Notions Of Gender Research Articles

Impact of Moroccan Female MPs on the Decision Making Process: Challenges and Limitations

The notion of gender has always been a debatable issue especially when it comes to power relations. This article is an attempt to shed light on the major forms and patterns that face these female MPs to impact the decision making process in relation to males. It focuses mainly on the nature and forms these MPs can have as decision makers. To achieve this aim, we look at the effectiveness of these women in decision zones. Female MPs were interviewed especially to evaluate the outcome of a long struggle that attempts to change the pre-constructed images associated with these female effectiveness. Moroccan female members of the parliament’s impact on decision making process is mostly governed by a set of cultural and political formations; it is not a question of time or space, but mostly in how these notions have been constructed to meet special aims.

Negotiating inclusion of gender and sexual diversity through a process of feminist translation in Quebec

Abstract According to French grammatical rules the masculine prevails over the feminine. In Quebec since the 1980s, an inclusive, “non-sexist writing,” aimed at making the feminine visible, has been promoted by women’s activist groups and has been adopted in most governmental publications. Recently, a renewal of the notion of gender manifests itself through an emerging definition of inclusive writing as “neutral writing,” aimed at neutralizing gender in the French language. In this context, a feminist collective has undertaken the translation into French of Our Bodies, Ourselves, a major reference book on sexual and reproductive health. What effects has the coexistence of these two trends of feminist inclusive writing had on the process of constructing and writing this book and on the terminological choices made by the collective of translators? This case study showcases how the translation process opens a space for rethinking linguistic practices around gender.

‘Come, Follow Me’, The Sacralising of the Home, and The Guardian of the Family: How Do European Women Negotiate the Domestic Space in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints?

In October 2018, the Prophet Russell M. Nelson informed members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that the Church teaching curriculum would shift focus away from lessons taught on Sunday. Instead, members were now asked to engage with ‘home-centred, church-supported’ religious instruction using the Church materials ‘Come, Follow Me’. In a religion where Church leaders still defend the idealised family structure of a stay-at-home mother and a father as the provider, the renewed emphasis on the domestic sphere as the site for Church teaching could also reinforce traditional Mormon gender roles. This article draws upon the lived religion of Latter-day Saint women in Sweden, Greece and England to understand how they negotiate gender in their homes. Looking at the implementation of ‘Come, Follow Me’ of sacralising of the home as a gendered practice, there appears to be reinforcing the primacy of the domestic space in the reproduction of religious practices and doctrinal instruction. Simultaneously, in conceptualising a gender role, the guardian of the family, I show the ways that European Latter-day Saint women are providing, protecting and nurturing their families. The domestic space then becomes instrumental in providing space for more nuanced, complex gender constructs that accommodate Mormon beliefs, cultural context and secular notions of gender without destabilising the institutional structure.

Miss Tacuarembó: The Transformation of Gender and Genre in Argentinian Musicals

AbstractThis article examines Natalia Oreiro, a film and television star who has contributed to representations of on-screen queer subjectivities in Latin America. I examine her film Miss Tacuarembó (Sastre 2010) as a musical that resignifies heteronormative notions of gender commonly found in popular family film genres. I consider the film’s layered intertexts such as choreography, pop songs, and telenovelas, as well as the role of Oreiro in resignifying those intertextual codes as signs of queerness. This article thus reveals the ways in which intertexts disrupt this formulaic family and young adult film.

Women's Gender Roles in History Textbooks in Turkey

Although the notion of gender has a biological meaning, the concept of gender refers to a social construction that emerges from a biological basis. This construction includes cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity that are more appropriate for social life. In the definition and distinction of gender roles in social life construction, the discussion of the public and private sphere is seen. Textbooks have an important place as a dominant discourse tool in the public and private sphere debate. Therefore, textbooks in general and history textbooks in particular have an important share in this debate. Textbooks convey stereotypes of gender roles to students and contain descriptions of roles. On the other hand, history textbooks construct and legitimize the historical context along with the definitions of roles. Therefore, history textbooks have an important share in the production of women's gender roles. In this context, it is determined that the purpose of the study is to evaluate the gender roles of women in compulsory or history courses textbooks in the 2019-2020 academic year in Turkey.

“[T]Hat Where One Was, There Was The Other”: Dreams of Queer Stories in Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun, or, the Fair Vow-Breaker (1689)

ABSTRACT Throughout The History of the Nun’s hetero-romance plot, Behn creates serial queer doublings which work structurally with other formal effects to queer gender itself, revealing the limits of hetero- cisgendered categories. The novel uses the formal conventions of space and time and the themes of writing/telling/reading to gesture toward the capacious possibilities of gender and to lay bare the limits, not only of binary notions of gender, but also of limiting social structures, including narration itself.

“Homes with Value”: Mortgage Finance and the Reconfiguration of Home Value in Urban Mexico

AbstractMexico is in the midst of a major urban transformation. State‐subsidized mortgage credit has facilitated the emergence of an affordable housing market and transformed the urban periphery into vast tracts of tiny concrete “social interest” housing developments. Easily available credit has allowed millions of Mexican workers to pursue the cultural and moral imperative to possess “patrimonio” by becoming homeowners. Patrimonio can be understood as a kind of inalienable possession tied to gendered notions of the family, inheritance, and economic security. Yet ballooning mortgage debts associated with these homes inverts the promise of patrimonio, turning the home into a source of economic instability and insecurity. I argue that this paradoxical situation derives from the convergence of different logics for understanding a home’s value—as patrimonio, as social good, and as financialized commodity. The mortgage contract reconfigures the patrimonial desires of homeowners into a vehicle for marco‐economic growth and a source of private profits. Drawing on twenty‐two months of ethnographic field research in Mexico City and Cancún, I highlight frictions in the meanings of home as a cultural imperative, social good, and financial commodity that arise in the context of its mobilization as marketized commodity in contemporary urban Mexico.

The Gendered Body Work of Muslim Arab Mothers Who Donate a Kidney to Their Children

PurposePrevious studies showed that among the pediatric ESRD patients who receive a kidney donation from a parent, in most cases the mother is the one that agrees to donate her kidney to the sick child, whereas fathers are less willing to donate. The present study sought to explore decision making regarding which parent would donate a kidney to their child among Muslim Arab parents of pediatric ESRD patients. Design and methodsThe study design is a cross sectional qualitative study. We conducted semi-structured interviews with thirty-one parents: twenty-five mothers and six fathers, who donated a kidney to their child. ResultsParents tended to refrain from donating a kidney to a sick daughter; mothers were more willing to donate than fathers. Our findings imply that culturally constructed notions of gender and motherhood are mobilized to the realm of health and illness, and mothers' body work is an influential factor in determining survival chances of pediatric ESRD patients and their quality of life. ConclusionsOur study shows that kidney donation made by mothers to their children represents a gendered body work and powerfully demonstrate gender relations in Arab society. Cultural artefacts shape parents' differential propensity to donate organs for a female or a male offspring. Practice implicationsIt is recommended that the nursing staff enlist the help of Muslim clerics to increase the willingness of fathers to donate a kidney for their offspring, and also to encourage both parents to donate a kidney to a sick daughter. Education campaigns are needed to raise awareness and encourage changes in the attitudes of the Muslim families of pediatric ESRD patients toward parental kidney donation.

Gender, Land, and Place

Considering how gender operates within land-based and place-based learning is critical as both human and more-than-human relations and relationships have been heavily shaped and regulated by settler colonialism and settler heteropatriarchy. The deterioration of Indigenous notions of gender and the forceful colonial imposition of a Western gender binary has served to fracture Indigenous peoples' relationships with Land.

Mothering managers: (Re)interpreting older women's organizational subjectivity

AbstractThis paper explores motherhood as an organizational subjectivity. Highlighting the experience of older women in a global engineering firm, and my own experience as an academic leader, the paper shows how the maternal body is culturally produced and how discourses of motherhood perpetuate highly gendered notions of who can give and receive care in organizations. This paper argues that the patriarchal construction of women as endlessly maternal, but never complete, limits the possibility for gendered agency. The paper calls for a reinterpretation of the maternal in organizations that would allow women to reclaim a feminine space where they can draw on the full repertoire of their embodied potentialities in order to experiment and assert their subjectivity. This reinterpretation of the maternal would also facilitate an uncoupling of notions of care and motherhood which would allow for a degendered reciprocal care offered and received by all members of the organization.

Snaking into the Gothic: Serpentine Sensuousness in Lewis and Coleridge

This essay charts the ways late-eighteenth-century Gothic authors repurpose natural histories of snakes to explore how reptile-human encounters are harbingers of queer formations of gender, sexuality, and empire. By looking to M.G. Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) and his understudied short story “The Anaconda” (1808), as well as S.T. Coleridge’s Christabel (1797–1800), I centre the last five years of the eighteenth century to apprehend the interwoven nature of Gothic prose, poetry, and popular natural histories as they pertain to reptile knowledge and representations. Whereas Lewis’s short story positions the orientalised anaconda to upheave notions of empire, gender, and romance, his novel invokes the snake to signal the effusion of graphic eroticisms. Coleridge, in turn, invokes the snake-human interspecies connection to imagine female, homoerotic possibilities and foreclosures. Plaiting eighteenth-century animal studies, queer studies, and Gothic studies, this essay offers a queer eco-Gothic reading of the violating, erotic powers of snakes in their placement alongside human interlocutors. I thus recalibrate eighteenth-century animal studies to focus not on warm-blooded mammals, but on cold-blooded reptiles and the erotic effusions they afford within the Gothic imaginary that repeatedly conjures them, as I show, with queer interspecies effects.

Manfred’s Quest as Limit Test: A Genealogy of Knowledge, Exile, and Gender

ABSTRACT This article explores Lord Byron’s Manfred as a contemporary text with the critiques of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler. I argue that Manfred’s quest operates as a form of “limit test,” an approach to knowledge that subverts or questions what is taken to be “universal.” This article traces a genealogy of Byron and Foucault’s shared interest in finding a way out for carceral figures who are confined by guilt and “Enlightened” forms of knowledge. Referencing Agamben’s Homo Sacer and the potentiality of being, I suggest Manfred tests the limits of the “truth of being” in its relationship to Power and deconstructs Manfred’s exile from human society. I connect Manfred’s representation of gender and sexuality to Judith Butler’s work in Gender Trouble, wherein she describes homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender mobility as a form of “incest” to society. I invoke Judith Butler’s conception of gender performativity as new way to understand the Manfred/Astarte relationship and link gender with the “truth of being” itself. Read this way, Byron’s work entangles contemporary notions of gender, exile, and knowledge through tropes of incest, sin, love, and resurrection and death, and this positions his work as a confluent site of discourses in biopolitics.

Muslim Notables, French Colonial Officials, and the Washers of the Dead

Abstract For many decades, scholars of gender and women's history in the Middle East and North Africa have challenged prevailing visions of an unchanged patriarchy, showing how patriarchy was transformed in relation to colonialism, and how some women struggled against it. To the contrary, this article aims to challenge our understanding of women's agency, taking Mzab as a case study. It explores the ways in which women of this Berber speaking region, inhabited by Ibadi Muslims and conquered by the French in 1882, contributed to the colonial reinforcement of male domination. Reading together works of ethnography, colonial administrative files, legal disputes, and Arabic-language newspapers, this article shows that, together with the colonial legal framework, other informal legal discourses and institutions shaped women's condition. Down the road, forms of patriarchy and notions of gender shifted.

Muslim Notables, French Colonial Officials, and the Washers of the Dead

For many decades, scholars of gender and women’s history in the Middle East and North Africa have challenged prevailing visions of an unchanged patriarchy, showing how patriarchy was transformed in relation to colonialism, and how some women struggled against it. To the contrary, this article aims to challenge our understanding of women’s agency, taking Mzab as a case study. It explores the ways in which women of this Berber speaking region, inhabited by Ibadi Muslims and conquered by the French in 1882, contributed to the colonial reinforcement of male domination. Reading together works of ethnography, colonial administrative files, legal disputes, and Arabic-language newspapers, this article shows that, together with the colonial legal framework, other informal legal discourses and institutions shaped women’s condition. Down the road, forms of patriarchy and notions of gender shifted.

Calling for a Paradigm Shift in the Study of Gender in Engineering Education

<strong>Background:</strong> Dominant discourse regarding gender in engineering and engineering education relies on simplistic notions of gender as a rigid binary, which obscures the existence of transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people and the gender dynamics they experience. <strong>Purpose:</strong> This paper seeks to address the limits of the dominant gender discourse and research paradigm and propose new paths forward. This article calls researchers to intentionally transform their approach and framing of gender to create gender equity for all. <strong>Scope:</strong> An examination of existing literature in engineering education is put against prevailing theories of gender and human difference from across academia. The overwhelming majority of literature in the field exists within a reductive gender binary. TGNC students and professionals are largely invisible in engineering education research and theory and this exclusion causes harm to individuals as well as our community as a whole. Such exclusion is not limited to engineering contexts but is found to be a central component of systemic TGNC marginalization in higher education and in the United States. <strong>Discussion:</strong> We call for a substantive disciplinary shift towards studying the deep complexity of gender informed by, and accountable to, literature on gender theory, queer studies, and feminist research methodology. We propose interventions for engineering education researchers categorized into three levels: 1) Micro—to recognize gender diversity in engineering education; 2) Meso—to describe and analyze the experiences of TGNC students in research; and 3) Macro—to transform our discipline’s conceptualization and theoretical framing of gender.

Maternity and Morality in Puebla's Nineteenth-Century Infanticide Trials

The criminal trials of twenty-seven women processed for the crimes of abortion and infanticide in the state of Puebla, Mexico during the nineteenth century reveal both community and state perspectives about contemporary notions of gender, motherhood, and honor. This paper argues that while there was an increase in both denunciations and convictions for these crimes in the nineteenth century, women's peers acted as reluctant participants in their incrimination. Both local and higher court justices convicted women more frequently for abortion and infanticide than they had done in the colonial era, but nonetheless sentenced them with considerable leniency. Some of the explanation for their leniency lay in court officials' view that indigenous women, who constituted a considerable percentage of the defendants, were too “rustic” or “ignorant” to be held responsible for their actions. The cases also reveal, however, that courts and communities shared the view that any means–including committing violent crimes or hiding pregnancies–justified the ends of protecting plebeian women's reputation of sexual honor.

Gender score development in the Berlin Aging Study II: a retrospective approach

In addition to biological sex, gender, defined as the sociocultural dimension of being a woman or a man, plays a central role in health. However, there are so far few approaches to quantify gender in a retrospective manner in existing study datasets. We therefore aimed to develop a methodology that can be retrospectively applied to assess gender in existing cohorts. We used baseline data from the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II), obtained in 2009–2014 from 1869 participants aged 60 years and older. We identified 13 gender-related variables and used them to construct a gender score by using primary component and logistic regression analyses. Of these, nine variables contributed to a gender score: chronic stress, marital status, risk-taking behaviour, personality attributes: agreeableness, neuroticism, extraversion, loneliness, conscientiousness, and level of education. Females and males differed significantly in the distribution of the gender score, but a significant overlap was also found. Thus, we were able to develop a gender score in a retrospective manner from already collected data that characterized participants in addition to biological sex. This approach will allow researchers to introduce the notion of gender retrospectively into a large number of studies.

Gendercraft: Marxism–Feminism, Reproduction, and the Blind Spot of Money

The plausibility of “gendered exploitation” as a sine qua non of capitalism, as articulated by both classic Marxist–feminism since the 1970s and more recently by authors of social reproduction theory, stands or falls with the evaluation of Marx's theory of value. From the standpoint of both Marx's monetary theory of value and the problem of quantification, the use of “women's oppression” in capitalist social reproduction appears to be questionable. This also necessitates a deeper analysis of the use of “gender” in the wider field of pertinent Marxist–feminist literature. Arguments for “gendered exploitation” often hinge on unsound premises that introduce a naturalizing view of social relations. Analogous to Barbara and Karen Fields' intervention against “Racecraft,” the term “Gendercraft” may represent this argumentative move. The notion of gender as the site of specifically capitalist exploitation is thus challenged and countered with a new emphasis on struggles against the wage relation as the site of anticapitalist resistance.

All that glitters is not gold: Counter penetrating in the name of Blackness and queerness, or, Athi-Patra Ruga's camp act in the dirt

In this article I engage South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga's artistic practice to flesh out the complexities that arise from the intersection of the terms Black and queer. Drawing on diverse historical, social and textual resources, I interpret Ruga's dismantling of dominant post-apartheid and postcolonial narratives vis-a-vis a close reading of some of his provocative avatars. Ruga's practices of staining, tainting and contaminating serve to expose the borders that produce conventional notions of race and gender. The article employs camp discourse in its allusion to performativity, displacement and artifice in order to 1) lay bare prevailing normative structures; and 2) dismantle conventional views of identity. To avoid being blindsided by camp's flamboyance and ostentation, I propose a view that favours an intimate embroilment with dirt - a stance I argue may furnish camp acts with political intent and so help create a more sophisticated and comprehensive view on the juncture of Blackness and queerness. Relying on Ruga's method of counter penetration as a way of fleshing out a hermeneutic view of Black queer subjectivity, I show how counter penetration in Ruga's estimation is a subversive and transgressive act intent on contaminating and infecting conventional narratives of history, identity and politics. Keywords: Black queer identity, camp, Athi-Patra Ruga, performance.

Centering Hawai'i: Lessons on and beyond United States Empire

Centering Hawai'i:Lessons on and beyond United States Empire Hōkūlani K. Aikau (bio) Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism. By J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 275 pages. $95.68 (cloth). $26.95 (paper). Return to Kahiki: Native Hawaiians in Oceania. By Kealani Cook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 255 pages. $49.99 (cloth). $29.99 (paper). Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood. By Dean Itsuji Saranillio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 282 pages. 100.22 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). In 1993, Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease coedited the collection Cultures of United States Imperialism, a seven-hundred-page volume calling for a shift in American studies toward sustained analysis of US Empire. Kaplan identifies "three salient absences" in the academic study of American Empire and American Exceptionalism, which, she argues, contribute to an "ongoing pattern of denial across several disciplines: the absence of culture from the history of U.S. imperialism; the absence of empire from the study of American culture; and the absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism."1 The three books under review are excellent examples of contemporary scholarship that heeds Kaplan's call. Their methodological, historical, and analytic breadth illuminates the complex and enduring forces and cultural dimensions of US imperialism. These authors go even further by demonstrating how indigeneity as an analytic category is central to understanding settler colonialism. Just as Kaplan and Pease identify "an ideological disjuncture" in the very foundations of the discipline, at a panel during the 2015 annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Robert Warrior reminded the audience that another cognitive gap persists. American studies' ongoing articulation of whiteness with national culture has resulted in the persistent marginalization of Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS) within the field. Warrior's [End Page 867] content analysis of the ASA program from 1998 to 2014 found that topics focused on settler colonial studies significantly outnumbered those that featured NAIS topics. The exception was when NAIS scholars were on the program committee or serving as ASA president. Warrior's findings suggest that twenty years on from the publication of Cultures of US Imperialism the cognitive gap persists and has expanded. These three books fill this cognitive gap by centering indigeneity as an analytic and demonstrate how NAIS is essential to any analysis of US Empire and settler colonialism. Another cognitive gap that Native Pacific cultural studies scholars have highlighted is the absence of Oceania from the study of American national culture and politics. As the Chamorro scholar Keith Camacho explained in 2011, Oceania "[plays] a vital role in the making and unmaking of the American empire from the late nineteenth century to the present."2 "Oceanizing American Studies," Greg Dvorak's contribution to the special issue of American Quarterly that inaugurated the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa as the new home of the flagship journal for the ASA, reiterates the need for American studies to center Oceania in research on US imperialism and settler colonialism.3 These three books provide illustrative examples of what can be learned about American Empire, specifically, and coloniality and imperialism generally when Hawai'i is centered methodologically and theoretically. Each book is an exemplar of how NAIS scholars offer analytic tools and methodological insights about American nationalism and US Empire from the viewpoint of those on the front lines of decolonization and anti-imperialism. In a time when the United States is yet again grappling with disease, racism, and antidemocratic legislation, these texts provide crystal clear evidence that this is not new or unexpected. Rather, when the history of US imperialism and settler colonialism in Oceania and Hawai'i are placed at the center of analysis, we learn that "democracy" has been a rallying cry of white supremacy, capitalist greed, and heteropatriarchy all along. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui's book chronologically bookends the historical periods addressed in these three books. As she explains, "Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty … seeks to demonstrate how white American notions of property title, state sovereignty, and normative gender and sexuality become intimately imbricated in aspirations for Hawaiian liberation and in...