Patriarchal Order Research Articles

Mystery and Foil A Study on Lises Other Image in The Brothers Karamazov

In The Brothers Karamazov, Lise is a female supporting character whose narrative presence is relatively limited. However, as Alyoshas lover, Dostoevsky invests a great deal of emotion in this young woman, intentionally creating a character who is lovable. Yet, Lises character reflects a disciplinary influence of patriarchal discourse. Although her image presents an outward sense of rebellion and independence, she is further trapped in the mold of traditional discipline, embodying characteristics of the Other. Her attempts to break through the traditional female image and patriarchal order are not significant.

Family Care for Children with Disabilities in Czechoslovak Documentaries in the 1960s and the 1970s

This article discusses the approaches to family care for children with disabilities depicted in documentaries produced by prominent film directors in the 1960s and 1970s, the period explored as re-establishing patriarchal order in socialist Czechoslovakia. Interpreting the documentaries in the context of public campaigns on child welfare reveals mental deprivation as a central concept that brought together the biopower of institutions and patriarchal values. The success and dissemination of Deprivation Theory is shown to have resulted in multiple internal contradictions in the medicalization of public care for children that was initiated in the late 1940s. The article traces the grounding of the dichotomy of public care versus family care by re-constructing the social ideals around child development and family care. These ideals remain one of the obstacles to the deinstitutionalization of care for children with disabilities to this day.

The Unseen and the Unsayable: Walpolean Gothic Theatre

One of the defining features of the Gothic mode is its attraction to obscurity, its central interest in what cannot quite be apprehended. Gothic writing circles around the unseen, the unsayable, and the unknowable, and often self-consciously draws attention to the withholding of information. This article focuses on the foundational example of the Walpolean Gothic: Horace Walpole’s unperformed tragedy The Mysterious Mother (1768) is structured around what cannot be said, while Robert Jephson’s The Count of Narbonne (1781) – a dramatic adaptation of The Castle of Otranto (1764) – repeatedly draws attention to elements that are imminent but never quite realised. In these two plays, silence and absence make their paradoxical presence felt. The tragedies draw attention to questions of what can be said and done on stage, while simultaneously exploring the power of the negative to reveal the cracks in narratives of patriarchal order. Together, they demonstrate how the Gothic can use the force of what is not there to trouble theatrical and political hierarchies.

RE-READING OF VULNERABLE MINDS IN COSTUME- A SELECT STUDY ON TWO MALAYALAM MOVIES

Masculinity as depicted in visual culture is often appropriated as the ideal to adhere in most of the representations, whether it is cinema or performing arts. Patriarchal order tends to project masculinity as the source of power from which the matrix of a society is outlined. Representation of masculinity on screen and their dimensions convey human experiences in a hitherto unperceived way. Apart from being a muscular figure which is categorized against a vulnerable woman, the dawn of 20th century has witnessed varied representations onscreen including sensitive, vulnerable, possessive protagonists trapped in a well-toned muscular body striving for an identity. Performing arts, unlike movies gives space for representing varying emotions pertaining to their role in society using costumed characters and images.

CROSS-DRESSING IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FEMINIST THEATRE

Sex and gender are two concepts that are often unconsciously used interchangeably, but they have distinct meanings. They are crucial in understanding the gender hierarchy or the distinction between man and woman created by the patriarchal order. While sex refers to a biological difference or an innate existence based on signs such as chromosomes and genitals, gender is a socio-cultural identity subsequently acquired through a social interaction. While the biology-oriented approach reduces femininity and masculinity to the body based on an essentialist approach, the socio-culture oriented approach underlines that femininity and masculinity are culturally constructed, fluid, and changeable. The gender roles assigned to man and woman in the patriarchal society bring along certain expectations based their sexes and their society’s values and beliefs about gender. The fact that both woman and man are expected to wear appropriate dresses for their gender roles is the reflection of this expectation. When a man wears clothing traditionally associated with women or when a woman wears clothing traditionally associated with men, they might face ridicule or criticism because these clothing choices challenge established gender norms, and because the clothes are reminders of roles, symbols that favour social roles. Contrary to this, cross-dressing is described as an act of wearing clothing and accessories that belong to the opposite sex, and it is possible to see its examples as a deconstructive strategy in contemporary British feminist theatre. This article aims at discussing the functions of cross-dressing as a body memory in contemporary British feminist theatre over selected plays such as Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979) and Top Girls (1982), Timberlake Wertenbaker’s New Anatomies (1984), and Moira Buffini’s Silence (1999).

A symbolic violence approach to gender inequality in academia

AbstractFeminist scholars have long recognized the gender‐based challenges that women in academia face relative to men. Although numerous strategies have been designed and implemented to tackle this problem, the attainment of gender equality in academia has proved futile globally. Integrating Acker's notion of the ideal worker with Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic violence and capital, we undertake a qualitative study of how women in African universities navigate the masculinized ideal academic norm, and how their efforts to break free from this symbolic image reproduces and legitimizes gender inequality. Drawing on the narratives of 36 women researchers in Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, Kenya, Botswana, and Zambia, our analysis reveals how the perpetual struggle for power, positions, and resources in academia influences women researchers within these contexts to enact three strategies for legitimacy―(1) ‘Engage the patriarchal order,’ (2) ‘Contest normative femininity,’ and (3) ‘Appropriate normative femininity.’ In contributing to the ongoing efforts to achieve sustainable development goals 5 and 8, we develop a theoretical framework that illuminates the subtle and sophisticated mechanisms that (re)produce, sustain, and legitimize the gendered structures and cultures in academia that serve to disadvantage women. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are outlined.

Historical comments on ethics in psychiatry : Challenges in the 19th century

With the emergence of an early psychiatry around 1800, anumber of questions arose on dealing with agroup of persons whose "alien", irritating and disruptive behavior was considered to be aphenomenon of being sick. In the context of the growing importance of human rights, the term humanitarianism attained ahigh relevance as the reference for early psychiatrists. Based on historical sources it is shown that despite amultitude of psychiatric beliefs on humanitarianism the established psychiatric practice was dominated by patriarchal order regimes up to the first decade of the twentieth century, later superimposed by the challenges of somatophysiological and experimental research as well as perceptions of biological racism. The associated new ethical questions were partially addressed within psychiatry but did not prevent an increase in the assessment of the mentally ill as "inferior".

Disaster, Transgenerational Endurance and Duration in Béké Writing

This article interrogates the preoccupation with transgenerational endurance and duration apparent in béké representations of “natural” disaster. It begins with a brief overview of the earliest literary texts to emerge from the French Caribbean islands: Auguste Prévost de Sansac de Traversay’s Les Amours de Zémédare et Carina, et description de l’île de la Martinique (1806), and Jules Levilloux’s Les Créoles ou la vie aux Antilles (1835)—both of which feature catastrophes that claim the lives of plantation owners and pose a threat to their daughters, the bearers of béké culture. I then consider texts by béké women who lived in Martinique at the time of Mount Pelée’s eruption in 1902, an unprecedented disaster which eradicated almost half of the island’s white population: Clémence Cassius de Linval’s Cœurs Martiniquais (1919) and Élodie Dujon-Jourdain’s Le Sablier renversé (1912). In doing so, I trace a lineage of male and female béké authors who lament white losses in the aftermath of “natural” disaster and remain anxiously preoccupied with the caste’s longevity. Such an approach reveals how white Creoles have, across generations, taken to writing to promote, protect and preserve their culture. Anxieties around the need to preserve patriarchal order, family bloodlines, names and language consistently resurface in this intergenerational literary output which spans more than a century. As we shall see, some of these temporal concerns converge with Édouard Glissant’s observations on time and memory in the French Antilles, specifically his sedimentary poetics of duration.

Making money moves: rural women, returnees, and renegotiations of sex work through the street in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

ABSTRACT Feminist research has highlighted both the emancipatory components of sex work on women’s lives, as well as the problematic nature of an overly romanticised reading of women’s sexual labour. In Ethiopian cities, including the capital, Addis Ababa, rural migrant women and returnee women from the Gulf States are confronted with layered forms of structural disadvantage that narrow the scope of their prospects for economic empowerment and deepen their vulnerability. Consequently, women relate to the street as a connector to capital, despite clashing claims for access and proximity that govern the street economy. This paper explores the everyday lived experiences of rural migrant women and returnee women streetworkers in Addis Ababa. Drawing on qualitative data collected in 2022 and 2023, the findings of this study show that women resort to sex work under conditions of protracted economic strain and an absence of viable alternatives for self-employment. Due to the marginalisation they face as part of the informal labour market, women exercise sex work both in the form of streetwalking and through routine engagements in transactional sexual relationships; both activities representing a central component of women’s ability to get by in the city. This paper argues that despite being the site of consequential transformation, women’s economic empowerment through sex work takes place within an entrenched patriarchal order that reproduces disenfranchising power inequalities through the practice of sex work itself, while reasserting the way women’s bodily integrity, safety, aspirations, and social standing are governed on – and by – the street.

“Splendid Failures”: Inclination, Slow Regicide, and Performative Critique

This paper focuses on Honig’s critical reworking of the concept of inclination and her concept of “slow regicide”. With “slow regicide” Honig describes a performative critique of the violence of the patriarchal order. However, what Honig underestimates, I argue, is that this intervention must itself be non-violent if it is not to reinstate patriarchal violence. My suggestion is that paying closer attention to the performativity of inclination shows how “slow regicide” enables a non-violent refusal in which the normativity of patriarchy is frustrated and fails.

What Is the Patriarchy Doing in Our Bed? Violent Sexual-Affective Experiences Among Youth

Abstract Introduction In the context of a qualitative research study on sexual practices and risk among youth, repeated accounts of non-consensual sex and other forms of gender-based violence emerged. Drawing from that research, this article explores the influence of the patriarchal system on sexual-affective relationships among young people aged 18–25 years residing in Andalusia, Spain. Methods The fieldwork was conducted between March and May 2019. Six discussion groups were held with 39 participants segmented by gender, level of education, sexual orientation, and length of relationships. Results The results show that patriarchal constructs related to female body standards and the subordination of women’s pleasure to men’s, in addition to blackmail and sexual violence, continue to pervade the sexual-affective imaginaries and experiences of young people. Additionally, the participants’ discourses on patriarchal and sexual violence are interwoven with critical feminist points of view, revealing timid signs of resistance to the patriarchal order. Conclusions Women navigate inequality by assuming, negotiating, or rebelling against the different types of violence to which they are exposed in their intimate relationships. In their sexual-affective relationships, young people today are confronted with numerous tensions and contradictions. The discourse of females shifts between their right to seek pleasure and self-blaming, while trying to overcome feelings of shame and dismantling aesthetic standards or empowering themselves and claiming orgasm equality. Policy Implications The findings are applicable for the prevention of violence against young women in relationships of trust.

The Survival Dilemmas of Qinglou Talented Women in the Late Ming Dynasty and Their Encounters with the Patriarchal Order

Abstract During the Ming and Qing Dynasties it was common thought that the Qinglou talented women were not bound by normal human relationships and women’s virtues because they lived outside the patriarchal order. Chased after by male bigwigs in the society, they mingled at upper-class male playing places and obtained higher reputations because of their outstanding talent. However, they held a very contradictory position because, especially in the Ming dynasty, women’s virtues were still regarded as an important standard of female evaluation in the society. On the one hand, they faced dilemmas in their living conditions, and on the other, there was a subtle interaction between their living space and the patriarchal clan system – this also occurred because of changes created by the patriarchal clan system and social rules, which exerted a continuous influence on the way a female could survive in the later imperial period. Based on historical and literary documents such as jottings, novels, and unofficial history of Ming and Qing Dynasties, this essay aims at analyzing the living space of these talented women.

“Wholesome Utility”: Patriarchy and Black Nationalism in Paradise

Abstract: This essay examines the relationship between patriarchal culture and Black separatist politics in Toni Morrison’s Paradise . While these two themes are obviously central to the text, they are generally treated as merely contiguous elements of life in Ruby, Morrison’s fictional all-Black town. A close examination of classic Black nationalist discourse, however, reveals that the politics of Black separatism has, from the time of its origin, stemmed from efforts to establish a Black patriarchal order that could stand in opposition to racist institutions and practices that strip the Black man of the patriarchal status enjoyed by white men. I argue that Morrison’s novel exposes this causal relationship between patriarchal culture and Black separatism and the way that it generates within Black nationalist ideology a tendency to hijack, obscure, or even eliminate racial solidarity efforts that are more intersectional, inclusive, and democratic.

The Specter of Female Masculinity: How Women Shaped the Ex-gay Movement in the 1970s and 1980s

Starting in the 1970s, the “ex-gay movement,” a loose collection of conservative Christian counselors and therapists, experienced sizable growth in the United States. Importantly, women played a prominent role in the expansion of the ex-gay movement in the ensuing decades, both as counselors and as counselees. This article highlights the tension that arose between the patriarchal gender norms and the role women counselors played in the ex-gay movement. When read “along the grain,” ex-gay texts demonstrate the production of a gendered hierarchy that not only valued “female femininity” over “female masculinity” but also reified patriarchal authority in the US. Female pastoral counselors, such as Leanne Payne and Elizabeth Moberly, advocated for the conservative gendered vision of the religious right. But as women, these counselors—and their books—could not transcend the patriarchal order of the religiously conservative ex-gay movement.

The Centaur’s Kick: Backlash as Disruptive Upgrades to Patriarchal Orders

Backlash is not always pushing back against progress for women, but how is it still patriarchal? Sliced into three sections – on confluence, contestations, and cartographies – this article draws on a thesis about backlash as the exploitation of insecurity wrought by apparent crises to re/shape social orders, through re-fixing symbolic sites, namely the body, family, and nation. It begins by describing a confluence of types of actors and projects silencing feminist voice. Contesting gendered backlash narratives about the three sites are then explored, followed by a more theoretical section reflecting on cartographies of resonant concurrence and contradictions in backlash. Reflecting on masculinities, identification, and levels of hegemonic power, the argument is that the fixing of sites re/naturalises three deep-level patriarchal logics – phallogocentric binary (body), hierarchical (family), and categorical closed-systems (nation) principles – which helps us theorise the evolution of patriarchal hegemonies. This may inform more strategic countering of backlash.

Quick-Witted Eccentrics: The Genre and Genders of Screwball Comedy

Focusing on the type of funny woman that came to life in the Hollywood screwball comedy genre of the 1930s and 1940s, this article explores the intersections of genre and gender. The particular type of female comedic performance associated with the screwball comedy is characterized by an accelerated speed of dialogue, in which the woman demonstrates rhetorical skill, wit, and quick intelligence, as well as eccentric behavior that leads to comical situations. By taking a closer look at specific scenes from canonical screwball comedies, such as Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve, and His Girl Friday, as well as less widely known films, such as Four’s a Crowd and Take a Letter, Darling, the article demonstrates how the comic effect stems from the incongruity between the woman’s gender performance and conventional scripts of femininity, without however making the woman the object of the joke. Instead, the woman’s actions serve as the motor of the comic by radically disrupting the man’s sense of authority and the patriarchal order, by extension. The article argues that by featuring women as agents who disrupt the established or conventional order of things, the screwball comedy genre makes possible the emergence of a new way (or ways) of inhabiting femininity.

Patriarchal (Dis)orders: Backlash as Crisis Management

Patriarchal (Dis)orders: Backlash as Crisis Management

THE RADICAL ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES IN POLITICAL IMAGINATION AND PRODUCTION OF COMMON FUTURE IN BELARUSIAN PROTESTS

The following article explores the idea of how information technologies could serve the idea of a common future in the world of catastrophe. In a world of socio-political catastrophes, violent suppression of rights and freedoms, oppressive state machines and covert control tactics, attempts are being made to find soft tactics of resistance, non-violent forms of confrontation that would allow to overcome the existing patriarchal order and reveal neo-colonial practices. The digital environment can be not only a tool for the production of machines of total control or the maintenance of the capitalist order of consumption. They can also serve as a tool for soft, nonviolent resistance to rigid structures, creating emancipatory tools for overcoming oppressive power relations and transforming the socio-political environment into a more inclusive, open structure. The article also attempts to return to the discussion about the critical potential of the theory of cyberfeminism, which not only analyzes the social and political, but also revises information technologies from the point of view of their emancipatory potential.

The reflection of the struggle against male violence on digital platform TV series: Hükümsüz and Mezarlık

On digital platforms, patriarchal ideology-challenging works are more widely available. The television series Hükümsüz, which debuted on the Exxen platform in 2021, and Mezarlık, which debuted on Netflix in 2022, have established themselves as pioneering projects that raise awareness of the rise in femicides in Turkey in recent years. The Mezarlık dramas, which also reveal the role of the police and the state in the murder of women, and the Hükümsüz series, which emphasizes that femicides are caused by gender inequality and calls into question the patriarchal order, are both examined from a feminist standpoint in this study as works that challenge male dominance. The representations in the dramas are coded in terms of gender roles, perpetrator responsibility and the victimisation of women in the representation of male violence, the politics of femicide and the responsibility of the state, and practices of combating male violence. Using content analysis, one of the qualitative research techniques, it was possible to determine that the series were composed in a way that was intended to undermine the patriarchy, which is a continuation of the prevailing ideology.

In the Defense of Punks and Monsters: Julia Ducournau and Titane

Abstract: In 2021, Fémis-educated, punk-looking director Julia Ducournau made history when she became the second woman to receive the Palme d'Or for her second film, Titane . A trembling Ducournau thanked the jury for "avoir laissé entrer les monstres." Titane , a cyberpunk/black comedy/fairy tale film, shakes the spectator out of the comfort of mainstream—cisgender, middle-class—culture and cinema and of predictable horror films. This article will first focus on understanding Alexia's character and show that her "monstrosity" is a reaction to the patriarchal order and normative gender roles against which she rebels. We will see how Ducournau stages a "sexual script" outside hetero- and homonormative limits and how she envisions free, fluid love before examining how, using a Christic subtext, albeit in a punk, transgressive manner, she proposes a truly inclusive, caring society.