Women Others Research Articles

The othering of women in silent film: Cultural, historical, and literary contexts By Barbara TepaLupack, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2024

The othering of women in silent film: Cultural, historical, and literary contexts By Barbara TepaLupack, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2024

The othering of women in silent film: Cultural, historical, and literary contexts By Barbara TepaLupack, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2024. 344 pp. $120.00 (hardcover)

The othering of women in silent film: Cultural, historical, and literary contexts By Barbara TepaLupack, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2024. 344 pp. $120.00 (hardcover)

A Reading of Feminism and Camp in David Henry Hwang’s Play M. Butterfly

David Henry Hwang’s influential theatrical production of M. Butterfly (1988) has been widely discussed in terms of postcolonialism, Asian representations, and the intersection of gender and race. The feminist connotation embodied in the work, however, is largely either ignored or criticized. Employing poststructuralist feminist thoughts of Luce Irigaray, Teresa de Lauretis, and Judith Butler, as well as camp feminist research, the article attempts to illuminate the play’s undertones that defy patriarchal construction, gaze, and othering of women’s bodies in dominant culture and knowledge. It shows that the characterization of Comrade Chin, Renee, and other main female characters in M. Butterfly confront stereotypical representations of women with subversive ones. Moreover, the play camps or plays with fetishized womanhood in an excessive and exaggerated manner. In this way, it lays bare the presumed feminity as an artifice produced via the male gaze, freeing female beholders from identifying with the object and watched position and allowing them to return the watching gaze as a subject.

The Othering of Women by the Otherised: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as the Voice of the Voiceless

Some works of art are a kind of term analysing products. By reading or examining them we can have an idea about the era they were created in. In this context, Jean Rhys, in her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea, gives very detailed information about Creole women’s life and mishaps they lived. Indeed, we can read this novel as a premise of Charlotte Brontee’s Jane Eyre. There is a Creole character named as Bertha Mason, namely the woman in the attic. Jean Rhys, as a Creole herself, looks for the reasons of imprisonment of Bertha Mason to the attic. Although she is a white woman she is condemned to the attic in her husband Mr. Rochester’s house. Of course the time Bertha Mason lived in, the puritanic life style was dominant, yet there is not any link between her imprisonment and it. Bertha, as a Creole, could not gain admission in English society due to not being full-blooded white. Because of this, she is neither English nor slave. Because of being a post-colonial work, reader can see the clash between ‘black and white negros’. Here, ‘the white niggers’ are Creoles who had slaves and lands lang syne. We can analyse Wide Sargasso Sea from many perspectives, yet to me the most important one is the othering of others by otherised people. The othering layer is Creoles and specifically women, the otherised are blacks, and the others in this study are also blacks but then men. I will not discriminate between black or white men. In this study I will examine the othering of women in English society eventhough the Kingdom is governed by a Queen in that time. I will touch the reasons that compel women to stay at home and, if they are not full-blooded white, to the attics like a mad person. And also, I will try to scrutinize the causes of maddening of woman in that era.

Bodies of/at Work: How Women of Colour Experienced Their Workplaces and Have Been Expected to ‘Perform’ During the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT Almost 50 years ago, Edward Said wrote on ‘the other’ in relation to race and gender in his path-breaking book Orientalism (1978). While much has evolved around notions of gendered and racialised otherness since then, Said’s conceptualisation still resonates today. Our paper reports on a 2020/2021 survey of Women of Colour in the Australian workplace. The survey was conducted during the pandemic by Women of Colour Australia, a not-for-profit group, working with the lead author. We focus on the qualitative answers from participants, many of which detail sometimes painful and extremely personal workplace experiences. More than 500 Women of Colour, including seven per cent who were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, completed the survey. Sixty per cent said they had experienced discrimination in the workplace, despite 59 per cent of participants saying their workplace had a Diversity and Inclusion policy. Participants had to ‘perform’ their identities whilst being subjected to intersectional issues of racism and sexism, some of which the pandemic exacerbated. Our paper describes the harmful ramifications of gendered othering of Women of Colour for Australian organisations and society in the years of the pandemic.

Violence, Sexuality and Diminishing Masculinity: Subversive Masculinities in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration (1969) and Nadifa Mohammed’s Orchard of Lost Souls (2013)

Political upheavals, relegation of women and migration are the hallmarks of pioneer and recent works of prose from Eastern Africa, which prompts most critics to opt for postcolonial and feminist canons in the critical appreciation of these literary productions. Colonialism triggered cultural tensions and desire to emigrate to Western metropoles to obtain the means to expedite the new ideas in Africa. With settings pervaded by dominant and marginal cultural dualisms, it is reasonable to subject such literary works to postcolonial criticism. Similarly, the gender othering of women through misogyny and cultural practices such as female genital mutilation brings most works of prose in the region under feminist criticism. This study breaks away from these trends to analyse the political upheavals and abuse of women in such prose works as an attempt to reconstruct the diminishing hegemonic masculinity. The colonial enterprise in Africa was not just a cultural shocker, but a sexually aggressive act poised to explore virgin lands and demascularize her male inhabitants. This article analyses political animosity and male promiscuity in African characters as a futile attempt to restore the diminishing hegemonic masculinities in Mohamed’s Orchard of Lost Souls (2013) and Salih’s Season of Migration (1969). The ideas of Connell (1991) and McClintock (1995) will form a theoretical basis of interpretation.

Animals and Beauties: Zoomorphic Inscriptions of a Modern Gender Hierarchy

Abstract At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with myriad other foundational changes taking place in China, attitudes to the role and significance of women and animals were also changing. This evolution is apparent in the artistic realm where both had featured in imperial-era Chinese art for centuries and continued to appear in the new Republic after 1911. This article examines animals and their paired depiction with women within one genre of art – the Baimei tu (One hundred beauties) – as it evolved from the late 1800s until the end of the 1910s. An examination of the works of leading commercial artists of this form reveals the importance of animals in the creation of a gendered modernity for China’s Republic – one that established a clear hierarchy of men over women. This article argues that the species-ist othering of animals was integral to the othering of women in the early Republican world of commercial art. It contributes to the literature on human-animal studies that shows the links between species-ism and sexism through the identical processes of variously othering animals and women. Identifying animals and women as special and different, reinforces a species hierarchy that places humans above other animals and a sex hierarchy that places men above women.

“Don’t Give Up! Don’t Give in!” Gender in International Relations and “Curious” Feminist Questions

“Don’t Give Up! Don’t Give in!” Gender in International Relations and “Curious” Feminist Questions

GENDERED AGEISM AND MICRO AGGRESSIONS IN THE WORKPLACE

The intersection of gender and age discrimination has formed an important facet of research concerning barriers to prolonging working lives. With increasing public policy interest in integrating later retirement into successful ageing frameworks, research has sought to understand whether workplace age discrimination is experienced differently by men and women at later career stages. While simplistic additive or multiplicative effects of being an older woman on experiences of workplace discrimination have been posited, research has been inconclusive. While some studies report gendered ageism affecting older women others find that older men appear to struggle with what has been argued to likely be their first experiences of workplace discrimination as they pass beyond what have traditionally been the ‘prime working years’. Attempting to overcome the common methodological error of measuring discrimination with leading, unsophisticated self-report items, this presentation draws on nationally representative data from a survey of 3000 Australians obtained using the ‘everyday discrimination’ approach to measuring workplace discrimination. Binary logistic regression was used to assess the probabilities of experiencing 12 workplace discrimination behaviors across age, gender and functional capacity while controlling for employment type and socioeconomic position. The results replicate some studies’ findings of counter-intuitive patterns of workplace discrimination across gender and age group, with discrimination more frequently reported by younger men. It is argued that a more nuanced approach to considering the intersection of age and gender is required and that in considering policy approaches to supporting longer working lives the role of age discrimination should not be overstated.

Obstetric and offspring risks of women’s morbid conditions linked to prior anticancer treatments

BackgroundLiterature shows the effects of type of cancer and/or anticancer treatment on live birth percentages and/or pregnancy and neonatal complications in female cancer survivors. However, studies analyzing the obstetric and offspring risks of the morbid conditions associated with previous anti-cancer treatments are missing. The present review aims to uncover these risks.MethodsA literature search based on publications up to March 2016 identified by PubMed and references cited in relevant articles.ResultsThe morbid conditions associated with prior anticancer treatments including chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, and/or hematopoietic stem-cell transplant may induce not only obstetric and neonatal complications but also long-term effects on offspring. Whereas some risks are predominantly evidenced in untreated women others are observed in both treated and untreated women. These risks may be superimposed on those induced by the current women’s trend in Western societies to postpone maternity.ConclusionsMedical professionals should be aware and inform female cancer survivors wishing to have a child not only of the short- and long-term risks to themselves and their prospective offspring of previous anticancer treatments, fertility-preservation technologies, and pregnancy itself, but also of those risks linked to the morbid conditions induced by prior anticancer treatments. Once female cancer survivors wishing to have a child have been properly informed about the risks of reproduction, they will be best placed to make decisions of whether or not to have a biological or donor-conceived child. In addition, when medical professionals be aware of these risks, they will be also best placed to provide appropriate treatments before/during pregnancy in order to prevent or alleviate the impact of these morbid conditions on maternal and offspring health.

White Privilege, Color Blindness, and Services to Battered Women

White privilege is a system of benefits, advantages, and opportunities experienced by White persons in our society simply because of their skin color. In this article, the authors present the results of a descriptive, exploratory study of White privilege in battered women's shelters in the Deep South. Based on a qualitative analysis, the authors show how White privilege is intricately connected to executive directors' claims of color blindness, the othering of women of color, and viewing White as the norm. The authors conclude the article with implications for service provision to battered women and directions for future research.

With her Feet on the Ground: Women, Religion and Development in Muslim Communities

There has been a resurgence of donor interest in women and religion, conceptualizing religion alternately as a developmental obstacle, primary developmental issue and developmental solution. Both donors and recipient organizations need to interrogate the discourses underlying this focus and to examine their potentially harmful long-term impact on women's struggles in contexts where identity politics are a key factor in determining women's options. Cassandra Balchin relates the experience of the international solidarity network Women Living Under Muslim Laws. She argues against reinforcing Orientalist othering of women in Muslim contexts and efforts by extreme right politico-religious groups to monopolize definitions of women's role in society, while diverting attention away from the realities of women's struggles in Muslim contexts, secular alternatives and the community, national and international power structures that constrain women's development.