Patriarchal Power Research Articles

Gendering merit: How the discourse of merit in diversity disclosures supports the gendered status quo on Canadian corporate boards

• Gender diversity disclosures of Canadian public companies are analyzed. • “Merit” and “diversity” are socially constructed to largely exclude women. • Many companies focus on “merit” to justify having fewer women directors. • Disclosures of companies referring to merit are less readable. • Patriarchal structures are revealed in the language of diversity disclosures. The diversity disclosures by Canadian corporations are examined to show how references to ‘merit’ and ‘diversity’ are used strategically by many corporations to support the gendered status quo and to resist pressures to increase the representation of women on boards. References to ‘merit’ and ‘diversity’ in the first mandatory corporate governance diversity disclosures of a sample of corporations from the Toronto Stock Exchange are analyzed using critical discourse analysis to assess the extent to which these disclosures are used to legitimize current board recruitment practices and to maintain the gendered status quo. We find that corporations referring to merit in their disclosures tend to have fewer women directors than corporations that do not mention merit. In addition, we assess the readability of the disclosures. We find that those referring to merit tend to be less readable, suggesting efforts to obfuscate. This research highlights the patriarchal power structures underlying corporate board appointments and shows how these power relationships are revealed in the language corporations choose to use in their diversity disclosures. ‘Gender’, ‘diversity’ and ‘merit’ are socially constructed concepts. Until the gendered roots of the language of merit-based policies are acknowledged, corporations have little incentive to challenge the status quo and engage substantively with diversity. Overcoming corporate resistance to change may require a range of innovative practices by corporations and regulators, up to, and possibly including, mandating levels of women’s representation on corporate boards.

On Patriarchal Patenting and Brand Naming: Janet Evason and her Cluster Meet Frances Cauldhame


 
 
 The following essay is a literary critique of the patriarchal dominion present in The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, parallel to Joanna Russ’s feminist arguments in The Female Man and the prism of brand naming and patenting in Modest_Witness by Donna J. Haraway. Such analysis proposes a postmodernist reading which rejects metanarratives to exam- ine literature. Instead, this paper explores and evaluates the scientific and patriarchal power over the main character in The Wasp Factory by creating tropes inspired on The Female Man. The author suggests the reader to vanish the line which divides fiction and reality since the conflicts found in one plane are also seen on the other. 
 
 

Complicating notions of violence: An embodied view of violence against women in Honduras

Feminist geographic analysis has demonstrated that violence inflicted on women is embodied, experienced and personal and at the same time, linked to global socio-political and economic processes and patriarchal norms. Consequently, violence is a complex system instead of a norm located in certain places. In heavily militarised societies, patriarchal power regimes are even more prevalent because states’ security strategies promote a masculinist understanding of protection as to who should be protected and by whom – and from what. This study draws on feminist geopolitical analysis and explores how feminist activists in Honduras experience and resist violence in their everyday lives. The research is grounded in interviews, focus-group discussions and participant observation with Honduran activists. The findings demonstrate that violence and its effects are first embedded in women’s everyday lives through feelings of fear and unsafety on the streets, at the workplace and at home. Second, violence operates through structures and institutions such as the military and police, impunity for violence against women and the juridical restriction of reproductive rights. Third, the internationally financed war on drugs and ‘development’ projects contribute to violence, thus, there is a link between intimate experiences of violence and global economic and military powers that sustain violence. Activists therefore argue that, for their needs, the state’s and international organisations’ security approaches are inadequate. The paper weaves together feminist visions of collective self-care and discusses activists’ strategies against violence. This study contributes to a growing feminist geographic scholarship linking women’s bodily experiences with violence and responds to calls for complicating notions of violence.

A cultural approach to algorithmic bias in games

As algorithms come to govern every aspect of our lives—from bank loans, to job applications, to traffic patterns, to our media consumption patterns—communication research has become increasingly concerned with how we govern algorithms. Building on the methodological frameworks established by critical information researchers like Safiya Noble, Tarleton Gillespie, and Nick Seaver, this essay argues that we do not need to reverse engineer the “black box” to understand its impacts because they can be found through qualitative methodologies instead. This essay rejects the “black box” as an epistemic premise upon which critical algorithmic literacies can be built by using discourse analysis to observe how the unknowable language of the algorithm is deployed discursively within gamer communities to establish and maintain patriarchal power. This essay shows how the “black box” is used by fan communities to advance a patriarchal understanding of what we term paradigms of “balance” and “realism” in game design.

Building oppressive proxies: Sudanese and Egyptian domestic place and the production of patriarchal femininity in Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley

Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley disrupts the trend in much feminist literature to present women’s places and spaces as sites of revolt against patriarchal oppression. In the small places of the Abuzeid home, Lyrics Alley reveals that women’s places are not inherently emancipatory, and patriarchal behaviour is not exclusively observed in men. Through the socio-spatial dispersal of patriarchal power, homosocial domestic places, where women interact with other women, can produce femininities that oppress other women by actively advancing patriarchal concerns. In this essay, Lyrics Alley provides a cartography for socio-geographical enquiry to establish how space and place construct patriarchal women. My analyses of these literary spaces reveal the mechanisms by which patriarchal women are spatially produced, and may use space to oppress other women.

The Design of Building The Creative Characters on Literation Based on Youth Locality: A Case Study in Panti Village, Jember Regency

This research aimed to describe the relationship between women and nature in maintaining and preserving the natural environment. The relationship was illustrated in problems 1) the existence of patriarchal power on women of Lou Dempar, which causing sexual violence in the "Fire Cloud Smoke/Api Awan Asap" novel; 2) women's intelligence due to the knowledge they had in maintaining the biodiversity of Lou Dempar in the "Fire Cloud Smoke/Api Awan Asap" novel; 3) women's intelligence in preserving the traditions of the ancestors of Lou Dempar in the "Fire Cloud Smoke/Api Awan Asap" novel. This research used descriptive qualitative research with an ecofeminism approach. There were 2 kinds of data in this research, they were primary data consisting of words, phrases and sentences quoted from the "Fire Cloud Smoke/Api Awan Asap" novel written by Korrie Layun Rampan, while the secondary data were in the form of other data obtained from the reading of journals, books, newspapers that had a relation with primary data. The research data were collected by using the documentation technique. Data analysis techniques used were identification, classification, analysis, and triangulation. The results and discussion stated that patriarchal power penetrated nature and women became the victims, but Nori appeared as a representation of a woman who had the knowledge and also thought in advancing the village by taking care of nature or biodiversity. The Lou Dempar community rose up in terms of agriculture, animal husbandry, mastery of modern technology, and marketing of agricultural products. Women's knowledge was able to preserve nature, including preserving the hereditary traditions of Lou Dempar cultural community. Vandana sHiva's ecofeminism showed the relationship between women's knowledge, protecting culture and biodiversity.

Women’s Knowledge and Biodiversity of Lou Dempar Cultural Community in A "Fire Cloud Smoke/Api Awan Asap" Novel Written by Korrie Layun Rampan: Ecofeminism Study

This research aimed to describe the relationship between women and nature in maintaining and preserving the natural environment. The relationship was illustrated in problems 1) the existence of patriarchal power on women of Lou Dempar, which causing sexual violence in the "Fire Cloud Smoke/Api Awan Asap" novel; 2) women's intelligence due to the knowledge they had in maintaining the biodiversity of Lou Dempar in the "Fire Cloud Smoke/Api Awan Asap" novel; 3) women's intelligence in preserving the traditions of the ancestors of Lou Dempar in the "Fire Cloud Smoke/Api Awan Asap" novel. This research used descriptive qualitative research with an ecofeminism approach. There were 2 kinds of data in this research, they were primary data consisting of words, phrases and sentences quoted from the "Fire Cloud Smoke/Api Awan Asap" novel written by Korrie Layun Rampan, while the secondary data were in the form of other data obtained from the reading of journals, books, newspapers that had a relation with primary data. The research data were collected by using the documentation technique. Data analysis techniques used were identification, classification, analysis, and triangulation. The results and discussion stated that patriarchal power penetrated nature and women became the victims, but Nori appeared as a representation of a woman who had the knowledge and also thought in advancing the village by taking care of nature or biodiversity. The Lou Dempar community rose up in terms of agriculture, animal husbandry, mastery of modern technology, and marketing of agricultural products. Women's knowledge was able to preserve nature, including preserving the hereditary traditions of Lou Dempar cultural community. Vandana sHiva's ecofeminism showed the relationship between women's knowledge, protecting culture and biodiversity.

Authoritarian Patriarchy and Its Populism

Theories of authoritarianism and populism are insufficient if they do not take into account the power of gender and sexuality, in relation to other social divisions, within authoritarian power and the erotics that produce populism. Patriarchal power is a more comprehensive approach, showing how the new authoritarians rely on gendered security and securitization to produce the new post-secular and the post-postcolonial nationalisms of today. While populisms are divergent in empire and postcolony, for instance in the US and India, generated by grievances and disappointments of a waning empire on the one hand, and a failed modernization on the other, their authoritarian leaders are linked not just in modes of power and governance but also through sharing technologies of surveillance, security and accumulation.

Being Subordinate Men: Paul’s Rhetoric of Gender and Power in 1 Corinthians by Brian J. Robinson

Reviewed by: Being Subordinate Men: Paul’s Rhetoric of Gender and Power in 1 Corinthians by Brian J. Robinson Vien V. Nguyen brian j. robinson, Being Subordinate Men: Paul’s Rhetoric of Gender and Power in 1 Corinthians (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019). Pp. xii + 269. $110. This book is a revised dissertation submitted to Fuller Theological Seminary (2017), supervised by Love L. Sechrest. In the book, Brian J. Robinson analyzes Paul’s appropriation of feminine imagery in his self-presentation to deconstruct the conventional assumptions and expectations of the hegemonic masculinity model, which was inconsistent with the values of the Corinthian community and contributed to discord in the community. Thus, he argues, “Paul’s rhetoric in 1 Corinthians subverts masculine ideals and intentionally recasts the appropriate masculinity and status of the men in the community in order to promote unity in the face of increasing factionalism” (p. 4). Utilizing gender criticism, R. advances his argument in six chapters. In chap. 1, R. outlines the scope of his research, discusses the contemporary scholarship on the Corinthian correspondence relevant for the study, and provides an overview of the study. In chap. 2, R. traces the development and influence of gender studies and employs them as a methodological approach to examine discourses of masculinity and gender in Greek and Roman literature. He then presents common assumptions about masculinity and addresses the intersection between masculinity and power. In Greco-Roman patriarchal societies, a man must embody the socially constructed expectations of the idealized masculinity, that is, self-control/mastery and domination over others. He must maintain and defend his masculinity before his peers via the proper presentation of the male body. A failed masculinity would result in personal attacks and charges of femininity, which would lead to loss of social and legal standing in the community (p. 38). Chapter 3 focuses on alternative masculinities found in first- and second-century c.e. texts. R. discusses the categories of masculinity: hegemonic, complicit, and subordinate. Of specific attention are complicit and subordinate masculinities. Complicit masculinity refers to men who lack key aspects of hegemonic masculinity (i.e., lower-class freemen) but who could still participate in the patriarchal power structures. Subordinate masculinity refers to those who manifest feminine characteristics (i.e., eunuchs) and who would be excluded from the patriarchal power structures (p. 66). In his examination of the writings of Favorinus, Josephus, and Philo, R. demonstrates how these authors engage in hegemonic gendered discourses to reformulate perceptions of masculinity, transforming what was perceived as subordinate masculinity into complicit or hegemonic masculinity. In chaps. 4 and 5, R. deals with Paul’s call to imitate him by adopting subordinate masculinity. In chap. 4, R. analyzes Paul’s description of himself in 1 Corinthians 1–7 as a failed orator (1:17–18; 2:1–5), a wet nurse (3:1–3), a shameful father (4:14–15), and a celibate man (7:1–7). All these imageries, perceived as feminine and subordinate, would diminish his standing before other “manly” men and restrict his access to spheres of power and influence reserved for hegemonic and complicit men (p. 146). Moreover, Paul implores the Corinthians to imitate his subordinate persona to subvert destructive and oppressive forms of masculinity, to confront factionalism, and to protect the congregation’s unity. In chap. 5, R. elaborates on Paul’s call to “misperform” discourses of hegemonic masculinity to destabilize patriarchal structures that legitimize oppression. He examines the various commands in Paul’s paraenesis to the Corinthian believers: becoming fools (1:1–4:20), not bringing [End Page 523] each other to Roman courts (6:1–8), adopting the diets of the weak (8:1–11:1), husbands submitting to their wives and wives to their husbands (7:1–6), being subordinate men (16:13). In chap. 6, R. recapitulates his argument and attempts an interpretive test of Paul’s commands on head coverings (1 Cor 11:2–16) in light of Paul’s rhetoric of gender and power in 1 Corinthians. This summary does not do justice to R.’s comprehensive work. The thesis is carefully researched and cogently argued. The book contains a wealth of indispensable material, and...

EKOFEMINIZAM I ETIKA

Inclined towards consumerism, modern patriarchal society suffers from denaturalisation which reflects itself through the processes of natural oppression and animal exploitation. Logic of domination upon which patriarchy acts and by which it imposes a superior attitude over nature and nonhuman species, destroys internal values that animals and nature possess, which are not recognized at the capitalist stage where value is regarded through the prism of instrumentalism. This paper aims to disclose the opposite practice which employs the ethics of care and partnership with nature and its elements, through the postulates of ecofeminism oriented towards the life-affirming principle, not the destructive force that patriarchy is prone to. By analysing different ecofeminist approaches, this paper reveals the importance of nature and animals as a unique potential and subjectivity, with a right to freedom and existence. In view of maintaining biodiversity, the animal is redefined from the absent referent, that is, inferior and subdued phenomenon endangered by the masculine hegemony, into a siginificant constituent of human reality by introducing the language of empathy and moral responsibility with the capacity to build a close relationship with the environment from the angle of ecofeminism. It is important to develop ecological consciousness, and accept the time flow needed for renewal of nature, by understanding the importance of the natural surroundings in which man is only a small particle. In such a language, the culture of meat eating has an alternative in the form of vegeterianism, whereas animal and nature become part of moral community, so that hunting, and laboratory exploitation of animals, as well as the use of natural resources are reduced to necessity, not the indispensable. Meat consumption is an attack on animals and an act of support to consumer culture, whereas the refusal of meat is an act of defiance to patriarchal power in the contex of ethics towards nature and its living beings. A conclusion is reached through argumentation that ecofeminism sees the practice of animal killing as justified only in special/extreme cases, that is, in situations when it is necessary to save human lives, or when the terrain does not offer other options for human diet. On the other hand, the exclusion of animals from laboratory practices is considered desirable for two reasons: firstly, because animals can feel pain due to their neural structures in the brain, and secondly, because there is no guarantee that a good effect of research on animals will give good results in humans. Following Ynestra King who claims that there is no hierarchy in nature, and that man is not imposed as a superior being over other species by any laws of nature, a conclusion is reached that man has no right as a rational and conscious being with a highly de- veloped system of communication to use that position as an argument or an excuse for demonstrating his agression towards animals which have an equal right to live and be free. The system of nature is declared a sacred space in the value system of ecofeminism in which the life of each individual being is invaluable. Man as a spe- cies has the greatest impact on nature, environment and diversity and, at the same time, he is the only one who can assist nature in the act of renewal, by limiting his appetites so as to sustain the world of nature, including animals as valuable species in it. Protection of animals is; therefore, needed in all segments – they should not be regarded as guinea pigs, meat or trophies, but looked upon as specific beings with their needs and instincts.

Queering the Waters: The Subversive Potential in E. Pauline Johnson's Canoe

Queering the WatersThe Subversive Potential in E. Pauline Johnson's Canoe Kristen Brown (bio) O, sweetest of all music, the far-off laughter of a rapid, rollicking and scampering among its stones. Nearer, nearer it came; the ripple grew into a roar, the sweet, wild laughter arose into boisterous, tempestuous merriment, and in another moment we swirled round a bend, dashing headlong into a tossing, twirling mass of waters that fretted and fumed themselves into eddies and whirlpools and showers of pearly spray, with a petulance that defied restraint. —E. Pauline Johnson, "Forty-Five Miles on the Grand" (1892) Thinking about queerness through gesture animates how bodies move in the world, and how we assign meaning in ways that are always already infused with cultural modes of knowing. —Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings Emily Pauline Johnson was a master of gestures, both literal and figurative. Whether steering her canoe through the rapids of the Grand River or taking her recital tour to the elite of London, her hyperconscious self-fashioning of her public persona emphasized her doubleness as Mohawk princess and Victorian New Woman. The quote above, taken from an article in Ontario's Brantford Expositor, appeared during the emergence of Canada's recreational canoe craze in the late-Victorian era. The newspaper situates Johnson's essay after a leading, multipage article proudly touts Brantford's "early settlement" a century earlier, when the "sturdy and true pioneers of the province appeared upon the scene" (1). What follows are two pages replete with dozens of photographs of "The Representative Men of Brantford County," a visual reminder of the hierarchy and ambition in the growing town. Juxtaposing this account of settler [End Page 137] colonialism with Johnson's relatively lighthearted narrative of paddling forty-five miles on the Grand River renders both texts testaments to British North America's successful navigation of settler-Indigenous relations and concomitant establishment of patriarchal power structures. Interspersing her story with photographs of the Brantford Canoe Club and other athletic organizations, the emerging newspaper culture simultaneously posits the newly named province of Ontario's—and, by extension, Canada's—dedication to physical vitality and modern leisure. Like the calculating editorial staff at the Expositor, Johnson, too, had a knack for shrewd moves and nuanced navigation. A close look at her article reveals the often overlapping and seemingly contradictory characteristics that affected a great deal of her writing and performance. First she fashions herself as a modern Mohawk who is loyal to the British Crown, taking care along her narrated canoe run to identify sites like the home of Alexander Graham Bell (who was a friend of her father's and named an honorary chief of the Mohawks) and "the oldest chapel in Upper Canada … built especially for the Mohawks" (20). While Johnson's amicable references to these constructed sites suggest a cultural hybridity, her narration is also prone to place-based musings of an ecologically dynamic, pre-settler space.1 Though she opens the article with the declaration that "Ontario boasts many a beautiful inland river" and reminds readers that "a lovelier run cannot be found in the province," she still laments the loss of the "erstwhile rapids" whose remaining ripples and rills are but "souvenirs of the long ago" and recalls "the olden days" before the Grand became "a broad, semi-sluggish stretch of water, owing to many mills and their requisite dams" (17). The photograph accompanying Johnson's narrative depicts her attired in the materials of modern leisure expected of proper female canoeists, yet she sits alone in the stern, poised and in possession of the sole means with which to navigate the fragile vessel through the rapids that remain—the paddle (fig. 1). While her rhetoric and appearance express congenial acceptance of late-Victorian era behavior and the British empire's land claims with their requisite names and borders, she simultaneously embodies the memory and unchecked energy of precolonial, prepatriarchal, [End Page 138] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. E. Pauline Johnson in canoe. Photo courtesy of the Brant Historical Society. unbordered ecology, proudly aligning herself with what once was "the most...

Ninfómanas, ciegas y mudas: enfermedad y escritura en la literatura de Margarita Aguirre, María Elena Gertner y Elisa Serrana

La escritura de mujeres producida en Chile por las autoras adscritas a la asi llamada Generacion del 50 esta colmada de topicos de enfermedad. El presente trabajo explora la hipotesis de que estas imagenes patologicas responderian, a pesar de sus diagnosticos iniciales diversos, al modelo de la histeria, que hace confluir femineidad y enfermedad. En las obras Cuaderno de una muchacha muda de Aguirre, La mujerde sal de Gertner y En blanco y negro de Serrana, la escritura puesta en circulacion propondria un juego de inflexiones e inversiones a partir de la imagen histerica, proveniente de una mirada masculina, sosten del poder patriarcal.

To the Front and Center of the Field: Recent Histories of Black Women, Gender, and Black Power

To the Front and Center of the Field:Recent Histories of Black Women, Gender, and Black Power Rhonda Y. Williams (bio) Ashley D. Farmer. Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xx + 288 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4696-3437-1 (cl); 978-1-4696-5473-7 (pb); 978-1-4696-3438-8 (ebook). Tanisha C. Ford. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xvi + 272 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4696-2515-7 (cl); 978-1-4696-3613-9 (pb); 978-1-4696-2516-4 (ebook). Robyn C. Spencer. The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. xv + 280 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8223-6275-3 (cl); 978-0-8223-6286-9 (pb). Soul Sisters to the front(lines) of struggle. Black women intellectuals, artists, educators, organizers, and fashionistas at the center of political culture. Black Militant, Revolutionary, African, Pan-African, Third World, (African)Every Woman on the (battle)fields of history. These expressions and their syntactic strikeouts stylistically proclaim: For too long, the historical images and historiography conjured by the words black power have been traditionally dominated by either black men as historical actors or analyses of hegemonic patriarchal power. Appreciatively, neither the "traditional" nor "hegemonic" prevail in these deeply researched books by Tanisha C. Ford, Robyn C. Spencer, and Ashley D. Farmer. In their works, black women are not only visible as historical actors, contributors, and sometimes visionaries in struggles for black liberation. They are also navigating, wrestling, rethinking, abiding, retooling, and even changing the course of culture, ideas, organizations, and everyday social and intimate spaces. Let us begin with the book jackets. The front cover of Ford's Liberated Threads features a photo of Olive Morris with a manicured Afro and geometric-patterned skirt, her hands firmly holding a bullhorn to her lips. Morris is speaking at a rally at the central library in Brixton to protest "special" police patrols of the predominantly black neighborhood in London in 1978. Spencer's The Revolution Has Come also features a photo—six [End Page 118] Afro-coiffed Black Panther Party women at De Fremery Park in Oakland, California, in 1968. This image of the relatively known (Kathleen Cleaver), little known (Tarika Lewis), and unknown (the other four women are not identified) women bridge familiar, corrective, and still-to-be-written narratives of the Black Panther Party. The cover of Farmer's Remaking Black Power is a black-and-white illustration of various black women's faces punctuated by stars and one clenched black power fist; they anchor the title in allusive red, black, and green.1 As suggested by their covers, these books, which literally and figuratively frame hundreds of pages of research, signal the centrality of black women's stories and activist legacies. Writing different types of history—cultural, organizational, and intellectual, respectively—Ford, Spencer, and Farmer document black women's presence, voices, ideas, arduous work, influence, and, to varying degrees, the multifaceted gendered terrains of struggle in the post-World War II, civil rights-black power era. All three authors interrupt perfunctorily framed, male-inspired liberation narratives, as well as model ways to interrogate patriarchy without simplistically erasing black men or conflating black power with gender oppression. In these ways, their studies are emblematic of the newest wave of scholarship, chiefly prompted by black women historians, that complicates the historiography and enriches the history of race, women, gender, and social struggle.2 What Is Soul, Soul Sisters? Seriously investigating the common moniker soul and its power to signify "style," Liberated Threads examines how black women's "body politics" both inspired and emerged out of individual and collective black self-determination struggles. Ford argues that expressions of "soul style," steeped in black women's transgressive cultural performances, helped produce spaces of liberation, as well as physical and political danger, for black people who opposed divergent status quos structured by race, gender, class, sexuality, and the state. These black women created a language of the body. They asserted their freedom to define self...

The (Un)Masking of Patriarchal Power in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author and Clothing the Naked

This article explores the conflict between female and male voices in two plays by Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Clothing the Naked. Through the representation of female characters who ‘talk back’, Pirandello unmasks gender roles as the product of patriarchal power and offers an alternative view to the self-righteous narratives of male characters, especially about sexual abuse. The result is a fractured, humoristic discourse, which reproduces patriarchal gender roles while at the same time casting a doubt on them – that they may well be a constrictive mask that men impose on women; and on themselves.

Türkiye’de Kadına Karşı Şiddetin Sembolik ve Doğrudan Biçimleri: Namus Olgusu ve Namus Cinayetleri

Gündelik yaşamda bir grubun diğerine kurduğu tahakkümün korunmasını sağlayan görünmez şiddet, yapısal, sembolik ya da normalleşmiş şiddet gibi çeşitli süreçler vardır. Pierre Bourdieu da güç ve tahakküm analizinden ve bunların modern toplumlarda toplumsal olarak yeniden üretilmesinden yola çıkarak, sembolik iktidar ve şiddet kavramını ortaya atmıştır. Sembolik iktidar, zihinlere dünya ve toplum düzeni tasavvurunun ve ırka, dine, etnik kökene veya cinsiyete dayalı toplumsal bölünmelerin meşru ve doğal olduğunu empoze etme gücüdür. Sembolik şiddet de toplumsal dünyamızı toplumun bütün üyeleri tarafından paylaşılan meşru ve “doğal” olarak varsaydığımız algı, düşünce ve eylem çerçevelerimiz olan bilişsel yapılar yoluyla gerçekleştirilir. Böylece sembolik şiddet, aynı zamanda biliş ve tanıma eylemleri olan tüm tahakküm ve boyun eğdirme eylemlerini ve hiyerarşileri kapsar. Kadının tahakküm altına alınması, ataerkil bir toplum ve devlet düzenin kurulmasıyla gerçekleştirilmiştir. Doğrudan şiddete başvurmadan, toplumsal dünya ilişkin kodlamaların eğitim sistemi ve din gibi ortak algı çerçeveleri üzerinden kadına yönelik sembolik şiddet, sembolik eril iktidarın ve tahakkümün korunmasında etkin rol üstlendiği görülmektedir. Bu makalede ataerkil düzenin dayandığı sembolik iktidarın kadının cinsel denetimini normalleştiren bir sembolik şiddet biçimi olarak namus olgusunun antropolojik ve sosyolojik gelişimi ile namusa dayalı bir doğrudan şiddet biçimi olan namus cinayetleri, Türkiye bağlamında incelenmiştir.

The Cut in Conflict: Female Genital Mutilation and the Concept of Religious Violence in the Western World

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is both a concurrent and historical practice, manifesting in geographically diverse regions and across different religious groups. Wherever it is practiced, the ritual cutting of female genitals is an act designed to undermine a woman’s personal sexual autonomy and identity, as well as reify patriarchal power relations. Although historically practiced in Islamic communities, records of female genital mutilation predate Islam, and the validity of Quranic references to the practice are contested by modern Islamic scholars. The recent incidents of FGM reported to have occurred in expatriate Muslim communities in Western European and North American nations reveal an ancient tribal practice that has acclimated itself to notions of modern Western medical authority. In fact, there is evidence for the presence of FGM in Western culture since the 19th century, in a context distinct from Muslim communities or Islamic religious influence; the history and current iterations of FGM in the West conform closely to Foucauldian theories of sex and power, and echo Foucault’s assertion, discussed in The History of Sexuality, that power relations must successfully conceal their own mechanisms in order to maintain viability within society. Consequently, patterns associated with twenty first century FGM analogize the construction of “religious violence” as a cultural category in Western discourse. When gendered violence is categorized as “religious,” it is inevitably subjected to a process of othering that serves to further embed its practices as part of the collective social reality.

Love, matrimony and sexuality: Saudi sensibilities and Muslim women's fiction

All those desires, discriminations, success stories, and confrontations that otherwise might not have seeped into mainstream discourses are subtly said through the stories that mirror Arab women‟s lives. Girls of Riyadh is a postmodern cyber-fiction that delineates subjects we usually do not get to hear much about, i.e. the quest of heterosexual love and matrimony of young Arab women from the less women-friendly geography of Saudi Arabia. Though in the last two decades the scholarship on alternative discourses produced by Muslim women have been multitudinous, there is a scarcity of critical investigations dealing with creative constructions of postfeminist, empowered Muslim woman, not battling with patriarchal power structures, but negotiating aspects that matter most in real life: human associations and familial formations. This paper engages with the categories of love, marriage, and sexuality, drawing upon the lives of four educated, successful, „velvet class‟ Saudi women. The significance of this study is linked with carefully challenging some of the stereotypes about Arab women as victims of forced marriages and their commonly perceived discomfort with love at large. The study reveals that it is men who need to “man up” against cultural conventions since women are increasingly expressive in their choices and brave enough to face the consequences audaciously.

Love, matrimony and sexuality: Saudi sensibilities and Muslim women's fiction

All those desires, discriminations, success stories, and confrontations that otherwise might not have seeped into mainstream discourses are subtly said through the stories that mirror Arab women‟s lives. Girls of Riyadh is a postmodern cyber-fiction that delineates subjects we usually do not get to hear much about, i.e. the quest of heterosexual love and matrimony of young Arab women from the less women-friendly geography of Saudi Arabia. Though in the last two decades the scholarship on alternative discourses produced by Muslim women have been multitudinous, there is a scarcity of critical investigations dealing with creative constructions of postfeminist, empowered Muslim woman, not battling with patriarchal power structures, but negotiating aspects that matter most in real life: human associations and familial formations. This paper engages with the categories of love, marriage, and sexuality, drawing upon the lives of four educated, successful, „velvet class‟ Saudi women. The significance of this study is linked with carefully challenging some of the stereotypes about Arab women as victims of forced marriages and their commonly perceived discomfort with love at large. The study reveals that it is men who need to “man up” against cultural conventions since women are increasingly expressive in their choices and brave enough to face the consequences audaciously.

Solidaridad económica y Descolonialidad del poder. Apuntes desde México para acercarse a las “economías otras”.

This paper aims to expose the main elements of the proposal of solidarity economy, which is presented from thecritical perspective of the De/Coloniality of power. It is argued that in Mexico and Latin America a range of ongoing social practices are focusing at the social reproduction from a solidary and liberating rationality; “Other economies” such as the experience of Campesino Communities in Camino (Oaxaca, Mexico) are presented briefly. This Communities are prefiguring an alternative societal proposal that ends to eliminate relationships of domination and exploitation typical of the pattern of modern / colonial, capitalist, eurocentral and patriarchal power and it s imaginary of development.

Intersecções entre memória e feminismo

Surgindo no contexto de ideais iluministas e transformadores da Revolução Francesa e Americana, posteriormente se espalhando no mundo todo, o feminismo, como movimento social, é essencialmente moderno e faz críticas à estrutura de poder patriarcal existente na sociedade através de discussões por direitos sociais e políticos. Atua em multiplicidade de relações, construindo articulações e se ampliando dentro do contexto mundial. Nessa perspectiva, esse artigo se propõe a percorrer a trajetória histórica por onde transitaram as dinâmicas políticas dos feminismos, refletindo sobre as intersecções da memória como fio condutor para o empoderamento, fortalecimento da identidade e a conquista dos direitos das mulheres.