Norms For Women Research Articles

Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South by Blain Roberts (review)

Reviewed by: Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South by Blain Roberts Karen W. Tice (bio) Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South. By Blain Roberts. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. x, 363. $39.95 cloth) Visitors traveling to Bell County, Kentucky, are greeted with an official road sign marking it as the home of the winner of the 2011 Miss Petite Princess Pageant as does neighboring Knox County, which honors its local 2010 Tiny Miss Kentucky winner. Beauty pageants are also especially popular on both black and white Kentucky college campuses and have been used to market not only their universities but also their localities’ contributions to coal, chicken, tobacco, and cotton. The southern states, in general, sponsor more local beauty competitions, on and off campus, that contribute to national beauty pageants such as the Miss America Pageant. Indeed, the westernized beauty contest prototype of individuated competition has been surprisingly durable and elastic, molded to fit an array of historical, [End Page 775] regional/national, economic, and cultural contexts, especially in the U.S. South. Throughout their long history, beauty pageants have been altered continuously in response to shifting idealizations of gendered, racialized, and class-based beauty, virtue, and respectability. They have been used to promote tourism, industry, civic and cultural pride; to resist stereotypes of racial and cultural backwardness; and to sell crops and commodities. Constructing values and norms for women’s bodies and behaviors through beauty pageantry has been a popular strategy to evaluate and showcase gendered, ethnic, racial, and class distinction; cultural citizenship; nationalism; and racial and regional identities. The popularity of southern beauty queens as regional icons of progress and economic modernization has resulted in many writers who label the region as the U.S. “pageant belt.” Blain Roberts’s book helps us understand the historical roots of the notion of the “pageant belt” South and how beauty practices have served as barometers of race, gender, segregation and integration, consumerism, rural/urban migration, and economic modernization throughout the U.S. South. Roberts defines beauty as an “expansive category that encompasses ideals, practices, rituals, labor, and even spaces,” and her work seeks “to show that the pursuit of beauty encompassed a range of activities, large and small, intimate and public,” including cosmetics, beauty and body contests, and hairdressing (p. 9). She argues that southern beauty politics are deeply racialized since “pursuing beauty became the way for white and black women to signify their commitment to their race, to literally embody it” (p. 11). She states that the South was regionally distinctive and thus probes how “southern beauty practices resulted from a fraught relationship between a conservative, largely rural region and the rest of the nation.” Although many scholars have written about race, beauty pageants, black colleges and respectability, hairdressing, and cosmetics, Roberts furthers this conversation in her innovative account of the roles of home demonstration agents and agricultural trade boards in furthering “indigenous rural practices into forums for the evaluation [End Page 776] of women’s bodies,” when “a market economy transformed the South into a region of profit-oriented commercial farming” (p. 106). She shows how the growing acceptance of the public evaluation of women’s bodies—and the importance of cultivating habits based on not only economy and thrift but also fashion, respectability, and the emergent aesthetics of urban cosmopolitanism in dress and deportment—augmented southern beauty rituals. She highlights the role of baby shows, health pageants, 4-H clubs, dress revues, sewing classes, “crop beauty competitions,” and agricultural fairs as the latter shifted its emphasis from “growing better tomatoes to growing better bodies” in the transformation of not only beauty practices but the economic and cultural modernization of the South (p. 119). Roberts additionally analyzes how the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and civil rights culture were expressed in southern women’s beauty practices, including the differing political investments and complexities that middle-class and rural black women faced in their beauty practices and the use of cosmetics to champion black capabilities, assert middle-class black aesthetics, build racial solidarities, and battle white racism. Despite her claim...

Starved by Society: An Examination of Judith Butler’s Gender Performance and Society’s Slender Ideal

This article uses the work of Judith Butler as a platform upon which to unpack the consequences of women living in a patriarchy and the slender performance that I argue we are unwittingly engaged in. In this critical approach to the gender divide and the political dimensions of anorexia in the 21st century, this article aims to highlight some of the key concerns arising out of society’s stereotypes and norms for women and how the struggle to both conform and resist these are played out on their bodies. Turning to the work of Marion Woodman and the concept of a ‘ritual of transformation’, I explore Butler’s notion of re-citation (re-inscription) through the use of ritual, a rite aimed at liberation and a reconnection to our matriarchal lineage. This ritual can be found in the most mundane of tasks and through repetition we have the power to both conceive of new ways of living and strengthen our subversive possibilities. This ritual becomes an act which places critical agency back in our hands, something removed as we are shepherded by consumerism and mass-capitalism. It’s through a framework of Feminist Liberation Theology and Body Theology that this all takes place. If, as Butler says, our behaviour creates our reality then we must change our behaviour!

Kurdish Life in Contemporary Turkey: Migration, Gender, and Ethnic Identity by Anna Grabolle-Çeliker

<i>Kurdish Life in Contemporary Turkey: Migration, Gender, and Ethnic Identity</i> by Anna Grabolle-Çeliker

Correcting for multiple comparisons in studies of dream content: A statistical addition to the Hall/Van de Castle coding system.

University of California, Santa CruzThis article addresses the issue of potential false positives when multiple tests arecarried out in comparing 2 samples with the content indicators used in the Hall andVan de Castle (1966) coding system for dream content. Using an algorithm based onthe Benjamini–Hochberg (Benjamini & Hochberg, 1995) correction for the FalseDiscovery Rate, it first compares findings for men and women in a large normativesample; all 12 of the statistically significant differences at the .05 level remain, alongwith 10 of 11 below .01. The article then compares results from an individual’s dreamseries with the norms for women; 10 of the 12 significant p values at the .05 levelremain, along with 4 of 5 below .01. The article concludes that earlier findings withthe Hall-Van de Castle system can be viewed as established findings, and recom-mends that the correction formula be used with large samples.

Gender, Maturity, and “Going out into the World”: Self-Referent Term Choice at Ogasawara Middle School

����� ��� The belief that women and men should use different first-person referent terms in casual, everyday contexts in Japan is a linguistic ideology based on the ideological construct that “women’s language” does and should exist. 1 While women’s language is imagined to have been an eternal feature of the Japanese language, it is, in fact, a contemporary construct, an ideology about gender and gendered expression that assumed a particular form during the Meiji period. What constitutes women’s language or other linguistic practices is not static, however, and the symbolic meanings particular terms assume continue to be reworked. At the same time, particular meanings that persist do so because they are actively reproduced. Historically, perceived linguistic corruption has been linked to moral corruption in Japanese women. Because women stand as symbolic barometers of cultural change and the loss of tradition, the perceived waning of women’s language presents an overt sign of (national) disorder. 2 As Shigeko Okamoto, Hideko Reynolds, Miyako Inoue, and others have found, both men and women continue to monitor and evaluate the degree to which women’s actual speech follows the norms of women’s language. 3 At the root of the critique and monitoring of women’s speech are ideas about who women are and should be. Public fear over the corruption of women’s language takes various forms, illustrating that the construct of women’s language is alive and well in Japan today. In this paper, I examine how middle-school girls navigate the gendered world of self and self-reference through their choice of self-referent terms. The students’ exegesis

Correlation between anxiety and anxiety-relief strategies of nurses in infection departmet

Objective To explore the correlation between anxiety and anxiety-relief strategies of nurses in infection department,and provide the reference for the work of hospital.Methods State-Trait Anxiety Inventory was taken to analyze the state-trait anxiety status of 29 nurses in infection department.Results The infection department nurses state anxiety (45.39 ± 9.51) and trait anxiety (45.85 ± 9.91) were higher than those of healthy women norms,pediatrics nurses,general nurses,women cadres,and technological personnel,respectively.The difference was statistically significant (P ＜ 0.01).Conclusion Infection department nurses have mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.Paying attention to nurses' mental health problems in infection department is helpful to improve the quality of nursing work and reduce the medical risk.Nurses' psychological anxiety and disorder is considered to be a new topic worthy for attention of hospital administration work Key words: Infection department; Nurse; Psychological anxiety

“It's better for me to drink, at least the stress is going away”: Perspectives on alcohol use during pregnancy among South African women attending drinking establishments

The Western Cape of South Africa has one of the highest rates of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) globally. Reducing alcohol use during pregnancy is a pressing public health priority for this region, but insight into the experiences of women who drink during pregnancy is lacking. Convenience sampling in alcohol-serving venues was used to identify women who were currently pregnant (n = 12) or recently post-partum (n = 12) and reported drinking during the pregnancy period. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted between April and August 2013. Interviews explored drinking narratives, with textual data analyzed for themes related to factors that contributed to drinking during pregnancy. All but one woman reported her pregnancy as unplanned. The majority sustained or increased drinking after pregnancy recognition, with patterns typically including multiple days of binge drinking per week. Analysis of the textual data revealed five primary factors that contributed to drinking during pregnancy: 1) women used alcohol as a strategy to cope with stressors and negative emotions, including those associated with pregnancy; 2) women drank as a way to retain social connection, often during a difficult period of life transition; 3) social norms in women's peer groups supported drinking during pregnancy; 4) women lacked attachment to the pregnancy or were resistant to motherhood; and 5) women were driven physiologically by alcohol addiction. Our data suggest that alcohol-serving settings are important sites to identify and target women at risk of drinking during pregnancy. Intervention approaches to reduce alcohol use during pregnancy should include counseling and contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancies, mental health and coping interventions targeting pregnant women, peer-based interventions to change norms around perinatal drinking, and treatment for alcohol dependence during pregnancy. Our findings suggest that innovative interventions that go beyond the boundaries of the health care system are urgently needed to address FASD in this region.

The Construction of “New Woman” in Chen Hengzhe’s Autobiography

This essay examines the autobiography of Chen Hengzhe (1890-1976) (see Appendix), a relatively less studied woman writer, historian, and critic in modern China. Through the study in four aspects, namely, the pursuit of modern education, simple appearance, great leaders, and the ambassadors of culture, the author’s research indicates that Chen’s construction of “new woman” has been influenced by complex historical and cultural forces such as the Chinese traditional culture, Western culture, and the iconoclastic spirit of “the New Culture Movement”. Meanwhile, Chen’s gender consciousness is also an important element. Moreover, Chen’s pioneering standing and her own experiences of studying abroad makes her take the lead in conceiving women’s leadership and their roles in global culture communications. In the late Qing and the early Republic, traditional values and norms of womanhood were severely challenged. Chen’s construction of “new woman” is her conscious effort to define a new womanhood and is an integral part of the ongoing exploration of Chinese women for modern womanhood. Through the examination of Chen’s “new woman”, this paper seeks to enrich our understanding of the complexity of modern Chinese women’s exploration of modern womanhood.

We are generated women. The discourse construction of feminine breast in the medical context

The aim of the article is to reflect on the impact of gender norms in women’s bodies in the medical context. We explore the discoursive construction of breast implant in three groups of women: those who suffered breast cancer, trans, and women that submit to surgery for aesthetic reasons. Through discourse analysis, we study how do health professionals elaborate distinctions between the three cases, how do they give different levels of legitimacy to women’s demand, and how do they argue if the cost of the intervention has to be covered with public funds. In the end, we see how health professionals interviewed draw two boundaries to distinguish the bodies of the women demanding the intervention: the first one is related to the perception of the need and the second one, to the legitimacy attributed to the demand.

The Mismatch Between Postpartum Services and Women's Needs: Supermom Versus Lying‐In

The Mismatch Between Postpartum Services and Women's Needs: Supermom Versus Lying‐In

Access to treatment for substance-using women in the Republic of Georgia: Socio-cultural and structural barriers

BackgroundIn the Republic of Georgia, women comprise under 2% of patients in substance use treatment and to date there has been no empirical research to investigate what factors may facilitate or hinder their help-seeking behaviour or access to treatment services. MethodsThis study included secondary analysis of in-depth interviews with 55 substance-using women and 34 providers of health-related services. ResultsThe roles and norms of women in Georgian society were identified as major factors influencing their help-seeking behaviour. Factors that had a negative impact on use of drug treatment services included an absence of gender-specific services, judgmental attitudes of service providers, the cost of treatment and a punitive legal position in regard to substance use. Having a substance-using partner served as an additional factor inhibiting a woman's willingness to seek assistance. ConclusionWithin the context of orthodox Georgian society, low self-esteem, combined with severe family and social stigma play a critical role in creating barriers to the use of both general health and substance-use-treatment services for women. Education of the public, including policy makers and health care providers is urgently needed to focus on addiction as a treatable medical illness. The need for more women centred services is also critical to the provision of effective treatment for substance-using women.

Jessie Fauset's &lt;em&gt;Plum Bun&lt;/em&gt; and the City's Transformative Potential

We are mainly indebted to writers of fiction for our more intimate knowledge of contemporary life. (3) Robert E. Park, City, 1925 In a moment of accumulated outrage at humiliations of everyday racism, Angela Murray, protagonist of Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1928 novel Plum Bun, decides to leave what she considers her staid hometown of Philadelphia and launch herself a freer, fuller life that can be had only in a truly great like New York (8o). To avail herself of greatest possible freedom, she also chooses to cross color line and pass as white. This is a decisive--if expected--moment in text, and rest of narrative details various repercussions of Angela's daring decision to set off as an unfettered woman. Fauset's novel thus traces Angela's movement over time and space: from her early years in a respectable black neighborhood in Philadelphia, through her adventures as a young woman passing as a white artist in bohemian Greenwich Village, and eventually to reclaiming her racial identity and moving to Paris to pursue her art. At novel's conclusion, Angela is coming into her own as a portrait artist and has been reunited with love of her life, Anthony Cross. Set exdusively in various and increasingly cosmopolitan spaces--from Philadelphia to New York City to Paris--Fauset's novel participates, at least to some degree, in urban of Harlem Renaissance literature that Maria Balshaw details in Looking for Harlem. In her book Balshaw considers then-nascent discipline of sociology as practiced by thinkers such as Robert E. Park, whose words serve as epigraph to my essay, and Charles S. Johnson. She demonstrates that their progressive ideas about space formed an important background to optimism of Harlem Renaissance (23). (1) Yet Balshaw does not discuss Fauset's work at any length, despite fact that Plum Bun--like Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing--clearly takes part in ongoing debate about the embeddedness of African American in consumer culture and in city (97, emphasis added). Because Plum Bun engages in important ways with both aesthetics and concerns of sociology, I will demonstrate that novel can be read as raising crucial and timely questions about emancipatory potential of space for upwardly mobile black women. By emphasizing centrality of space in Plum Bun, I add a new dimension to literary criticism on Fauset while reinforcing Kathleen Pfeiffer's claim that novel's narrative is neither anachronistic nor marginal but rather modern, complex, and worthy of serious scholarly attention (80). (2) Susan Tomlinson has convincingly argued that Plum Bun explores intersections of race and gender constructions of black and white American women (90). Angela Murray, Tomlinson suggests, manages to emulate two norms of womanhood: that of New Negro Woman--characterized by racial pride and sexual respectability--and that of New Woman--characterized by sexual experimentation and pursuit of a public career. Yet, according to Tomlinson, not until novel's end--when Angela is in Paris, has disclosed her racial identity, and begins to devote herself to her artistic career-- do both gender and racial advancement coalesce in unified female (90). The impossibility of combining these norms in one female subject in turn reveals their contradictions and mutual exclusivity. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson makes a similar point, suggesting that passing character as artist is locus of Fauset's oscillation between advocating an avant-garde womanhood and endorsing a more conventional New Negro womanhood (Portraits 49). Pfeiffer, on other hand, examines narrative in light of its even larger cultural context, suggesting that Fauset uses passing as a way to reflect on the multivalent transformations in which white American culture at large was then participating (80). …

I Just Trust Him: The Notion of Consideration as a Barrier to Condom Use amongst Women Who Inject Drugs in Central Java

The HIV epidemic in Indonesia has risen sharply since 2004, from 2682 cases in 2004 to 19,973 in 2009. The main transmission route of HIV in Indonesia is injecting drug use. There is little research on women who inject drugs in Indonesia. In-depth interviews were carried out with 19 women who injected drugs in three small cities in central Java. The interviews explored the living conditions of the women and the context of HIV risk. The transcripts were coded and the data were thematically analyzed. In this paper we report on condom use with regular partners. Condom use was very low with their regular partners, even though both they and their partners were injecting drug users. The reasons women gave were that they trusted their partners (although they realised this trust was shaky). The women used traditional Javanese cultural concepts of consideration to explain why they did not use condoms. This was heightened by other cultural norms of women’s place in Javanese society. Although the women in the study were marginalized because of their drug use, they still hold to many Indonesian cultural precepts—of consideration and care for the other above oneself in their relationships with their regular partners which impede condom use. While notions of consideration and harmony were used to explain non-condom use, the same notions could also be used in couple-counseling to assist.

Battles over the Sexes

Several themes in this issue of the Hastings Center Report deserve mention. Entirely fortuitously, several shorter pieces in this issue discuss the nature of the doctor-patient relationship and the need for physicians to engage patients personally rather than only technically. Also, a special supplement to this issue addresses the shifting terrain of the debate about the use of animals in medical research. Perhaps the most prominent topic in the issue, however, is the physical modification of women's genitals. Both articles address this topic, and though there are significant differences between the two articles, both circle specifically around the question of whether the modification of women's genitals may be driven by cultural norms of womanhood and how women differ from men, and both comment not just on the questions but on the social debate about them.

A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America * By LEILA AHMED

The book responds to a view held among American and European scholars, from the 1990s onwards that some Muslim women wear ḥijāb because they are devout, observant Muslims. For the author and her respondents, wearing ḥijāb was not just an expression of piety but also an instance of the use of Islamic symbols, growing in Muslim societies since the 1970s. This political expression of Islam, popularly labeled ‘Islamism’, was fueled, among other factors, by the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Leila Ahmed contrasts militant Islamism with a non-militant, non-violent Islamism and argues that the practice of wearing ḥijāb is a part of the women's involvement in Islamism of the latter kind. The eight chapters of Part I explore the objectives, motivations, methods and strategies of the Islamists; Islamists’ notions about women and their proper roles; the importance of women in Islamism; and women's role as activists. Chapter 1, ‘Unveiling’, outlines the history from the 1950s when going bare-headed was becoming the norm for women in the cities of Egypt and in other Muslim-majority societies. Ahmed recounts the debates around veiling in the late nineteenth-century era of British colonialism that paved the way for the unveiling movement in the early twentieth century. This historical background informs the resurgence of veiling as an important marker of the tension and confrontation between Islam and the West.

Longitudinal Anti-Müllerian Hormone in Women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome: An Acupuncture Randomized Clinical Trial

Others have studied acupuncture treatment for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). Anti-müllerian hormone (AMH) is positively correlated with the ovarian follicle pool, thus making it a useful ovarian reserve measure. AMH is elevated in women with PCOS and has been suggested as a diagnostic tool. This study examined the impact of electroacupuncture on AMH concentration in women with PCOS. Seventy-one women with PCOS participated in a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled clinical trial of acupuncture. Three longitudinal AMH samples over the 5-month protocol were compared with objective ovulation parameters primarily using nonparametric statistics. Results indicated that AMH levels in PCOS were higher than published norms in women without PCOS. There was no difference between the true and sham acupuncture arms in the change in AMH longitudinally. Baseline AMH, but not the change in AMH over time, was inversely correlated with ovulation and menstrual cycle frequencies in both arms combined (P < 0.001). In conclusion, AMH correlated with an increased likelihood of monthly ovulation, as expected from the literature on women without PCOS. The lack of difference by intervention in AMH was consistent with the underlying clinical trial. AMH may be clinically useful to predict which PCOS women are more likely to respond to an intervention.

An abbreviated tool for assessing feminine norm conformity: Psychometric properties of the Conformity to Feminine Norms Inventory–45.

The Conformity to Feminine Norms Inventory-45 (CFNI-45; Parent & Moradi, 2010) is an important tool for assessing level of conformity to feminine gender norms and for investigating the implications of such norms for women's functioning. The authors of the present study assessed the factor structure, measurement invariance, reliability, and validity of the CFNI-45 with data from 520 college women (55% White). Confirmatory factor analyses with data from this sample suggested acceptable fit for the posited 9-factor structure. Furthermore, analyses of measurement invariance indicated similar structural properties with members of socioculturally dominant (i.e., White) and nondominant (i.e., women of color) racial/ethnic status groups. Also, subscales of the CFNI-45 demonstrated acceptable internal consistency reliability coefficients, and correlations with convergent and discriminant validity indicators supported the validity of subscales scores. Overall, results offered support for the CFNI-45 as a multidimensional measure of women's conformity to feminine norms. The CFNI-45 can be used in research to facilitate evaluation of the theorized roles of conformity to feminine norms in women's mental health, vocational behavior, interpersonal relationships, and other domains. The CFNI-45 can be used in clinical practice to assess and attend to clients' conformity to feminine norms as is called for in the American Psychological Association's (2007) Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Girls and Women.

Civil society advocacy and the diffusion of violence against women norms: An analysis of the International Violence Against Women Act

This article analyzes the advocacy campaign and the policy process surrounding the International Violence Against Women Act (I-VAWA) in the United States and explains the mobilization of this campaign and its political outcomes to date. The main question the article explores is: How can we interpret the effort by advocacy groups in the United States to use the domestic political process to advance their international goals? The findings suggest that the literature on norm and policy diffusion as well as the structure of political opportunities and framing, both variables identified by social movement theorists, can help us understand the I-VAWA campaign and its strategies and achievements to date. The article interprets the policy process surrounding I-VAWA as an effort by rooted cosmopolitans to use favorable domestic political opportunities and strategic framing to diffuse international norms and standards.

‘Sexercise’: working out heterosexuality in Jane Fonda’s fitness books

This paper explores the connection between the promotion of heterosexual norms in women’s fitness books written by or in the name of Jane Fonda during the 1980s and the commodification of women’s fitness space in both the public and private spheres. The paper is set in the absence of overt discussions of normative heterosexuality in leisure studies and draws on critical heterosexual scholarship as well as the growing body of work theorising geographies of corporeality and heterosexuality. Using the principles of media discourse analysis, the paper identifies three overlapping characteristics of heterosexuality represented in Jane Fonda’s fitness books, and embodied through the exercise regimes: respectable heterosexual desire, monogamous procreation and domesticity. The paper concludes that the promotion and prescription of exercise for women in the Jane Fonda workout books centred on the reproduction and embodiment of heterosexual corporeality. Set within an emerging commercial landscape of women’s fitness in the 1980s, such exercise practices were significant in the legitimation and institutionalisation of heteronormativity.

An Ergonomic Bench for Indigenous Weavers

FEATURE AT A GLANCE: In this article I describe how an ergonomic bench was designed for indigenous weavers in Guatemala in the presence of long-standing economic poverty, gender inequality, and racial prejudice. The bench helps women increase their ability to earn a living through enhanced productivity and improved textile quality, while also preventing cumulative trauma to their bodies and preserving important aspects of their traditions. The systems approach that enabled user-centered ergonomic design of the bench also stimulated self-awareness among end-users, empowering them to create meaningful change in a culture in which kneeling, rather than sitting, is the norm for women.