Feminist Poststructuralist Theory Research Articles

Woman and the Narratives of Resistance: Introspecting the Re-creation of Draupadi through Dasgupta

The ‘politics of silence’ around the body of women has always been an issue addressed with complexly designed patriarchal structures of negotiation. The concept of women when interrogated with an intersectional lens can be found as a pattern created through the process of a forceful ‘bhava’ (emotion or feelings), that they are meant to perform based on the culture and social structures. The interconnected yet distinguished lines of definition between femininity, feminine, feminism and feminist often provides an echoing vacuum of voice(s) that generates many questions to the inclusive structure of ‘what constitutes a woman’. The primordial view to the presentation of a woman in India draws the burden of endurance, love, self-sacrifice, servitude, silence and reproduction. These roles frame the identity of what a woman should be and the Sati women are generally held as the symbols and markers of such qualities. The cultural diplomacy of India has always re-structured the organization of women in relation to the mainstream male narration(s) in the form of ‘his-story’, making the story of ‘her’ absent and such absence as Simone De Beauvoir regards in her work The Second Sex is the creation of why males are left unmarked and women are marked. Henceforth, this paper shall attempt to re-situate Draupadi (a Sati character from Ancient India) within the political constructs of the definition of women by deconstructing the popular notions of what a woman should be, following post-structuralist feminist theory and an empirical and theoretical methodology

Gendering and slow violence as mundane political practice in early childhood education

ABSTRACT For many years, researchers have attended to gender in early childhood education (ECE) from an equity perspective, framed initially by feminist and feminist poststructuralist theories. More recently, researchers have adopted feminist new materialism and feminist posthumanist perspectives to consider gender in ECE. Here we think with the concept of slow violence to contemplate how, in combination with extra-sectionality, gendering is a cumulative and an integral part of the mundane political practices occurring in ECE contexts, lurking in the everydayness of busy settings and ‘hidden in plain sight’. We show how the talk of educators forms an integral part of the practices occurring daily in ECE settings, and how the ways gender is discussed becomes one of the mundane political practices that are cumulative and part of slow violence. This article was prompted by nuances that emerged when probing data from interviews with Australian early childhood educators and by noticing differently, how gender can be constructed in the everyday talk and actions of educators.

Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Elite Athletics: “There’s a Lot of Work Still Yet To Be Done”

Several female athletes have recently challenged the long-standing assumption that pregnancy/parenthood (particularly motherhood) and participation in elite-level sport are mutually exclusive. These women’s actions have elicited change across the elite athletics industry and have sparked a need for further research to understand how elite athlete-parents perceive these shifts. We used feminist poststructuralist theory, feminist participatory action research, and semistructured interviews to explore the perspectives of 21 pregnant and parenting elite/international and world-class athletes (11 women and 10 men) on the developing degree of acceptance of parenthood in elite athletics. Through feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, we identified that, despite considerable recent advancements, there is still a need for continued change in the degree to which pregnant/parenting elite athletes are accepted and supported within elite athletics.

Capable of Anything: Ethiopian Women and Tourism

ABSTRACT Scholarly contributions argue that concerns about gender need to take into account geographical factors and be viewed in context rather than within a generalised framework. The current study is underpinned by poststructuralist feminist theory to investigate the various gender-viewpoints and how individuals construct their identities in Ethiopia's tourism and hospitality firms. Three major aggregate themes, including gender in employment practices, gender in leadership activities, and gender in entrepreneurial performance, were identified to achieve the set objectives. As a result, the study highlights that the gender aspect in employment, leadership, and entrepreneurship practices appeared gendered, multifaceted, and constantly negotiated. Furthermore, it reveals the importance of realising the various gender viewpoints (identities) and reducing conventional gendered (masculinised) ideologies in employment, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Research implications, limitations, and future agenda are also conversed.

Queer temporalities and the life course: Trans aging in Torrey Peters' Detransition, Baby (2021)

Torrey Peters' debut novel Detransition, Baby from 2021, a Women's Prize for Fiction nominee, problematizes gender norms by telling the story of three main characters: Reese, a trans woman, Ames, who de-transitioned to live as a man again, and Katrina, a Chinese and Jewish cis woman who is also Ames' lover and boss. Ames and Katrina are expecting a child and are testing the possibilities of having a non-conventional family together with Reese. Parenthood is, thus, the central theme of the novel which structures also the sections of book into the time before the conception and the weeks after it. By doing so, the temporal framework of the novel queers the linearity of heteronormative life courses on the form as well as the content level. Therefore, the interplay of form and content invites to critically investigate how the concept of trans time that challenges linearity and normative conformity (Halberstam, 2005) may provide useful insights into trans aging and the life course through this literary representation. Following, contemporary feminist theorists' commitments to negotiate what makes “life more livable for those whose gender presentation, identity, or bodily experience have been judged abnormal, nonexistent, or impossible” (Karhu, 2022, 304–305), this paper aims at carrying out a critical feminist literary analysis of trans aging, queer life courses and the thereof related gendered norms in Peters' novel. By relying predominantly on feminist poststructuralist theories (Butler 2004) and cultural aging studies (Maierhofer, 2019), it is the aim to challenge normativity and limited social norms through this critical literary reading.

Learning about perspectives of patients and colleagues through qualitative research.

Welcome to the third issue, Volume 7, of Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare. As usual, articles demonstrate the immense range of applications for qualitative scholarship in the field of healthcare.
 Before introducing this issue’s articles, I want to welcome some new folks to QRMH. Dr. Paula Hopeck and Dr. Elizabeth Spradley joined our editorial board. Dr. Hopeck teaches at Commonwealth University in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania where she researches end-of-life issues and trains nursing students as they transition into the nursing profession. Dr. Spradley teaches courses in communication and medical humanities at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacagdoches, Texas. Dr. Spradley has published widely on narrative and identity, instructional communication, and work-from-home issues. Also, we have our first-ever book review editor: Dr. Michelle Walter, teaching specialist and lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne. Dr. Walter’s research examines mental illness from the perspective of poststructural feminist theory. Dr. Walter contributed this issue’s book review on mental health in higher education. [...]

“They Seem to Only Know About Bleeding and Cramps”: Menstruation, Gendered Experiences, and Coach–Athlete Relationships

Menstruation is a barrier to women’s sport participation through stigmas, silence, a lack of coach and athlete education, discomfort in communication, and risk of menstrual disorders, especially at nonelite levels. This study provides a qualitative and quantitative, poststructuralist feminist examination of the barriers and facilitators to positive coach–athlete communication and relationships around menstruation. The aim of the study is to create a gender-responsive model of coaching about menstruation. An online questionnaire was completed by 494 athletes aged 16 years or older. Utilizing poststructuralist feminist theory, qualitative and quantitative analysis highlighted women athletes’ experiences with menstruation, particularly surrounding coach–athlete communication. The results illustrated the heterogeneity of menstruation experiences, with athletes’ previous gendered experiences leading them to resist and/or uphold traditional, masculine-centric gender norms in sport. Most athletes experienced negative menstruation symptoms, but many did not speak with coaches about menstruation, highlighting menstruation’s current position as a siloed topic in sport, usually reserved just for women coaches. Athletes did not discuss menstruation due to discomfort, coach ignorance, menstruation stigmas, and fears of consequences. Athletes largely agreed coaches knowing and discussing menstruation would bring benefits, such as performance improvements, stronger coach–athlete relationships, and erasure of menstruation stigma. Overall, barriers to menstruation discussions include stigma, antagonism and pessimism, and maintenance of a masculine norm. A model of gender-responsive coaching around menstruation is proposed for coaches and sport organizations, which promotes integration and proactivity, tolerance and trust, and protection of athlete voice and agency.

İbrani Mitinin Yıkımı: Anita Diamant’ın Kırmızı Çadır’ında Dişil Yazı

Anita Diamant’s first novel The Red Tent (1997) retells the story of Dinah, Jacob’s and Leah’s daughter, Joseph’s sister in the Genesis chapter of the Old Testament. In this revised story, Diamant creates Dinah, the silenced woman of the Old Testament, as the narrator of the novel. Weaving a different narrative than the Hebrew myth, the narrator tries to subvert hierarchical structures of phallogocentrism by focusing on women’s bodies, femininity, and sexual power. This study, basing its argument on post-structuralist feminist theory, examines how patriarchal ideology and discourse are challenged through female language and ‘feminine writing’. The analysis of the rewritten text reveals that feminine writing frees the female body and female sexuality from the authority of androcentric ideology. Additionally, the textual strategies, used by Diamant to deconstruct the patriarchal order and to create a gynocentric myth, present alternative definitions of female identity.

Women as Marginalized Beings: A Reflection on the Intersectionality of Marginalization within Indian Literary and Social Framework.

As Elizabeth J. Meyer wrote in the book Queering Straight Teachers Discourse and Identity in Education is that, “Queer theory goes beyond exploring aspects of gay and lesbian identity and experience. It questions taken-for granted assumptions about relationships, identity, gender, and sexual orientation. It seeks to explode rigid normalizing categories into possibilities that exist beyond the binaries of man/woman, masculine/feminine, student/teacher, and gay/straight” (Meyer, 1). Among these series of complexly designed network of marginalization, which is a branched and towered regime of oppression in Indian framework, so, I select Gender and Caste as that lens to depict the narratives of marginalized identity- women. The concept of “women” as Judith Butler defines in her famous work Gender Trouble 1990- “Women are the sex which is not “one”. Within…a phallogocentric language, women constitute the unrepresentable…women represent the sex that cannot be thought, a linguistic absence and opacity” (Butler, 13). The identity of a woman gets trapped between some supposed and created links, which therefore my paper will try to discern, by the application of queer post-structuralist feminist theory, in both few selected literary texts- Mahasweta Devi’s Rudali and Breast Stories, Chitra Banerjee Devakaruni’s Mistress of Spices, Vine of Desire, and Sister of My Heart, and social context- women as subject of politics within the rape culture.

Through a glass, darkly: Gazing into the field of carers in academia

AbstractCarers in academia is a young but growing field, which has quickly expanded since the 2000s and has gained new momentum during the Covid‐19 pandemic and the accompanying disruptions of personal and professional lives. It is also one which, through its associations with reproductive and women's work, remains relatively marginalised. This article examines the English language research literature on carers in academia. Drawing upon feminist poststructuralist theories, we contend that, because the literature is not ‘out of the discourses’ of care and academic work and, instead, contributes to construct the objects it speaks of, the state of the field is a matter of cognitive and social justice. Following the presentation of the methodological and theoretical frameworks and a discussion of the authorial voices framing the field, we consider the relative in/visibilities of various groups of care/rs. Drawing on a review which identified 158 relevant texts, we find research in the field broadly ignores male, disabled, BME and LGBTQ+ carers, as well as ancillary workers and professional groups other than academics, and forms of care work other than parenting healthy, abled children. We then move to discussing the liminalities of care, noting the absence of studies of care work in academia related to non‐humans and to end of life. We conclude by pointing out the need for further reflexivity in terms of how processes of knowledge production include and exclude in ways that are complex and fluid.

Negotiating and Voicing: A Study of Employment Experiences among Vietnamese Marriage Immigrant Women in Taiwan

Applying a sociocultural approach and poststructural feminist theories as its framework, this study analyzed interviews with nine Vietnamese marriage immigrant women in Taiwan to explore their employment experiences in the process of crossing national and cultural boundaries. These low-skilled women labored to accumulate essential capital and struggled to be workers in demand. They accepted the improved employment quality that was affected by gendered racialization. Stable employment empowered these women, and some even divorced to achieve personal autonomy. The results of this study suggest that employment was significant for the daily lives of these immigrant women. Obviously, their prior socialization in Vietnam and the life experiences and economic structure in Taiwan interacted to contribute to these women’s work experiences, and they continually developed agency and a voice to create their positions and life meanings by participating in the Taiwanese labor market. This study recommends further investigation of marriage immigrant women’s identities and voices in the workplace and their expression of sexuality and femininity in employment.

Military mothering, responsibility, and children’s outdoor risky play: “I do not want my children to be afraid to try things”

Mothers more than fathers are discursively produced as responsible for children’s safety. Wives of members in combat arms occupations in the military may have feelings of responsibility for their children’s safety that are shaped through their involvement in military culture. In this research, we examined the feelings of responsibility mothers partnered with members in combat arms occupations have for their children’s safety during outdoor risky play. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 mothers and used poststructural feminist theory and feminist methodologies. Our findings indicate military mothers feel responsible for their children’s safety during outdoor risky play, but they resist societal pressures to restrict it. Some of the mothers believed there is an increased pressure on women more than men to provide care for their children, and some expressed that being part of a military culture shaped their feelings of responsibility.

Empowering or Responsibilising?

This article contributes to the limited body of work attending to girlhood in children’s nonfiction, with specific focus on collective biographies about women published since 2016. In recent years, children’s nonfiction books about women have proliferated rapidly in the United Kingdom and beyond. This proliferation has coincided with an intensification of academic and public interest in young people’s engagement with feminist ideas, where female empowerment is often marketed as a commodity. The biographies often present narratives of “empowered” women, and the implication of their framing is that readers will consume the texts and be inspired to achieve empowerment as well. Such discourses of empowerment are conducive to neoliberal subjectivities, where the self is regarded as autonomous, self-reliant, and responsible. This article offers a critical content analysis of Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women (2016), Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2 (2017), and three of Kate Pankhurst’s Fantastically Great Women books (2016–2020). My analysis is framed by poststructuralist feminist theories and popular feminism as theorised by Sarah Banet-Weiser. I suggest that, despite the important and admirable intentions underlying their publication, the overarching discourses of girlhood that these texts present are problematic. Specifically, whilst female representation is important, there are undertones that render women and girls individually responsible for themselves, especially for their aspirations and successes. As readers are inspired to take responsibility for their lives, other factors that produce and maintain their unequal status in the first place are eschewed.

Patient-provider power relations in counselling on long-acting reversible contraception: a discursive study of provider perspectives

Contraceptive providers play an essential role in shaping contraceptive decision-making and care, with the potential to constrain patients’ agency. This is a particular concern given the rising hegemony of Long-Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC) and growing evidence of negative patient experiences of LARC promotion and provision. Despite this evidence, little research has considered health providers' perspectives. Drawing on interviews with 22 contraceptive health providers in Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper explored their professional identity construction, focusing on meaning-making in instances of conflict between providers' and patients' priorities and agendas. Guided by feminist poststructuralist theory, the discursive analysis highlights common rhetorical strategies used by participants to (1) justify the use of coercive practices to encourage LARC uptake, and (2) in turn, negotiate positive identities. Findings show how participants grapple with the reproductive politics structuring contraceptive care, including established understandings of the purpose of (long-acting) contraception and contraceptive providers' roles vis-à-vis provision and promotion. The findings point to limitations on contraceptive agency, despite the unanimous endorsement of rights-based voluntary care. Extending the critical literature on LARC and contributing to the under-researched area of contraceptive coercion and agency, the findings of this study have important implications for the delivery of contraceptive care.

Gendered and Racialized Career Sacrifices of Women Faculty Accepting Dual-Career Offers

Dual-career hiring is crucial to cultivating gender equity in the professoriate. Women are more likely than men to be in an academic couple, therefore institutions that do not use dual-career hiring systematically disadvantage women in faculty hiring. Yet, institutional resistance to dual-career hiring is not the only obstacle hindering women in academic couples from entering and progressing in the faculty ranks. Women also make decisions about their employment within a broader social context where gendered norms privilege men’s careers. Gendered norms and gender expectations pressure women in heterosexual couples to make choices that prioritize their partner’s career. In this article, I analyze couple and individual interviews with nine heterosexual faculty couples of color to explore how women make career sacrifices when accepting dual-career offers. I argue that liberal and post-structural feminist theories are insufficient for understanding the career choices of women of color and illustrate how intersectionality is a useful analytical lens for shedding light on racialized factors informing their decisions. The findings extend past understanding by elaborating on not only how women’s position type (e.g., tenure-track vs. clinical) and rank (e.g., tenured vs. not tenured) are seen as negotiable, but also how women sacrifice their institutional and departmental fit. For women of color, these career sacrifices are racialized in ways that are detrimental to their inclusion and job satisfaction. The findings shed light on how gendered career decisions and institutional norms converge to perpetuate women’s underrepresentation in the tenure system and full professor ranks.

Matrices of Violence: A Post-structural Feminist Rendering of Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero and Lola Soneyin’s The Secrets of Baba Segi’s Wives

There is quite a significant discourse on patriarchy and women identity in neo-colonial states. These studies border on dehumanization, victimization, and discrimination against women. Gender activists and women right advocates have been in the forefront of calls for recognition and protection of the rights of women in the African patriarchal society. The interventions recognize the African patriarchal structure, but the advocacy emphasizes the need to accord the female gender a pride of place in the sociocultural milieu. This study identified and analyzed lopsided societal treatment of the female gender in literary works of two African writers of different sociocultural backgrounds using Poststructuralist feminist theory. The study identified the societies reflected in the literary writings as representations of patriarchal societies that place the female gender in less favorable conditions; thus, making it subservient to the male gender. The study concluded that the female gender is disadvantaged in some African societies. The study recommends that all patriarchal societies need to accord the female gender respect and recognition in order to enhance their contribution to social and economic development of the society.

Militarized masculinities in the home: ‘I’m not your army buddy - I’m your wife'

ABSTRACT There is a scarcity of scholarly attention to women’s perspectives of militarized masculinities in the home. As a result, we used semi-structured interviews to examine the perspectives of 16 women partnered with members in combat arms occupations in the Canadian Armed Forces on militarized masculinities in the home. We used poststructural feminist theory and feminist methodologies to inform our approach. Through a critical discourse analysis of the interviews, we identified that displays of militarized masculinities are discursively positioned as problematic in the home and around family. Our findings suggest that the home is a space where militarized masculinities are contested.

A Critical Analysis of Interventions for Women Harmed by Others’ Gambling

At present, gambling studies literature has multiple understandings of family and others affected (FAOs) by gambling harm and their support needs in play, each with different possibilities and constraints for harm reduction engagement with women. Individual psychological approaches have been privileged, eschewing the social and relational situation of gambling and harm in women’s lives. In Australasia, the majority of those seeking support in relation to a significant others’ gambling are women. Gender has been posited as a shaping force in the social stratification system, distribution of resources, and gambling and harm within society. There has been minimal engagement with the lived experiences of FAOs, which limits gambling harm reduction service development and planning. This research critically engaged with gambling harm reduction studies for FAOs, alongside interviews with eight women FAOs who presented to community services from a social constructionist perspective. The aim was to provide insight into how women FAOs position themselves and their support needs in relation to gambling harm and recovery. Data was analysed using thematic analysis informed by feminist poststructuralist theories of language. Results suggested that this small group of women were subject to intersecting patriarchal constraints and economic determinants of gambling harm. Powerful normative and moral constructions of ‘good/bad’ mothers operated to individualise some women’s responsibility for addressing harm in families and to alienate these women from gambling support services. These findings suggest that gambling services must support women and families in ways that go beyond personal functioning, extending into the social and political conditions of possibility for harm and recovery. Critical psychology and coherent gender analysis may offer opportunities to expand the role of gambling support to include advocacy, community development, and more client-led and gender-aware practice with women affected by gambling harm.

Imagining Women: Cultural Representation of Women and Gender in Xhosa Radio Plays Pre-1994

Apartheid was a deeply devastating system to the aspirations, dignity and human rights of black people. Apartheid, though, united them in their struggle for justice which culminated in the 1994 general elections. Despite the attainment of independence, though, black women still had to contend with another form of oppression—patriarchy. This study investigates stereotypical gender representation of women in Xhosa radio plays. The study used a qualitative approach and analyzed radio plays that were broadcast in the apartheid years. Two radio plays; Thamsanqa’s Buzani Kubawo (ask father) and Kheswa’s USomagqabi were analyzed in order to understand how women were written into the plays. Radio plays were decidedly gendered inappropriate and unapologetically biased towards men. In this regard, the study deployed the feminist poststructuralist theory and suggested possibilities for the attainment of women’s emancipation in the new dispensation. It offered that women should challenge the plays’ propagation of gender inequality that hinders women’s equal rights by heeding Cixous’ call that “woman must write woman”. The double oppression of women because of their skin color and gender can only be defied when women themselves tell their own stories. Therefore, the study recommended gender-sensitive radio content and an inclusive staffing at the SABC so as to ensure that radio plays carry a transformative agenda that breaks gender stereotypes such as inequality, marginalization and oppressive marriages. The plays must champion socio-cultural realignment and promote equal education as well as meaningful involvement of women in decision making.

Transgender awareness in early years education (EYE): ‘we haven’t got any of those here’

ABSTRACT The paper marks the growth of interest in transgender rights and argues for the value of transgender awareness as a challenge to gender binary thinking. It identifies early years education as a powerful site for a focus on gender non-conformity and aims to draw together theoretical and practical forms of support for the EYE staff who respond to young children’s gendered expressions on an everyday basis. The authors draw on data gathered within their respective research and professional training trajectories which are understood through queer and feminist poststructuralist theory, together with approaches from transgender studies. These are combined to emphasise gender multiplicities and pluralities of sexuality. The paper examines how staff can be supported towards greater gender sensitivity and considers how the presence of more male teachers in EYE can act as a catalyst for developing a gender flexible pedagogy. It concludes that a growing awareness of transgender benefits the mental health and wellbeing of all young children, and protects gender- variant children from peer abuse.