in the workplace is further elaborated in chapter 4 by focusing on female outdoor guides and their negotiation of gender and family, which challenges the normative family system and gender relations that are considered “natural.” In chapters...

Families in War And Peace: Chile from colony to nation by Sarah C. Chambers

Reviewed by: Families in War And Peace: Chile from colony to nation by Sarah C. Chambers Sandra Collins Families in War And Peace: Chile from colony to nation. By Sarah C. Chambers. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Since the 1980s familial networks and gender have been growing as a way of interpreting history in Latin America. Numerous studies have demonstrated how family bonds among elite Creole were later exploited in the struggle to separate from Spain. This was particularly visible in Chile, where the colonial economy had been held up by a kinship pattern of marriages between Chilean-born daughters and Spanish immigrants. Mary Lowenthal Felstiner's work on kinship politics and family metaphors was the first to show how family and politics were entwined during the shift to Independence in Chile, and how language connected to family and politics became a tool to unify elite families in their desire to break away from the crown. In Families in War and Peace: Chile from colony to nation, Sarah Chambers extends this analysis to the use of familial rhetoric in nation formation, arguing that it was equally instrumental in re-forging links devastated by the ongoing wars of the early nineteenth century. While studies on Chilean nation building have tended to date issues of family regeneration to the Conservative era beginning in 1830, Chambers demonstrates that it was a central consideration in the establishment of a stable government and society even during the tumultuous years directly following the wars of Independence. The objective of a "greater Chilean family" underpinned the formation of policies consciously designed to gain support and legitimacy for the fledgling nation. Paternal governance, so often cited as key to the endurance of Spanish hegemony in the Americas, was carried over to the ad hoc judicial systems of the Patria Vieja, and was later consolidated through courts that resolved property disputes, provided military pensions and dealt with legal disputes over family maintenance and custody. Chambers shows how Republican rhetoric was related to the family, and that this was increasingly utilised by non-elite members of society. Interesting examples of this are given in Chapter Six, when appeals from lower class women looking for child support for children out of wedlock or military pensions are shown to allude to paternal responsibility and even the legacy of slavery. With the onset of Liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, appeals to the mercy of a father figure began to fall on deaf ears. Legal reforms initiated by the Civil Code of 1855 saw a shift to the perception of poor women and children without access to family networks as "a potential labour force who should better earn their keep by working, often in the households of their social betters" (212). Such insights are profound when attempting to understand the patriarchal authority that continues to be the subject of speculation today. One of the book's greatest strengths is the way in which the structure allows for the multi-levelled discourses, negotiations and disputes to weave in and out of the discussion. The chronology that dictates events in Chile is the life of Javiera Carrera, sister of the Liberators Juan José, José Miguel and Luis. While her brothers had all died by 1821, Javiera lived until 1862 and bore witness to the multiple governments, wars and constitutions that shaped the lives of so many families. An analysis of her letters and correspondence offers a window to contemporary readers on the intricacies of relationships, the way events and decision-making could manipulate and be manipulated, and the way power was maintained through kinship relations though generations. Returning to Javiera's story throughout the book demonstrates the complex routes that negotiations of gender and one's role in the family could take, and demonstrates the complex engagements between individuals and government. The overarching structure is divided into two parts. The first part, "Families and War," shows how families mobilised politically and activism was carried out based on gender roles and place in the family during the years of Independence; while "Reconciling the National Family" traces state formation from 1823 to the 1850s. The traditional linear presentation of time helps the reader contextualise...

The Gendered Economics of Greek Bronze Mirrors: Reflections on Reciprocity and Feminine Agency

The Gendered Economics of Greek Bronze Mirrors: Reflections on Reciprocity and Feminine Agency Mireille M Lee The hand-held mirror is unique in Greek material culture in terms of both gender and economics.1 Bronze mirrors were produced by male metal-smiths in specialized workshops outside the household; the valuable bronze was otherwise associated with the masculine activities of war (in the form of weapons and armor), and government, as minted coins. Yet mirrors are gendered feminine in Greek society: in Greek iconography and literature, they are exclusively associated with women. Actual examples have been recovered archaeologically from women’s graves and from sanctuaries, especially those dedicated to female divinities. The iconography of the mirrors themselves is likewise overwhelmingly feminine, depicting both idealized female figures and mythological imagery. Because bronze mirrors moved between the spheres of masculine and feminine, public and private, they functioned as especially charged objects in the negotiation of gender and status in Greek society. Since mirrors were produced outside the household, women must have [End Page 143] acquired them via exchange—as opposed to textiles, which they might produce themselves. The value of the metal was significant and therefore represented a transfer of wealth from men to women. Yet unlike bronze weapons or coinage, the value of the metal did not translate into military or economic power. Rather, the bronze mirror conferred elite status on its owner, a status couched in terms of feminine beauty. For citizen women these precious objects could be transferred outside the household only in strictly prescribed ways as votive dedications and funerary gifts. In addition, mirrors were ascribed social value because of their supposed magical properties, especially as a means of prophecy. This study considers the ways in which women capitalized on the status conferred by mirrors in terms of personal display and conspicuous consumption, as well as in the realm of love magic. I argue that while mirrors functioned as an important means of feminine agency, the exchange of mirrors served to create and maintain social bonds between the sexes. TYPES OF GREEK MIRRORS Bronze mirrors have been recovered archaeologically throughout the Greek world.2 The vast majority with known provenience are from funerary and sanctuary contexts.3 Single mirrors found in graves are generally assumed to have been the personal property of the deceased. Unfortunately, the biological sex of that individual is unknown in many cases; indeed, many graves were conventionally identified as female on the basis of the presence of a mirror. When the sex of the deceased has been verified by means of skeletal biology, it seems that the exclusivity of mirrors with adult female burials persists only until the end of the fifth century b.c.e.; nevertheless, mirrors remained ideologically associated with women through the Hellenistic period (Houby-Nielsen 1997, with earlier bibliography). Mirrors were also dedicated in sanctuaries in all eras. Large caches of votive mirrors dating to the Archaic and Classical periods were discovered at the Argive Heraion and the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron; both sites were [End Page 144] of particular import for women in marriage and childbirth.4 In the late Classical and Hellenistic periods, mirrors are dedicated to other deities—especially Aphrodite, who replaces Hera as the primary divinity responsible for marital love (Houby-Nielsen 1997.243–45). Few mirrors have been recovered from domestic contexts, not only because Greek houses have been less extensively excavated than both sanctuaries and cemeteries, but also because mirrors’ portability and inherent value make them unlikely finds. Several bronze mirrors were recovered from the town of Olynthus in the Chalcidice in Northern Greece, which was destroyed in 318 b.c.e. by the army of Philip I of Macedonia and abandoned. One room in House A iv 9 has been interpreted as a women’s workroom on the basis of the presence of two case-mirrors, as well as a bracelet, groups of loom weights, and vessels for food preparation.5 Unlike Etruscan mirrors, no comprehensive corpus speculorum exists for Greek mirrors; rather, they have been studied by individual type. The earliest mirrors, dating to the seventh century b.c.e., are simply round polished bronze disks, often convex in shape, attached to...

“When I Ask a Question, They Look at me Strangely”

This study uses qualitative interviews with 66 women journalists from print, broadcast, and online media in India, to understand how women political reporters assigned to the political beat negotiate gender issues and organizational and news routines while being effective journalists entrusted to cover matters of policy and enhance political awareness among audiences. Using Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchy-of-influences model that introduces five levels of influence on news content, this study explores how institutional, news gathering, societal procedures, and professional practices influence the functions of women journalists on the political beat and percolate into the content they produce. The results show that in India’s growing media market, organizational and news routines, as well as the contentious issue of gender, control access to beats, especially the political beat, and percolate into news content produced by women political reporters.

Laura Levin, Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In

Drawing on case studies from performed self-portrait photography, environmental performance, eco-performance, and political activism, Laura Levin highlights the importance of attending to how the “background” in which people are embedded is central to their negotiation of class, race, gender, politics, and identity.

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Transnational celebrity and the fashion icon: The case of Tilda Swinton, ‘visual performance artist at large’

Tilda Swinton’s status as a fashion icon exemplifies the contradictory functions that Walter Benjamin attributes to fashion as both exemplifying commodity fetishism and expressing a utopian ‘image wish’. This vexed relationship with fashion inflects Swinton’s cinematic performances, enhanced by her emphasis on disguise and transformation that calls into question the nature of identity and its authenticity. Her persona speaks to the fluid and fragmented dimensions of contemporary European identities, which are rooted, but also cross borders, national and otherwise; similarly, her public presence testifies to the way that contemporary culture has generated new forms of celebrity as a means of representing identities in which the negotiation of gender is a significant component.

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Behind the Myth of the Matriarch and the Flagbearer: How Korean and Chinese American Sons and Daughters Negotiate Gender, Family, and Emotions

While more studies are exploring the ways in which gender structures the family experiences of American‐born children of immigrants, there is less attention to how gender shapes later views on ethnicity and culture. Based on interviews with Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese Americans in the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area, this article examines the different ways second‐generation children learn, interpret, and pass on the cultural values and family traditions in their adulthood. Because their family roles center on their roles as leaders and carriers of the family name through male heirs, sons—especially oldest sons—can fulfill their filial obligations through relatively orthodox and nonengaging cultural practices that although restrictive, do not threaten their personal goals and privileged status. However, daughters must negotiate more emotionally burdensome expectations and responsibilities by preserving family honor, acting as family caretakers, and juggling multiple responsibilities; thus, they tend to re‐create more subtle, self‐empowering, and emotionally engaging ways of interpreting and preserving their parents’ expectations on family culture. I argue that the gendered ways daughters and sons are taught to practice cultural values and protect family honor has significant bearing on their later views on ethnicity and culture but in complex ways that transcend the generational divide.

Cuteness, friendship, and identity in the brony community

I examine the practices of fan productivity and gender negotiation in brony fandom, the community of primarily college-age men who are fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (2010–). I examine the contours of brony textual and material practices, noting how productivity within the fandom plays a role in the negotiation of identity and community ethos. I also consider the implications of cuteness in the fandom and discuss how this aesthetic and its corresponding narrative have led to the development of a unique discursive mode among bronies, which I term the discourse of friendship. Drawing on Matthew Gutmann's theory of contradictory consciousness, I argue that the discourse of friendship is an innovative framework that encourages new ways of taking part in existing social institutions that destabilize hegemonic masculinity.

Shopkeepers, Women, and Gendered Narratives

This paper examines how male shopkeepers (esnaf) construct narratives about women on the basis of the fieldwork conducted in the district of Moda, Istanbul between 2009 and 2013. While drawing attention to shopkeepers' significance in the discursive struggles over women, the essay aims to demonstrate that shopkeepers constitute one of the key social groups to be focused on for understanding narratives about women. I explore which types of narrative shopkeepers prefer to deploy, what references they make, and which ready-made narratives they disrupt. While placing these narratives within the context of everyday interactions between the two groups, this essay attempts to bring a fresh perspective on gender relations in the urban space. I argue that small shops represent a central site for the construction of social bonds between shopkeepers and women as members of a district community. Current forms of public discourse, hegemonic narratives, implied persons, various forms of gender ideologies, and the researcher herself are all deemed significant factors here. Moreover, processes of gender negotiations within everyday practices (including rapport-building activities) constitute the micro-politics of the construction and perpetuation of narratives. Shopkeepers' narratives about women shed light upon their perceptions of their own occupation, their relationships with the district community and various types of gendered subjectivities they form. The essay aims to demonstrate how the micro-politics of the co-production and reproduction of gender narratives functions by highlighting their embeddedness in everyday practices, in which both male shopkeepers and female residents interact and play an active role.

Judging Expertise

This article develops a framework for understanding the role of gender in negotiations of expert authority and tests the new approach with an analysis of legal disputes about expert witness credibility ( N = 435). Content-coded data from patent infringement, civil rights, and medical malpractice lawsuits in U.S. district courts indicate that lawyers’ challenges to expert witnesses’ credibility reflect widely held cultural beliefs about gender and certain kinds of expertise: whereas women are more likely than men to be challenged as unqualified to testify, men are more likely than women to be contested as irrelevant to the case. Furthermore, although highly credentialed women and men have equal chances of overcoming credibility challenges, women with fewer credentials are substantially more likely than men to be excluded from court. Overall, findings suggest that women must clear a higher bar than men to demonstrate their credibility as expert witnesses. Moreover, this study indicates that disputes about expert witness credibility are a site where stereotypes about gender and expertise are reproduced in the justice system.