Paradox Of Women Research Articles

The Paradox of Women as Victims in the selected plays of Tennessee Williams and Vijay Tendulkar

The Paradox of Women as Victims in the selected plays of Tennessee Williams and Vijay Tendulkar

A Paradox of Women’s Employment and Empowerment inFlexible Capitalism

This paper discusses a paradoxical implication of employment for women’s empowerment in flexiblecapitalism. Export-oriented factories employ women from the poorer sections of a society and theirearnings make substantial contribution to poverty reduction at a household level. However, animplication of wage work for women’s empowerment is contentious. Many socialist feminist criticshighlight exploitative aspects of export-oriented industries. The micro-level studies point out women’sempowering experiences through employment in daily life. Employing a materialist feministperspective and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this paper examines the discussion on women’semployment and empowerment in the past fifty years and attempts to understand women’smultifaceted exercise of agency within patriarchal power relations and explain a paradox ofexploitative employment and women’s empowering experiences. It argues that flexible employmenthas empowered many women in the world, yet, in a way to serve flexible capitalism and patriarchy.

1, 2, 3, 4. I declare…empowerment? A material-discursive analysis of the marketisation, measurement and marketing of women’s economic empowerment

ABSTRACT Adopting Karen Barad’s material-discursive feminism, this paper investigates how human/non-human elements intra-act and blur together across time and space to produce the phenomena and paradoxes of Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE). Based on historical analyses of WEE and work with Walmart and other corporations involved in WEE, the author reveals how corporate-based WEE interventions unfold from historically-based and on-going entanglements of actors, discursive practices, an array of tangible and intangible elements (e.g. documents, systems, feedback loops) and marketing devices (e.g. commitments, metrics, stories, human transparency, myths). This paper expands views on agency and discourse, and advances understandings of WEE/CSR by making these complex intra-activities visible. It considers the role discursive practices and actors – including the author – play in these intra-activities and the effects of resultant (in)visibilities.

“It's the bride's day”: The paradox of women's emancipation

The white wedding is a traditional ritual, governed by heteronormative conventions, which (re)produces stereotypical and patriarchal gender norms. In this study 10 white, South African, middle-class, heterosexual, newlywed couples were interviewed about their wedding ceremonies. The interviews were analysed using Parker's (2005) framework for discourse analytic reading. This helped us analyse two related discourses, the “fairy-tale” and “bride's day” discourse that allowed couples to justify gender unequal practices. The findings suggest that wedding discourses encourage (1) the objectification of women and their treatment in a benevolently sexist manner, (2) the unequal distribution of wedding labour between the bride and groom and, ultimately, (3) the perpetuation of women's subordination in heterosexual relationships. Participating in the rituals of the white wedding maintains taken-for-granted heteronormative discourses that undermine gender equality and, ultimately, women's emancipation.

Progress and paradox for women in US higher education

Gender, and especially the status of women, is certainly one of the most salient identities in all corners of the world. For some countries, the issues begin with the right to education at even the earliest ages. In the United States, there is a prevailing assumption, because women are a majority of the undergraduate and graduate populations in higher education that a threshold concerning access and equity has been reached. The story of gender, however, is a more complex one. This article will focus on the parallel notions of significant progress in some domains for women in higher education and the paradox that depending on the level, and depending on which women, progress and in some cases lack of progress is clear. The article will review changes over the last decades and address the deeper issues of institutional transformation and the emerging issues for policy including conceptualizations of gender.

2000 Belle d’Opium parfum campaign and the erotic female grotesque

Abstract The now famous Belle d’Opium Eau de parfum campaign of Yves Saint Laurent Beauty featuring a naked Sophie Dahl has provoked both derision and titillation in audiences since its release in 2000. On the one hand, the image is clearly sexually alluring. On the other, the subject’s nakedness also provokes male fear of the female body as a site of difference, that is, castration, and demonstrates a re-claiming of female eroticism from the traditional domain of male sexual desires – a ‘grotesque’ display of female self-pleasure in defiance of the male gaze. For this reason, the advert captures particularly well the paradox of woman as both an object of attraction and a site for culturally informed moral reprehension through this mode of defiance. This article examines how the advert works on multiple registers, not only drawing attention to deep social and cultural anxieties that exist in relation to the female body but importantly also demonstrating an active reclaiming of women’s libidinal pleasure and ‘grotesque’ bodily ‘difference’. In this sense, the article argues that the Opium advert can be interpreted as a site of active transgression of strict moral and normative gender expectations, along the lines of Mary Russo’s concept of the ‘female grotesque’. In analysing this particular quality of the advert, the article goes on to suggest that the image works particularly well to challenge patriarchal conceptions of women, and yet the subject’s clear sexual attraction also defies traditional feminist interpretations of female objectification. It is precisely because of the moral ambiguity attached to the advert that it acts as a valuable site of discussion on how female agency can be interpreted through conditions traditionally seen as ‘objectifying’.

When “Bright Futures” Fade: Paradoxes of Women’s Empowerment in Rwanda

AbstractSince the 1994 genocide, Rwanda has emerged as a global model for the promotion of women in society. Today, Rwanda has progressive gender-sensitive laws, more girls than boys in primary school, and the world’s highest percentage of women in parliament. But has this national-level progress manifested in an actual improvement in the lives of ordinary Rwandan women? If not, what has prevented these rights-based empowerment efforts from taking hold? Drawing from interviews with 152 women at all levels of Rwandan society, this article illustrates the contradictory and complicated nature of women’s empowerment efforts. It identifies three paradoxes that capture how efforts to promote women can be undermined by deeply rooted social processes. First, women are granted new rights but cannot access them unless they are married, which further reinforces their dependence on men. Second, policies aim to empower women through education but have unintended consequences that create new forms of oppression. Third,...

The Paradox of Women's Day: Commercialization, Depoliticization and Commodification of a Dynamic Radical Revolutionary Idea

I wonder if attempts are being made to usurped and commercialized women’s day celebration by various actors to depoliticize it and making it banal and futile. The celebration of women’s day is being much hyped in today’s world but is it being celebrated in the same spirit and with similar intention to bring social transformation with which it was initiated a century back, I certainly doubt that. Capitalism is reinforcing patriarchy and altering human ties where emphasis is on individualistic culture rather than the spirit of sustaining collective communities or strengthening social relations. This paradox of celebrating a day seems to be absurd when in actual practice in their day to day lives women are denied their basic rights or opportunities and they are hardly respected as citizens or human beings. Though such celebrations may have symbolic appeal in raising the awareness about the women’s issues yet, merely commemorating women’s day in this fashion could not contribute to the elimination of patriarchal culture. Endowing gifts on a particular day neither empower women or draw attention to their accomplishments or do anything to reduce struggles they face in their daily lives; neither does it remind the givers of those gifts to challenge the status quo.

Constraints to gender equality in Nigeria; the paradox of women against women

Constraints to gender equality in Nigeria; the paradox of women against women

Trafficking in slavery's wake: law and the experience of women and children

* Introduction. Contextualizing Trafficking in Women and Children in Africa Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts*Part I:Trafficking in Colonial Africa*1. Trafficking and Reenslavement The Social Vulnerability of Women and Children in Nineteenth-Century East Africa Elisabeth McMahon*2. Without the Slave Trade, No Recruitment From Slave Trading to Migrant Recruitment in the Lower Congo, 1830-90 Jelmer Vos*3. The End of Slavery, Crises over Trafficking, and the Colonial State in the French Soudan Richard L. Roberts*4. Under the Guise of Guardianship and Marriage Mobilizing Juvenile and Female Labor in the Aftermath of Slavery in Kayes, French Soudan, 1900-1939 Marie Rodet*5. Sex Trafficking, Prostitution, and the Law in Colonial British West Africa, 1911-43 Carina Ray*6. Islamic Law and Trafficking in Women and Children in the Indian Ocean World Bernard K. Freamon*Part II: Contemporary Antitrafficking in Africa and Beyond*7. Trafficking and Human Exploitation in International Law, with Special Reference to Women and Children in Africa Jean Allain*8. Documenting Child Slavery with Personal Testimony The Origins of Antitrafficking NGOs and Contemporary Neo-abolitionism Benjamin N. Lawrance*9. Child-Trafficking Policymaking between Africa and Europe Margaret Akullo*10. The Story of Elsie A Case Study of Trafficking in Contemporary South Africa Susan Kreston*11. Ranking States Tracking the State Effect in West African Antitrafficking Campaigns Liza Stuart Buchbinder* Afterword. The Paradox of Women, Children, and Slavery Kevin Bales and Jody Sarich* Selected Bibliography* Notes on Contributors* Index

Returning to Lady Lumley’s Schoolroom: Euripides, Isocrates, and the Paradox of Women’s Learning

Dans la mesure où la fin première de l’éducation humaniste était de préparer les jeunes hommes à une carrière publique, les spécialistes de la Renaissance se sont tout naturellement intéressés aux quelques femmes qui, issues de l’élite, avaient pu étudier le latin et le grec : leur éducation a ainsi été présentée, tantôt comme un pur ornement intellectuel, tantôt comme l’instrument d’un exercice indirect du pouvoir. À travers le cas des traductions des classiques de l’Antiquité composées par Jane, Lady Lumley, cet article examine les réactions d’une femme lettrée à l’égard des principes politiques sous-jacents au programme d’éducation humaniste. Principalement connue pour sa traduction de l’Iphigénie en Aulide d’Euripide, Lumley a aussi traduit en latin cinq discours d’Isocrate. Alors que la critique a jusqu’à présent relégué son Iphigénie au simple rang d’exercice d’école, cet article prend l’éducation de Lumley au sérieux, en relisant son Iphigénie à la lumière de ses traductions d’Isocrate, auteur dont les oeuvres était régulièrement inscrites aux programmes de lecture humanistes. L’examen des traductions composées par Lumley, avec les dédicaces qui les accompagnent, révèle ici l’intérêt soutenu de cette dernière, non seulement pour les théories politiques contemporaines (« commonwealth theory »), mais aussi, comme le montre finalement son Iphigénie, pour leurs conséquences à l’égard des femmes.

(W)righting women: constructions of gender, sexuality and race in the psychiatric chart

This paper examines the interpretative nature of psychiatry in relation to gender, sexuality and race within the particular time and place of one urban, Canadian, clinical psychiatric setting. We bring women's psychiatric inpatient charts and a critical feminist perspective into dialogue in an effort to focus on gender, sexuality and race in psychiatric narratives on women's madness. The research used a qualitative, retrospective research design to examine the psychiatric narrative as a technique of power as it operates on women. This paper focuses on the overarching theme of ‘medicalisation’, identified from the analysis of women's psychiatric inpatient charts, including two subthemes: (1) language and composition and (2) decontextualisation. Our analysis suggests that psychiatric chart documentation practices that reproduce gendered, sexualised, and racialised biases and assumptions and decontextualise the social and structural context of women's experiences of madness serve to create the paradox of women's visibility/erasure in psychiatric charts. The paper concludes with an exploration of the significance of women's authorship legitimacy in psychiatric chart documentation.

The paradox of women's imprisonment

The paradox of women's imprisonment

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging—one with higher subjective well-being for men.

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging - one with higher subjective well-being for men.

Victims as offenders: the paradox of women's violence in relationships

Contents Acknowledgments Preface Chapter One - Introduction Chapter Two - Prior Research Findings and Controversies Chapter Three - Background: Site, Data, Methods and Program Philosophy. Chapter Four - The Police Ride-Along Study Chapter Five - Hearing from Criminal Justice Professionals and Social Service Providers Chapter Six - A Day in the Life: Inside a Female Offender's Treatment Group Chapter Seven - Violent Women: Motivations and Context Chapter Eight - Summary: The Findings and their Policy Implications Appendix A - Summaries of Domestic Violence Calls for Police Service References Index.

Gender Differences in the Relationship between Emotional Regulation and Depressive Symptoms

Reports of gender differences in depressive symptoms are one of the most pervasive findings in the literature. In addition, women are frequently reported to be more emotionally sensitive than men. However, the paradox of women being more emotionally responsive and yet at greater risk for psychopathology is still to be unraveled. In the present study we examined emotional regulation as a possible factor in the gender difference in depressive symptom reporting. In a sample of young adults we replicated the frequently reported finding of greater depressive symptom reporting in women. In addition, we found women to report greater attention to emotions. This is consistent with the idea that women tend to think more and ruminate more about their emotions. However, when the variance associated with this greater attention to emotions was statistically controlled, the gender difference in depressive symptoms was no longer significant. Subsequent analyses found that women with low depressive symptoms reported greater attention to emotions without evidencing greater depressive symptoms. However, women with high depressive symptoms exhibited greater attention to emotions, more impaired antirumination emotional repair strategies, and greater reports of depressive symptoms than men with high depressive symptoms. We close by speculating about the neural concomitants of these findings.

The Paradox of Women: The Legal Position of Early Modern Wives and Thomas Dekker's The Honest Whore

The double function of marriage as the site of licensed sexuality and also as the creation of an economic unit links together two desires--sex and security--which may or may not reinforce each other and at times can enter into conflict. The relationship itself is obviously intensely private, but marriage represents at the same time a contract with the community, so that while sex and finance are to some degree regulated within the couple, these same issues are in all cultures also subject to communal laws and customs. Numerous studies focusing on gender conditions in early modern England have emphasized the extent to which sexual and financial questions were legislated to the disadvantage of women; but one purpose of this essay is to point out that there are a number of ways in which both sexual and financial matters, as far as women were concerned, were unevenly and at times conflictually provided for under the several jurisdictions of Tudor and Stuart law, and unevenly reflected and renegotiated in the literature of the period. The law's operation from general principles, from which follows its recognition of all individuals as in some way members of categories, left women few loopholes once the law had determined--long before the development of English common law--that women constituted a group for whom laws were to be made which distinguished them from men. This transformation of biological sexual difference into the disparity of legal, economic, and political gender roles created conditions which institutionally disabled almost all women--in particular married women--of whatever class; but that law makers were not blind to the difference between biological identity and the legal determination of gender roles can be seen in some special instances uncovering contradictions and double-think in the law's provisions for women, discrepancies I shall be exploring in the first part of this essay. Early modern dramatists, addressing issues of personal and social justice in their plays, frequently invoked real questions of English law, calling [End Page 83] attention to how legal praxis, in theory aiming for clarity and justice, is problematic in its application to specific circumstances. This is a tension apparently built into many of the history plays, for example, where the plots often explore and counterpoise the constitutional rights and duties of kings and the rights and duties of their subjects. In the numerous plays of the period either centrally or peripherally concerned with marriage, however--both marriage formation and the relations between husband and wife once marriage has been contracted--still other considerations than the law's sex-gender constructions are visible, and many dramatists waver between, on the one hand, depicting women as interesting and sympathetic individuals and, on the other, making dramatic use of the traditional orthodoxy that all women share an essential nature (a nature morally and intellectually inferior to that of men). As an example of this wavering, which creates one of the major fault lines in the ideology of early modern drama, I turn in the second part of this essay to Thomas Dekker's open engagement with the law and culturally defined gender roles in the two parts of The Honest Whore. 1

?Beyond the Mountains?: The Paradox of Women's Place in Appalachian History

Despite the flourishing of southern women's history during the past two decades, the history of women in Appalachia has only begun to be written. Those who make the attempt must come to terms with implicitly gendered constructions of Appalachia and narratives of regional history that feature men as the determinant actors. Utilizing oral history and family legend, the article argues that women's history in Appalachia, particularly the history of working-class women, requires an approach that looks beyond orthodox sources of data and fields of action to locate women's history-making and the contestations of gender. The resulting feminist historiography challenges conventional conceptions of the region, its history, and who has created both.

"Beyond the Mountains": The Paradox of Women's Place in Appalachian History

"Beyond the Mountains": The Paradox of Women's Place in Appalachian History