Framework Of Oppression Research Articles

Going Insane: Battered Muslim Women Reclaim a Positive Identity.

This study examines the process of identity negotiation of 15 Muslim women who resisted severe abuse by their husbands and extended family by becoming mentally ill and thereafter, divorcing. Content analysis of the interview narratives shows that these women were poor, married young, and endured years of battering, isolation, and silencing for the sake of family honor and children's well-being. Entrapped within a web of sociocultural norms legitimizing wife beating, and abusive extended family relationships that annihilate their voice by branding them as maj'nuna/insane, these women explained that they were terrorized helpless victims fearing the stigma of being labeled insane and the resultant harm to their children. With the deterioration of their health, threat of annihilation, and imminent danger to themselves and their children, these women broke through the normative oppressive framework by becoming maj'nuna/mentally ill. Detached from the extended family and no longer caring to endorse a label that discredited what they said or did, these women overtly resisted by escaping to the family of origin and/or mental health clinic to reveal the abuse, divorce, and seek treatment. Severing all family ties, and now residing in public housing, these women felt safe to renegotiate a favorable identity and reclaim the right to live with dignity. Implications/recommendations: (1) The criminalization of battering and prosecution of batterers is not enough to deter when cultural norms sanction battering, (2) additional diagnostic categories are needed to identify the precursors of battering within the strategies of overt and covert resistance battered women adopt in collectivistic cultures such as mental and neurophysiological dysfunctions, and (3) it is necessary to transcend the individualistic model titling battered women within the false dichotomy of victimization or agency as it fails to reflect battered women's experience in collectivistic cultures and their resistant strategies to abuse in the extended family.

Excavating hegemonic rules of engagement for women and queer students of color in academic spaces

In this study, the author examines how persistent exclusionary epistemic norms and practices become internalized as barriers for women and queer students of color to pursuing liberatory learning in justice-oriented academic spaces at traditionally white institutions. Using an epistemic oppression framework rooted in critical race and intersectional feminist perspectives, the author analyzes critical episodes when women and queer students of color felt constrained in their desired participation in an educational foundations learning community to reveal hegemonic rules of academic engagement that operated to stifle their participation. The author argues that these rules, informed by dominant epistemologies and epistemic harms, limit WQSoC license to ask questions, claim their experiential knowledge, and assert critiques from their positionalities toward critical educational praxis. This research has implications for theorizing conditions that explicitly attune to and counter these oppressive rules to create space for WQSoC to center their learning.

Oppression-Based Stress and Alcohol Inequities Among Sexual and Gender Minority People: An Intersectional Multilevel Framework.

Sexual and gender minority (SGM) people are at heightened risk for alcohol use, hazardous drinking, and alcohol use disorder compared to heterosexual and cisgender individuals. This paper: (a) presents an oppression framework that integrates intersectionality, stress, stigma, and addiction-based theories to examine the complex and nuanced ways oppression-based stress (e.g., minority stress) leads to sexual orientation and gender identity inequities in alcohol use; (b) conducts a narrative review that summarizes recent and novel advancements in the literature on the impact of oppression-based stressors on alcohol use outcomes across structural, interpersonal, and intrapersonal domains among SGM people; and (c) provides future research and intervention directions for the alcohol field. A select review of the literature was conducted on July 10, 2023, using multiple electronic databases (i.e., PsycInfo, PubMed, Web of Science) and focusing on studies that had examined the associations between oppression-based stressors and alcohol use outcomes across structural, interpersonal, and intrapersonal levels. Search terms focused on alcohol consumption; SGM people, particularly SGM people of color; and oppression-based stress. Cross-sectional studies that focused on heterosexism-based and anti-bisexual oppression-based stressors at the interpersonal or intrapersonal levels and alcohol use outcomes were excluded as they have been included in prior reviews of the literature. The initial and combined search across the databases resulted in 3,205 articles. Of those, the narrative review included 50 peer-reviewed articles that focused on the following four areas of the literature on the associations between oppression-based stressors and alcohol use outcomes: (1) experimental, longitudinal, and experience sampling studies of heterosexism- and anti-bisexual oppression-based stressors (22 articles); (2) any studies of cissexism-based stressors (12 articles); (3) any studies of intersectional oppression among SGM people of color (seven articles, one article overlapped with the first category and another overlapped with the fourth category); and (4) any studies of structural oppression (11 articles). Results of this narrative review indicate that mounting evidence implicates oppression-based stress in inequities in alcohol use, hazardous drinking, and alcohol use disorder in SGM populations. This reflects SGM people's embodiment of oppression and injustice at the structural, interpersonal, and intrapersonal levels. Given some inconsistent and mixed patterns of findings, future research needs greater specificity in drinking inclusion criteria, robust and well-validated measures, more attention to culturally and developmentally relevant moderating and mediating mechanisms across the lifespan, application of sophisticated methodologies, and integration of intersectional and addiction frameworks.

What does oppression look like in 2022 notable books?

PurposeThis critical content analysis aims to examine the depiction of oppression in the 2022 Notable Social Studies Trade Books (K-2). From the framework of major types and levels of oppression, this paper sheds light on the rich affordances and problematic representations of oppression.Design/methodology/approachFrom the perspectives of an intersectional approach and the framework of oppression, the authors conducted a critical content analysis of the written texts, illustrations and peritexts of the notable books for young readers.FindingsAmong the 73 picturebooks, 46 (63%) include representations of oppression in the written texts and/or illustrations. Half of these books depict more than one type of oppression. The most frequently represented oppression is racism, followed by sexism. There are limited depictions of homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, antisemitism and Islamophobia. Nine books (20%) only include the representation of oppression in the peritexts.Research limitations/implicationsThis study contributes to anti-oppressive education by offering a theoretical framework of oppression, which emphasizes the interlocking systems of oppression. This framework can help foster a holistic understanding of oppression and dismantle it in a holistic way.Practical implicationsThe authors also offer suggestions to help educators curate picturebooks for anti-oppressive social studies education.Originality/valueThis study contributes to anti-oppressive education by offering a theoretical framework of oppression, which emphasizes the interlocking systems of oppression. This framework can help foster a holistic understanding of oppression and dismantle it in a holistic way. The authors also offer suggestions to help educators curate picturebooks for anti-oppressive social studies education.

“They Don't Know I Do It for the Culture, Goddamn”

Patriarchy, white supremacy, and fatphobia shape mainstream American culture into the twenty-first century. Fat Black women in popular culture are represented through controlling images that seek to define Black women through their perverse embodiment. Two dominant stereotypes, the Hottentot Venus and the mammy, synthesize anti-Blackness, anti-fatness, and misogyny to confine large Black women within a continuum between hypersexualized deviance and asexualized subservience. This historical context informs the social dynamics surrounding Lizzo, a fat Black performer whose rise has electrified discussion of race, gender, and body size across American society. The discourse surrounding Lizzo is marked by pernicious, oppressive ideologies and the controlling images of the mammy and the Hottentot Venus. The song “Rumors” directly confronts these attacks on Lizzo’s identity and works against this oppressive framework to proclaim joint Black, fat, female liberation.

Lived Realities of Socio-political Negotiations by Marginalized Groups and the Inherent Rationality of Caste-Based Power Negotiations: A Study ofKhapRegions of Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh

The article explores the lived realities of socio-political negotiations by marginalized groups and the inherent rationality of caste-based power negotiations at a micro level. It also explores the possibilities of alternate futures and alternate interpretations of the margins, through the study of caste-based negotiations and subversions in the Khap villages of western Uttar Pradesh. Stuart Hall, British Cultural theorist, draws attention to the perspective that cultural identification need not produce an essence but a positioning subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. B. R. Ambedkar had termed the hierarchical caste system in India as ‘graded inequality’, which resists any transformation in its oppressive framework because it gives a sense of superiority to each caste placed above the other in a descending order. Despite stiff resistance to any transformation, various forms of subversion—denting the rigid caste and cultural frames—exist in the Khap areas of western Uttar Pradesh.Ambedkar’s vision of a non-sectarian equitable new social order in combination with empirical study on the current socio-political negotiations by marginalized groups on the ground—with a hint to the possibilities of alternate futures through the efforts towards inducing a democratic environment—are explored here.

Migrant and Refugee Women in the Hostile Environment Immigration System: Deliberately Silenced and Preferably Unheard

AbstractImmigration is one of those issues about which everyone has an opinion, but those opinions are rarely informed by facts. Rather, they are sustained by feelings of alienation, powerlessness and fear. That governments draft legislation based on these depictions is highly problematic. It demonstrates at best a capitulation of leadership and at worst an explicit acceptance of a racist right‐wing populist agenda. When combined with systemic misogyny, a framework of oppression emerges that makes the lives of migrant and refugee women even more precarious than it is for men. These, like many other aspects of the ‘hostile environment’, force people into destitution; they fear reprisals by the system if they speak out and in many cases feel ashamed. All this sounds, and is, rather bleak, but it is not the complete story. Despite the hostility—or because of it—there is a thriving grassroots community of solidarity that is organising resistance against misogyny and the hostile immigration policy. The way forward starts with the reframing of the ‘good/bad refugee/migrant’ discourse from which a new narrative emerges: that of a fair immigration system based on principles of dignity, justice and welcome.

An orderly curriculum for a messy field? Classroom-field tensions in community organization in India

The large-scale reverse migration from cities to villages at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and again during the second wave in 2021 highlighted the persistence of poverty in India. Civil society responses pointed to the pressure that it was under in the absence of adequate outreach by the state for meeting food, livelihood, and other insecurities of urban and rural populations. Against this backdrop, the article outlines some of the challenges facing Social Work and Community Development in addressing poverty and marginalization. An examination of the relationship between Social Work with the state, and the contemporary complex neoliberal context for practice, highlights classroom-field tensions in community organization (CD). In preparing graduates for what appears to be a messy field, an orderly curriculum, irrespective of how well thought out it may be, struggles to retain convergence between principles of CD and certain elements of contemporary practice. It emerges that education for CD needs to build systematically on critical community practice and align with an anti- oppressive framework, in order to contribute substantively to addressing poverty and marginalization.

Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority: The Bai People of Southwest China by Liang Yongjia

Reviewed by: Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority: The Bai People of Southwest China by Liang Yongjia Megan Bryson Liang Yongjia, Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority: The Bai People of Southwest China. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. x, 176 pp. US$124 (hb). ISBN 978-0-415-52850-4 One of the best-known works on the Dali 大理 region of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province remains Francis L.K. Hsu’s 1948 Under the Ancestors’ Shadow, which treats the residents of the pseudonymous West Town as paradigmatically Han, though today most officially belong to the Bai 白 minzu 民族 (ethnic group or “nationality”). Both before and after Hsu conducted fieldwork in West Town (now openly recognized as Xizhou 喜洲, a town on the northwest side of Er Lake 洱海), scholars visiting Dali have developed widely divergent views of Bai ethnicity vis-à-vis majority Han culture. Some argue that the Bai are essentially no different from the Han, and the minzu label preserves ethnic difference where no cultural difference survives; others argue that, while some Bai people might represent themselves as Chinese or Han under certain conditions, specific cultural differences—especially language, but also including religion—distinguish them as a separate ethnic group.1 Liang Yongjia’s Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority: The Bai People of Southwest China returns to Hsu’s fieldwork site, Xizhou, to revisit many of the issues that Hsu raised in the 1940s. As its title indicates, Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority focuses on the connections between the reform-era (1978–present) celebration of ethnic culture and revival of religious practices in Xizhou, the Dali region, and the PRC more broadly. Liang argues that the two phenomena of ethnic and religious revival are, in fact, joined in their common goal of attaining what Liang refers to as transcendence and alterity. The introduction lays out the terms of this argument, which centers around these two concepts of transcendence and alterity. Liang does not explain what he means by transcendence, but his use of the term suggests that it refers to a utopian or idealized state. For example, he describes the Chinese state, in its imperial and communist forms, as offering a kind of universal transcendence that encompasses all religions. Liang explains his use of alterity a bit more, quoting Marshall Sahlins (who in turn was quoting Viveiros de Castro): “Since death exists, it is necessary for society to be linked with something that is outside itself – and that it be linked socially to this exterior” (p. 10). Alterity is this exteriority, or “something” outside society. Liang chooses this concept to get around more limiting terms such as “the supernatural” or “power.” He argues that establishing contact with alterity is the goal of both ethnic and religious revival. Liang’s approach is admirable for resisting reductionist readings of religion as a political or economic epiphenomenon, or as an exercise of social power played out through a postcolonial framework of oppression and resistance. However, his own framework needs further clarification. The concept of transcendence and the relationship between transcendence and alterity are particularly unclear. Liang observes that, through the PRC’s minzu identification project, “[e]thnic identity thus gained transcendence that oriented towards the communist alterity” (p. 11). Even if we understand “communist alterity” [End Page 300] as the utopian socialist future, the concepts of “ethnic identity gaining transcendence,” “religious transcendence,” and “communist transcendence” remain obscure both on their own and in connection with alterity. Given the long histories and complex uses of the terms transcendence and alterity in Religious Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Literary Criticism, they need significantly more attention to underpin the book’s overall argument. Chapter 1 introduces the backgrounds of Xizhou and Dali history, with a focus on kingship in the Nanzhao 南詔 and Dali kingdoms (the dates of which Liang gives as 652–899 and 937–1254, respectively) that ruled modern-day Yunnan Province and surrounding areas until the Mongol conquest. Liang follows Marshall Sahlins’s notion of the “stranger-king” to argue that Nanzhao and Dali rulers were outsiders who married into powerful indigenous families and then claimed kingship. Kings thus embodied alterity, and...

The Socio-Multidimensional Sexual and Gender Minority Oppression Framework: A Model for LGBTQ Individuals Experiencing Oppression and Substance Use

Counseling lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) individuals with substance use disorders while considering oppression is dynamic and complex. The Socio-Multidimensional Sexual and Gender Minority Oppression (SSGMO) framework guides counselors to attend to both oppression and substance use in LGBTQ individuals. It consists of four dimensions that help examine clients’ intrapersonal processes, interpersonal and cultural contexts, environments, and political forces associated with their LGBTQ identities and substance use. Counselors can utilize these dimensions in case conceptualization, assessment, or treatment planning. This article presents a hypothetical case illustrating the application of the framework, along with counselor implications and future directions.

American queeroes: coming-out narratives in the Captain America fandom

ABSTRACTThis article examines three Captain America fanfictions that imagine the eponymous hero’s cinematic representation as queer in an effort to gauge the impact of a queer Captain America on U.S. society and culture. At the same time, these texts scrutinise the public perception of heroes as agents of heteronormativity, as heterosexual subjects, and objects of a heterosexual gaze, through the incorporation of (social) media responses in their fictional microcosms. Moving beyond the reductive equation of heroic masculinity and heterosexuality, the analysed texts open up more inclusive discourses of desire, disclosure, and dissent by following the coming-out stories of their heroes. The virtual spaces of fandom are put into conversation with the closet, which renders private, and possibly queer, identities invisible, and coming out as an act of publicly (re)gaining agency and self-determinacy. The article offers a queer reading of one of Marvel’s most beloved characters by reassessing the Captain America films and laying bare the constructedness of hetero-heroism that structures and motivates the films’ narratives. American queeroes in fanfiction are thus not just fantasies – they constitute reactions to and efforts against the oppressive framework of heteronormativity which obscures and limits the potential queerness of characters in mass media representations.

Social Revolution in Circassia: The Interdependence of Religion and the World-System [Çerkesya’da Sosyal Devrim: Dinin ve Dünya Sisteminin Birbirine Bağımlılığı

This article examines the relationship between religion, geography, and social changes that took place in Circassia in the middle of the 17th century. The paper uses a philosophical approach to analyze the articulation of the economic, political, and ideological elements that connected the case of Circassia to the world-system theory. The Circassian social formation was a hybrid of the communal and tributary stages of human history. The social revolution in Circassia appears to be the result of class conflict, in the Marxist definition. The Circassians economy and political system was a product of the diffusion in the Silk Road system that affected their relationship with Europe, the Middle East, Anatolia, and Russia. These forces created the framework in which the Circassians were subjected to, and became the victims of, historical oppression. Likewise, this measure of oppression only successively deepened as the transition of the world system from the Tributary stage, starting 1492, to advanced industrial capitalism, i.e., 1850, asserted dominance over the framework of oppression. In proportion, the conditions of revolution ripen.

The Oppression of Latina Mothers: Experiences of Exploitation, Violence, Marginalization, Cultural Imperialism, and Powerlessness in Their Everyday Lives.

Despite Latinos being the largest growing population in the United States, research has not examined the impact of social structures on the well-being of Latina immigrants; negative social discourse and restrictive laws exacerbate inequality and discrimination in this population. Through combined inductive/deductive analysis of in-depth semistructured interviews, we examined immigrant Mexican mothers' ( N = 32) descriptions of oppression in the United States. All five forms of oppression, described in Young's oppression framework are evident: exploitation, violence, marginalization, cultural imperialism, and powerlessness. Discrimination places a high burden on Latinas due to the intersection of forms of oppression and nondominant identities.

Balancing the Fishes' Scales: Tribal, State, and Federal Interests in Fishing Rights and Water Quality in Maine

The state of Maine has a complicated and often adversarial legal relationship with the federally recognized Native American (Indian) Tribes in the state. Perhaps the most contentious legal relationship presently pertains to Maine’s authority to regulate water resources on Indian territories and lands (Indian lands). At their core, legal conflicts often involve disputes over power, money, respect, or any combination of these elements. What makes conflicts between states and Native American tribes so complex, and in this particular case volatile, is that the legal issues often involve clashes of all three of these elements. The legal framework for the current water resource dispute traces back to a series of state and federal laws setting aside reservation and trust land for the Tribes in the 1980s and 1990s, collectively known as the Settlement Acts. The Tribes’ lack of bargaining power during these settlements arguably resulted in a jurisdictionally oppressive framework for the protection of tribal natural resources. The most recent legal conflict erupted in February 2015, and juxtaposes Maine’s right to regulate water quality standards (WQS) against the Tribes’ right to fish for sustenance on their lands. The emotional responses ignited by this conflict illuminate why a comprehensive approach to settling the disputes between Maine its Tribes is needed.On February 2, 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent a letter to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The letter informed the DEP that the EPA was disapproving all of Maine’s WQS related to human health criteria for waters in Indian lands. The primary purpose of the disapprovals, from the EPA’s perspective, was to protect the Tribes’ legally protected sustenance fishing rights. This Note analyzes the policy considerations, practical implications, and lost opportunities behind the EPA’s decisions to disapprove WQS on Indian lands in Maine. Part I provides an analysis of the EPA’s rationale for the decisions, including its Trust responsibility and authority under the Clean Water Act. Part II considers the history of the Tribes’ agreements with Maine and their rights under Maine and Federal law in the context of the EPA’s decision. Part III considers Maine’s primary legal arguments against EPA’s decision and highlights why the State should consider settlement. Finally, Part IV looks toward how Maine and the Tribes can build mutual trust, and attempt to resolve conflicts outside of the courts. Given the incessant conflicts over tribal water rights under the current framework, Part IV suggests an amendment to the Settlement Acts to bolster the position of the Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission, allowing the Commission to foster a “true dialogue” between state officials and Tribal leaders and reduce the tendency to resort to the courts.

Race‐ing, Classing and Gendering Racialized Women's Participation in Entrepreneurship

The number of racialized women entrepreneurs has grown exponentially in recent years. Despite this growing trend, these businesswomen are more likely to operate on a small scale; their labour‐intensive businesses are characterized by low profits and limited mobility. Two fields of research attempt to illuminate — albeit problematically — the complexity of this phenomenon. Research on ethnic/immigrant entrepreneurs underestimates the experiences of racialized women who are entrepreneurs in their own right. Meanwhile the literature on women's entrepreneurship essentializes and homogenizes women's entrepreneurship. Research approaching women's entrepreneurship using an intersectional approach is scanty. In this paper, I draw on empirical evidence from a qualitative study with women entrepreneurs of Afro‐Caribbean descent. To provide a more nuanced understanding of racialized women entrepreneurs' experiences as entrepreneurs, I use Dill and Zambrana's intersectional/interlocking systems of oppression framework, examining processes of gendering, classing and racialization within four domains: structural, disciplinary, hegemonic and interpersonal. Despite processes of differentiation, participants found creative and subversive ways to resist these processes.

African American Children in the Child Welfare System: Requiem or Reform

The sobering statistics concerning the plight of African American children have become routine excerpts found in nearly every publication concerning the child welfare system. This article examines the laws that govern the child welfare system in this country and assesses the manner in which these laws do not rectify or prevent the poor outcomes experienced by African American children. The authors discuss a reform perspective, conceptualized in an oppression framework, as a call to action to improve the status of children in the child welfare system. This reform perspective is designed for educators, as they play a critical role in preparing students and practitioners to become reformers.

The politics of rebirth in Colm Tóibín's ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’

This paper explores the compatibility of Catholic and homosexual identities. Because the language of Catholicism is so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination, I aim to show that not only does it provide a vocabulary for oppression but also for change. For the contemporary Irish novelist, the latter means conferring new meaning onto formerly oppressive language. In ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’, two short stories from Tóibín's Mothers and Sons (2007), the protagonists undergo a ‘baptism’ that signals their emergence into a new world, one tolerant of homosexual desire. Fergus, in the ocean, and Miquel, in the bathtub, experience moments at once erotic and cleansing. I outline their participation in the traditional world – the time before their bathing rites – in contradistinction to a re-imagined, modern, ‘queer’ world. I argue that Tóibín appropriates a Catholic, and therefore heteronormative, rite in a way that includes homosexuals. Thus, he reworks an oppressive framework in order to allow for the formerly excluded to participate and celebrate their non-heteronormativity, or queerness.

Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: deconstructing queer space

Scholarship on queer geographies has called attention to the active production of space as heterosexualized and has levelled powerful critiques at the implicit heterosexual bias of much geographical theorizing. As a result, critical geographers have begun to remark upon the resistance of gays, lesbians and other sexual subjects to a dominant heterosexuality. But such a liberal framework of oppression and resistance is precisely the sort of mapping that poststructuralist queer theory emerged to write against. So, rather than charting the progress of queer geographies, this article offers a critical reading of the deployment of the notion of `queer space' in geography and highlights an alternative queer approach that is inseparable from feminist, materialist, postcolonial and critical race theories.