Gender Politics Research Articles

Review: New Women of Empire: Gendered Politics and Racial Uplift in Interwar Japanese America, by Chrissy Yee Lau

Review: <i>New Women of Empire: Gendered Politics and Racial Uplift in Interwar Japanese America</i>, by Chrissy Yee Lau

NEWSWATCH: Gendered Politics at Work and Play

NEWSWATCH: Gendered Politics at Work and Play

Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942–1953 by Xiaofei Kang (review)

Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942–1953 by Xiaofei Kang (review)

“Gender wars” and populist politics in South Korea

The 2022 South Korean presidential election campaign saw populist politicians, especially conservative parties, leverage gender conflicts and misogyny to attract young male swing voters. But there has been limited scholarly attention to the connection between gender and populist politics, particularly in South Korea, with research primarily focused on women's voting patterns, their political party representation, and on populist politics in the US, Europe, and Latin America. Existing research identifies that common strategies employed by populist politicians include anti-feminist discourses, reference to crises in masculinity, and appeals to emotion and affect. This paper examines how South Korean populist politics has utilized gender conflicts since democratization, considering the evolution of ‘gender wars’ in the South Korean context. It specifically delves into the strategies employed by conservative populist politicians from the People Power Party (PPP) during the 2022 election campaigns. These strategies, although similar to those of right-wing populists in Europe and the US, emphasized three key issues unique to South Korea: compulsory military service, low fertility rates, and the dismantling of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. This South Korean case contributes significantly to academic discussions about populist politics and gender, contextualized within the local political, social, and cultural context.

Anthony Trollope's Formal Experiment: Repetition and the Anti-romantic Marriage Plot

Abstract In Miss Mackenzie, Anthony Trollope attempted to write a marriage plot without love or romance but admitted that he was unable to do so. This essay argues that Trollope's formal experiment developing the “anti-romantic” marriage plot did not end with Miss Mackenzie but continued across eighteen novels written from 1864 to 1876. The essay performs a midrange reading of this set of novels to argue that across this experiment Trollope iterates his anti-romantic marriage plot, replicating his central conflict and establishing three stock characters (moral maidens, hesitating heroines, and husband hunters). Trollope's experiment clashed against his own gender and class politics, forcing him to confront and reevaluate his own ideas and gradually empathize with women who choose to marry not for romance but for financial security. While Trollope's novels have, since their publication, been criticized as repetitious, the essay argues that his use of repetition is not a weakness but a strength, a formal tactic with unique affordances. This reframing offers a way to reconsider Trollope's literary technique and prodigious output as well as appreciate the impact that his experiment had on the trajectory of the Victorian realist novel. While the 1860s and 1870s are often considered the peak of Victorian high realism, Trollope's novels (and the influence they have on other major novelists) reveal how during these decades the marriage plot and realism itself was in crisis.

Breaking the Cult of Masculinity –The Other Lamb, Midsommarand Empowerment on Screen

It is not only cult cinema but also the representation of the ‘cult’ on screen that can provide vital opportunities to de-centre destructive masculinity and ask questions about wider gender power struggles. Female characters that are at the centre of cult cinema, driving the narrative and breaking the rules of masculine control are not a new phenomenon. From Pam Grier’s ferocity in films such as Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown(1974) to Kurt Russell’s brutal takedown in Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007), cult film has long been a platform for destabilising the notion of traditional gender hierarchies. The notion of the ‘cult’ itself, however, has long been thought of and (represented on screen) as an all-male power trip with disastrous consequences for those that believe. As far back as The Seventh Victim (1943) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968), there have been many manifestations of cult violence towards woman on screen but there is also a cannon of films that use cinematic representations of the cult to change the narrative and bring wider gender politics to the surface. Two such contemporary examples of this are Małgorzata Szumowska’s The Other Lamb (2020) and Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019). Both films offer nightmarish manifestations of cult mechanisms and control that at first seem to once again place men and masculinity in pole position. This paper will examine how the narrative, character and cinematic language of both films offer a more complex and subversive discourse linked to female empowerment. They use the medium to offer cautionary, and often shocking, on-screen representations that attempt to disrupt traditional, male led power structures and can also be read as a commentary on wider society and not simply the cults that they portray.

Fiona Volpe: A New Perspective on James Bond's Iconic &lt;em&gt;Femme Fatale&lt;/em&gt;

While narratives of gender politics and female identity in Western visual culture have become more dynamic with the passage of time, one of the most contentious spheres of discussion in mass media surrounds that of Ian Fleming’s ultimate fictional creation, James Bond. Female sexuality and gender politics in the Bond universe has been robustly, and rightfully, scrutinised by academic and casual spectators for at least 50 of the 70 years since his inception. Yet, one of the most enduring characters in the cinematic canon has not yet been given this discerning treatment, in earnest. Originally called "Fiona Kelly" by screenwriters Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins, Fiona Volpe was portrayed by Italian actress Luciana Paluzzi-Solomon in Terence Young’s 1965 film adaptation of Thunderball. In November 2017, I had the opportunity to interview Mrs. Paluzzi-Solomon for a now-abandoned book concept. As one of the few actresses from the Sean Connery-era who are still living, she was remarkably forthcoming regarding her professional and personal experiences on set. Without pride or prejudice, Mrs. Paluzzi-Solomon’s account proved to be not only to be illuminating in and of itself as an interview, but also served as a foundation to better understand the origins, development, and public reception of the gold standard femme fatale of the Bond films. This article will explore the character of Fiona Volpe, her origins, plot function, and legacy, from the unique perspective of the woman who brought her to life.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Evolution of Community Thought: From The Yellow Wallpaper to Herland

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent American novelist and feminist, well-known for her works The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland, which have drawn considerable attention from scholars at home and abroad and aroused wide discussion since their publication. In most cases, the former was regarded as a classic of gender politics and the latter, a feminist utopia. Through the detailed analysis of the two works, it can be found that Gilman has interwoven the spirit of community into the two works, considering it as the right path to gaining women&amp;rsquo;s equality and freedom. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman just implicitly puts forward women alliance as a potential way to liberate women; while in Herland, Gilman describes the harmony between people (women) and the surroundings, between people (women) and people (men), which demonstrates that Gilman is more resolute and more confident in community and cooperation. In the meanwhile, from the two works, it can be found that Gilman&amp;rsquo;s thought on community is changing and more and more progressive and that the forming of community is a more effective way to contribute to personal growth and development.

‘We’ve got this policy, now what?’ The security politics of implementing the Family Protection Law in Jordan

In this article, I bring together scholarship from feminist international relations and comparative gender politics to investigate how and why Jordan has implemented its policy addressing domestic violence, the 2008 Family Protection Law. Through a qualitative case study, I find that implementation is partial. Aspects of the policy that elevate Jordan’s status in the international arena and sustain domestic male privilege are implemented. Attempts at implementing aspects of the policy that grant greater autonomy to women are met with intense opposition, which is justified on the basis of preserving state stability. Taken together, this article demonstrates how international pressure and national security (i.e., state-centric) practices combine with domestic conservatism to produce unintended consequences: ineffective violence against women policies that are minimally implemented. The analysis adds nuance to both the feminist international relations and comparative gender politics literatures by demonstrating how domestic gender policymaking processes are influenced by national and international security politics.

The semantics of gender, politics, and religion in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body

Zimbabwean literature produced after the attainment of independence has been predominantly engrossed with thematisation of the postcolonial subaltern subjects’ existential conditions, enunciated together with gender politics, religion and socio-economic environment that frame politics of difference, and sites of suffering or resistance. These tropes remain absorbing and critical even in contemporary female-authored novels that also engage with a deeply fractured modern-day Zimbabwe. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, This Mournable Body, offers important site to debate the enduring concerns of gender inequalities, politics, and religion. A stylistic approach is adopted to identify the semiotic construction of the text and discuss the different styles that are deployed to foreground central tropes in the novel. The adoption of stylistics as an underlying conceptual model locates this current study in the interdisciplinary research which brings together gender, applied linguistics, poetics, politics, and religion, in order to provoke new ways of reading the dialogic and polyphonic elements of the text. The study contends that the politics of difference is an unsettling subject that profoundly impacts on gender relations and religio-political practices in a milieu where precarity is a major defining feature of the subaltern sections comprising women and the marginalised poor. Thus, the novel’s title figuratively foregrounds the (un)mournable bodies of the people, who are both dehumanised and heavily burdened by surviving at the margin.Contribution: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, This Mournable Body demonstrates a deep concern with the plight of the subaltern people in a gendered society and how their conditions of the Othered bodies are further amplified by both religion and politics in present-day Zimbabwe. Thus the study contributes to the mounting discourses about politics of fragmentation and binary practices, and the ensuing agony suffered by the sidelined persons. The adopted stylistic reading of the focus novel underscores the interdisciplinary urgency to literary interpretative process.

A Cross-Sectional Study of Gender Politics in Nepal

This research paper examines the different dynamics of intersectionality in the political and cultural set-up of Nepal, where people of different religions, ideologies and ethnicities have lived for centuries. The paper tried to argue that variables such as class, gender, ethnicity, religion, region, disability and even caste influence the political and social status of Nepal. To study the real problems of women, all those parts that directly or indirectly affect their position must be underlined in the research paper. The article uses Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality to examine the dominant variables of patriarchy. The article focuses on the problems of Madheshi, Muslim and Dalit women who have always been marginalized in the political and social framework of the country. The primary finding of the study is that women belonging to marginalized class, caste, ethnicity, disability, religion and region are more oppressed in the country than women belonging to other categories. Because intersectionality is a burning approach to analyzing the position of women in patriarchy, theorists and researchers whose perspectives and ideas matter are brought into the discussion.

Decolonial Excesses: Racial and Sexual Dissidence in Johan Mijail’s Amor Vegetal

Johan Mijail (1990), born in the Dominican Republic, stands out a trans performer who systematically seeks to destabilize heteronormative culture and colonial legacies ingrained in the politics of race, gender, and sexuality. In her most famous performance Amor vegetal (2015), the naked artist does headstands while inserting small branches, leaves or flowers in her rectum. By placing the “obscene” at the center of her work, Mijail creates alternative knowledge that challenges traditional values of homophobia, Catholicism, and fear of Blackness, all located at the heart of libidinal politics in Abya Yala. In Amor vegetal the artist creates a procto-poetics of the obscene through excess, which offers up the anus/ass as a transfeminist, decolonial, and countersexual axis.

Is there a religious bias? Attitudes towards military humanitarian intervention in Germany

Abstract Is individual support for internationally agreed military humanitarian interventions (MHIs) subject to a religious bias? Conducting a vignette-based survey experiment, the paper provides micro-level evidence for such a bias within a highly unlikely sample: German university students. Participants in our survey experiment were more compassionate and indeed more supportive of an MHI when the victims of war-related violence were Christians rather than Muslims. The paper thus contributes to the literature on support for MHIs in two important ways: first, whereas the existing literature has a strong focus on the United States, this paper studies individuals’ support in another Western country that regularly contributes to MHIs, namely Germany. Second, while the existing literature has mainly examined how other social factors, such as the race or gender of the victims, affect individuals’ support for MHIs, drawing on social identity theory, this paper claims that religious identification also has an impact. Moreover, by showing that the religion of the victims of war-related violence shapes individuals’ attitudes towards MHIs through compassion, the paper also speaks to more recent literature that demonstrates that individuals’ attitudes towards refugees depend on – among other things – their religion. Against the background of a general rise of identitarian politics in many Western societies, our findings seem to be of particular relevance.

Feminist Utopias in the Early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT The first two decades of the twentieth century saw an intense period of international feminist organising and campaigning. Organisations such as the International Alliance of Women (1904), the Socialist Women’s International (1907), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1915) exemplified the transnational geography of the movement. This was also a time in which women’s writing moved in new ways, imagining speculative utopian worlds to accompany their radical gender politics. This article examines two literary feminist utopias from the early twentieth century: Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–3) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905). While US writer Hopkins’s Of One Blood offers an early Afrofuturist or Black internationalist utopia that reflects women’s struggles, Hossain presents a simultaneously feminist and anti-colonial imagining of the world. Both these works, in an internationalist tradition, criticise both patriarchal and racist or colonial world orders, demonstrating the vital role played by literary utopian works in feminism of the early twentieth century.

NEWSWATCH: Gendered Politics at Work and Play

NEWSWATCH: Gendered Politics at Work and Play

15. The Gendered Politics of Gender Politics

15. The Gendered Politics of Gender Politics

Gendering Late Medieval Habsburg Dynastic Politics: Maximilian I and His Social Networks

Abstract While gender history has developed into a powerful branch of premodern history, we still know little about gender relations around Maximilian I. One reason is that research concentrated for a long time on the individual personality of the emperor without paying much attention to the manifold relations among men and women that in fact contributed to establishing his rule. Another reason is the specific constellations of Maximilian's relationships with his wives Mary of Burgundy and Bianca Maria Sforza, with his daughter Margaret of Austria and grand-daughter Mary of Hungary, which have been mostly discussed in the framework of their personal courts and regional politics and less in a wider comparative perspective. Against the backdrop of recent approaches to dynastic politics, role models, and agency, I will, first, discuss the gendered dimensions of Maximilian's dynastic politics in their wider geo-political and socio-cultural context. I will, second, move beyond a focus on key dynastic actors to take into account personal networks as fundamental for any type of premodern rule. Following court ladies and female servants and the social networks they were part of I will outline the interrelations between social ascent, office, and the politics of kinship and gender at court.

The political ecologies of fire: Recasting fire geographies in British Columbia, Canada

How fires burn across British Columbia (BC), Canada is shaped by settler coloniality, timber capitalism, state forestry regimes, criminalization of burning, and Indigenous resistance. Despite the urgency of confronting the fire suppression paradox embedded in settler colonial fire management laws and practices, approaches to studying fire in Canada that foreground Indigenous law and de-center settler colonial governance is scarce. As political ecologists and geographers working and living in the context of unceded and ancestral lək̓ʷəŋən, W̱SÁNEĆ, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səlilwətaɬ, and syilx territories, we engage with Indigenous feminist scholarship to expose how coloniality and gender intersect in attempts to erase Indigenous sovereignty to structure and naturalize provincial fire policy and its emplaced impacts on Indigenous legal orders. Our analysis contextualizes settler-colonial provincial fire management policy in the purview of Indigenous legal orders to foreground how racial-colonial and gendered politics are obscured when colonial fire and wildfire practices are naturalized. Revisiting key moments in the political development of fire suppression across so-called BC, we contend that the suppression paradox is embedded in and reproduces a colonial logic that widens existing social and economic gaps. These gaps are uniquely gendered, as settler coloniality operates upon patriarchal lines that have actively attempted to erase Indigenous women and Two-Spirit peoples, including the laws and legal authorities that they possess and practice. Considering the 1910 Fulton Commission, we highlight an example of how women and Indigenous people were excluded from the political decision-making structures that shaped colonial fire management practices in BC. These gendered and racialized exclusions bear directly on the exclusion of Indigenous women and gender-diverse folx, and Indigenous legal orders guided by matriarchal lines of fire knowledge.

Unmothering the Conversation on Gender in Academia

The number of academic women working in universities has increased significantly in Chile. This article analyzes discourses on gender in the Chilean higher education system coming from academics working as scholars in the educational field in private and public universities in three different regions of the country. Based on a large qualitative study on research policies, we revisited data from 43 semistructured interviews with feminist poststructural discourse analysis (FPDA) to reflect the ways gender policies on research are being designed, justified, and resisted within academic spaces. The results show that the promotion of gender policies has been reduced to an idea of women as a homogeneous category, leaving aside a complex comprehension of politics of care and gender, without incorporating intersectionality in the discussion. This has an impact on the resistance to the advancement of gender policies in research and the perpetuation of sexism within academic spaces.

‘You ensure your own safety’: gender, fear and tourism labour in the gig economy in Turkiye

The platform or gig economy has had a profound impact on the tourism ecosystem. However, the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) warns that whilst platforms can contribute to more gender equality, they can also reinforce sexism and inequality. While platforms offer access to informal micro-entrepreneurship, they can also expose women to heightened vulnerability due to limited control over clients and lack of legal protection. Our research questions the link between gender roles, spatial fear, and platform workers’ experiences. Our findings indicate that despite Istanbul’s evolving urban tourism landscape, the prevailing gender politics in Turkey continues to uphold conservative gender norms that result in gendered labour divisions and gendered public space access. As female platform workers navigate safety concerns and feelings of fear in Istanbul, productivity becomes spatially constrained, despite their efforts to adapt using diverse innovative approaches. Interesting conclusions are drawn regarding the future of work via the finding that platforms create a hybrid employment model blurring host-guest lines, raising questions about the implications for platform workers’ safety.