Questions Of Gender Research Articles

How does water talk, and other hopeful questions about and beyond gender and language

The inaugural issue of Gender and Language focused on unanswered questions and unquestioned assumptions. This essay revisits these questions, thinking about next steps not only for the field, but also for the larger feminist, anti-racist, anticolonial world our work aims to build. In particular, I consider two questions with impacts for thinking about how to deepen the political impact of our own work, in the realms of social and environmental justice. First, how can we ensure the kind of work we are publishing in this journal has an impact beyond university conversations? Second, have we gone far enough, as a field, in reconsidering not just questions of gender and of language, but also of what we imagine as persons?

The Director-Research Concept of Stage Influences of Bela Bartok’s Opera "Duke Bluebeard’s Castle"

It was considered the director's approach to modern interpretations of Béla Bartók's opera "Duke Bluebeard's Castle". The research methodology is based on the basic provisions and concepts of musical directing, developed during the twentieth century and supplemented in the process of modern development of musical theater. There were analyzed recent studies of B. Bartok's opera and the work of playwright Béla Balázs. Based on this analysis, the direction of scientific work is clarified, which relates mainly to the intonation nature of the opera "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" and its compositional and dramatic features. The director's research concept of the stage incarnations of B. Bartok's opera opens a perspective for further scientific investigations. The basis on which the study is based is two opera performances in 2020- 2021, created with the participation of the world-renowned Ukrainian artists: Oksana Liniv, director of the opera evening "Judith" at the Bavarian State Opera; Andriy Zholdak, Ukrainian director that staged the play "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" at the Lyon Opera. In the analysis of these opera productions, three main directing principles have been identified, by means of which the material of the opera is actualized, in accordance with today's challenges: these are the principles of supplementing the performance, actualizing of the theme of the performance and visual detailing. There were considered the main fundamental concepts laid down by the authors of the work under study: composer Béla Bartok and libretto by author Béla Balázs, that became the basis for modern directorial interpretations. Emphasis is placed on the director's role in creating a directorial-research concept in the stage embodiment of the opera, which should find a connection between the ideological and artistic content of the opera and modern aspects of world society, which faces current issues of feminism and the role of women in the modern society. The question of gender and its showing on stage is also raised. The director's point of view on these phenomena is reflected in the stage incarnations of the opera "Duke Bluebeard’s Castle", modern productions of which are an indicator of the vector of development of the world music directing in the period 2020-2021. The novelty of the study lies in the selection of the main directing principles of work on the stage realization of B. Bartok's opera "The Duke of Bluebeard" based on the analysis of the productions of this opera in 2020-2021.

Old song, new melody: gender contestations in the appropriated comedy of Samobaba’s Yorùbá Bollywood

ABSTRACT This paper examines issues of gender relations within the context of dominant patriarchy as represented in Samobaba’s Yorùbá Bollywood comedy skits. Seun Shamsudeen, popularly known as Samobaba, has produced several audio-visual skits, clipped from Indian films (also known as ‘Bollywood’), therefore generating intercultural dialogues for his skits. In these skits, dialogue in Yorùbá language is grafted on verbal and gestural communications in the Indian film pre-text. While the paper engages the gender question in five selected texts on his Instagram platform, its reading of the skits is undergirded by the framework of appropriation, especially in the recent sense of the theory advanced by Matthias Krings in African Appropriation: Cultural Differences, Mimesis and Media. The jocular elements of his comedy are made more visible through the appropriation aesthetics which in turn become instruments through which the subject of gender is brought to the fore. In the end, the paper submits that Samobaba’s Yorùbá Bollywood is a projection of digital imaginaries that deserve further scholarly attention. This is because, apart from its entertainment potentials, it provides another platform through which gender relations are interrogated and, in the process, patriarchy is contested and sometimes subverted.

Global Capitalism, Racism, and Social Triage during COVID-19

The theory of global capitalism offers useful tools for understanding the socio-structural determinations that result in enduring global health inequities. The theory’s conceptual framework highlights the role of transnational corporations, financialization, consumerism, transnational social classes, and the transnational state in affecting the production and distribution of economic resources, spread of cultural ideologies, and exercise of political power. To understand the health consequences and economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the theory of global capitalism offers a holistic approach for understanding the current geopolitical order as well as its inherently contested nature. However, the approach often elides questions of race and gender while privileging class analysis. To understand the intersectionality in the reproduction of capitalist globalization, the concept of social triage offers an organizational level of analysis to interrogate how bureaucratic decision-making leads to racial and gender health inequalities at the global and national levels. The examples of essential workers, immigration detention, and disparate access to medical technologies reveal the necropolitical reality of an anti-Black pandemic, contributing to current debates about racial capitalism.

의사결정 나무 모형 분석기법을 활용한 자살 생각에 영향을 미치는 위기 학생의 생태학적 요인 탐색

The primary purpose of this study was to explore the ecological factors of at-risk students with suicidal thoughts among second-year middle school students, participated in the 5th year of the Gyeonggi Education Panel Study (GEPS). The decision-tree model, one of the machine learning algorithms, confirmed the intersectionality between suicidal ideation and the ecological factors of students at risk. For students who answered “strongly agree” and “not at all” to the question of suicidal ideation, mental health, attachment alienation, academic stress, gender, household income, and delinquency factors were identified as major factors with statistical significance. Based on the decision-tree model and its results, it was emphasized that it is necessary to understand the psychological and emotional needs, the home environment, and the school environment of students in crisis from an ecological perspective. In addition, the implications of the data-based approach, such as the decision tree model for School-Wide Positive Behavior Supports and the school safety integrated system (Wee project), were discussed.

A pilot study of social and structural determinants of health (SSDOH) measures in an Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) cohort

AbstractBackgroundResearch shows that people have different experiences, opportunities, and challenges depending on their background and life circumstances. These circumstances can be important social and structural determinants of health (SSDoH) that may help explain heterogeneity in cognitive, functional, and interventional outcomes in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRDs). The National Institute on Aging has set as a priority understanding the effects of SSDoH. This information may help elucidate disease mechanisms and modifiers as well as aid discovery of disease modifying treatments that are effective across diverse populations.MethodA battery of SSDoH measures was constructed based on instrument content relevance and psychometric properties. The battery is being pilot tested in a diverse cohort of older adults. We will report the results of that pilot testing.The battery consists of self‐report measures in 6 categories: (1) Education: highest grade or academic level completed, (2) Occupation: occupational cognitive requirements score (OCRS) and occupation description, (3) Economic Status and Strain: financial strain (2‐item mean index), total economic problems (7‐item inventory, range: 0–7) and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) socioeconomic status index, (4) Subjective Stress: Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS), Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), self‐report primary caretaker well‐being, and the Social Deprivation Index (SDI), (5) Early Life Stressors: parental stressors (3‐item mean index), parental educational involvement (2‐item mean index), hunger (1 item), and parental/caregiver education, occupation and health status during participant’s childhood (3 items), (6) Subjective Social Support and Status: Social Network Index (SNI) and the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status. Sociodemographic data collected includes self‐report of age, race, and sex, orientation, gender and identity (SOGI) questions. Collection of race data is based on National Institutes of Health (NIH) standards.ResultWe describe the results of pilot testing of SSDoH measures in the Penn ADRC UDS cohort, including return rates, participant experience, and other measures of feasibility and usefulness.ConclusionWe discuss the feasibility of routinely collecting SSDoH data in an ADRC research cohort. We describe factors to consider when selecting modules to implement in standing cohorts and options for adapting the SSDoH module‐based battery to a range of research cohorts.

“Dancing Naked”: Gender, Trauma and Politics in the Mystical Poetry of Lal Ded

Lal Ded, the fourteenth century Kashmiri female mystic, is revered as a spiritual exemplar by both the Hindus and the Muslims of Kashmir. She walked away from a difficult marriage at the young age of twenty-six to pursue the Śaiva path to spiritual liberation. Lal Ded records her long and arduous spiritual journey in a Kashmiri poetic form, vākh (a short poem of four lines with four stresses in each line), which is also one of the earliest genres of Kashmiri poetry. Even though most scholarship on Lal Ded’s vākhs does invoke her difficult life as a Kashmiri woman in a turbulent political milieu, it rarely poses the question of gender and politics in relation to her mystical poetry. My paper offers a close reading of selected vākhs to argue that the figures of loss (rāvan-tyol, loss-blister), shame (mandchhi hạ̄nkal, iron fetters of shame) and joy (nangaē natsun, dancing naked) in Lal Ded’s mystical poetry can be read not merely as stages on the path of a Śaiva liberation but also as a distinctive proto-feminist perspective on political self-transformation.

Gender Transitioning and Variance in Children and Adolescents: Some Temporal and Ethical Considerations

ABSTRACT This paper considers how a psychoanalytic approach is positioned to listen empathetically to gender variance. Sexuality for children and adolescents is a site of both intense curiosity and fluidity and it is not unusual for an intensive interrogation of subjectivity to be directed through questions of gender and sexuality. But psychoanalysis diverges from advocacy-based and affirmative approaches today by approaching gender identity as informed by a question that is driving a gender-based answer. Hence, it allows time in analytic work for a question to emerge that a gender position or identity may be answering. This is an ethical approach that supports a space for desire that is not altogether reducible to identity, and is premised on the impossibility of satisfactorily reconciling mind and body in all forms of identity.

Framing gender in Mughal South Asia

AbstractResearch on gender in Mughal South Asia has tended to focus either on the nature of the harem and elite female seclusion or, alternately, on constructions of elite masculinity. The first body of literature centers on debates as to the degree to which the harem functioned to limit (elite) women and constrain their political, economic, and social roles. The second analyzes how normative masculinity took shape during different reigns, according to both the preferences of the emperor and his advisors as well as the broader socio‐political context. Taken as a whole, this body of work provides nuanced, contextualized accounts of how gender functioned to shape the lives and/or representations of elite men and women, even as it echoes archival sources in focusing on Mughal elites and tends to be framed primarily in terms of the Persianate or Islamicate world. Recent research suggests not only the value of examining questions of gender in relation to non‐elites, but also the relevance of the household and the family, the influence of the Indic, the relationship of notions of gender to understandings of the body itself, and alternatives to a narrowly defined gender binary.

When the Subaltern Speaks: Race and Gender in Selected Works by ZadieSmith and LeilaAboulela

When the Subaltern Speaks: Race and Gender in Selected Works by ZadieSmith and LeilaAboulela

BODY, GENDER AND BOLLYWOOD

Bollywood as an industry can be seen as a cultural industry which produces visual texts that embodies cultural and social milieu of the Indian society. The question of gender and body and their depiction has always been at the forefront of the discussion on feminist analysis of the bollywood movies. This paper tries to understand that connection between reel and real and how notions which are in ideology can turn the visual texts as confirmative vessels, especially related to gender and body of female.

The Art of Rambling: Journeys through Space and Time with Mary Kingsley, Rose Macaulay, Ursula Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison and Octavia Butler

In “The Art of Rambling: Journeys Through Space and Time”, Sarah LeFanu will look at the travels and travel-writings of, predominantly, Mary Kingsley and Rose Macaulay, and will boldly suggest some connections with the science fictional spacewomen and time-travellers of the second wave of feminism. She will talk about five travelling women whose lives span over one hundred years, and look at some of the connections between them in their lives and in their writing. By focusing on the experience of the five authors in a larger socio-cultural and literary context, LeFanu will trace the implications of writing and travelling vis-à-vis the intersectionality of one’s personal commitments and motivations, with the aim to discovering how these are inflected by questions of gender and gender bias, consequently bearing upon the shape of modern discourses of women travel and travel writing. While each of the women travelled in different modes and to different places, for every one of them the imaginative worlds of their childhoods inspired them to engage with the world outside, an engagement that was not just personal but was also profoundly political.

The Art of Rambling: Journeys through Space and Time with Mary Kingsley, Rose Macaulay, Ursula Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison and Octavia Butler

In “The Art of Rambling: Journeys Through Space and Time”, Sarah LeFanu will look at the travels and travel-writings of, predominantly, Mary Kingsley and Rose Macaulay, and will boldly suggest some connections with the science fictional spacewomen and time-travellers of the second wave of feminism. She will talk about five travelling women whose lives span over one hundred years, and look at some of the connections between them in their lives and in their writing. By focusing on the experience of the five authors in a larger socio-cultural and literary context, LeFanu will trace the implications of writing and travelling vis-à-vis the intersectionality of one’s personal commitments and motivations, with the aim to discovering how these are inflected by questions of gender and gender bias, consequently bearing upon the shape of modern discourses of women travel and travel writing. While each of the women travelled in different modes and to different places, for every one of them the imaginative worlds of their childhoods inspired them to engage with the world outside, an engagement that was not just personal but was also profoundly political.

Black “Crime,” Public Hysteria, and the Cinema of Containment: Black Cinema Aesthetics from Willie Dynamite to The Interrupters and a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert

This essay will explore the ways in which African American visual culture has attempted to negotiate criminalization and the current situation of what Richard Iton rightfully characterizes as “hyperincarceration.” It will explore the ways in which contemporary African American visual culture is engaged in negotiating between the literal material realities and consequences of mass incarceration and aesthetic constructions of violence. While mass incarceration is increasingly becoming understood as “the New Jim Crow” for African American political organizing, Black criminality has become the key lens through which questions of masculinity, class exclusion, gender, and selfhood get negotiated in African American visual culture. This essay will argue that the “subtext of ongoing Black captivity” is the pretext for much of what drives Black action genres and African American representation in general as a key signifier of a racialized identity and as an indicator of a Black subjectivity fraught with complexities of non-belonging.

To blow the whistle in Brazil: The impact of gender and public service motivation

AbstractGiven weak protections for whistleblowers in Brazil – a country with over one million federal civil servants and a well‐known history of corruption scandals – how common is whistleblowing? This study presents results from a survey completed by 652 federal civil servants in Brazil. Examining the incidence of wrongdoing, whistleblowing, and retaliation, as well as the role of gender and public service motivation (PSM), we find that women tend to report wrongdoing less often than men, are less willing to engage in subsequent acts of whistleblowing, and experience more retaliation. Similar to previous studies, PSM is positively related to whistleblowing and retaliation diminishes intentions to engage in subsequent whistleblowing. Unlike previous studies, we find that PSM is more predictive of whistleblowing for women than for men. In contributing new findings to research on whistleblowing in lower to middle‐income democracies, this paper contains important policy implications, particularly on the critical question of gender.

The Indian Women Writers and their Contributions to Indian Literature

The Indian women writers are the one who mainly talks about the male ego and female desire for freedom. Through their writings women writer tries to oppose the male dominance over them. Indian women writers depict the injustices, the anguish and the despair they received in a male dominated society. Many of the writings can be considered as a mutiny against the restraints which the society thrust upon women. In this man-centered world they are trying to bring out the feminine identity through their works. Indian women writers never attempted to adopt any masculine roles to achieve themselves as equal as men, but through their writings they came across all the barrier of class, gender and space boundaries. They try to project masculinity and femininity as equal categories. Though through their works the Indian women writers tries to project women’s responses to gender questions. However, they tried to depict the fact that writings of women need not be differentiated by language or location.

Why Publishing Now?

Abstract This essay is a response to the eight essays collected under the title “Literature and Publishing, 1945–2020.” In this response, I consider the timing of such a collection: Why publishing now? Why should we be reimagining literary history through the lens of publishing at this particular moment? I suggest that we can only fully grapple with the relationship between literary studies and publishing in the present moment by attending to the relationship between literary studies and the university. In the midst of twin labor crises inflected and exacerbated by questions of race, class, and gender, we must recognize the parallel conditions of those working in publishing and those working in higher education. This project’s timely interest in the institutions that shape the contemporary literary field—publishers, agencies, distributors, prizes, etc.—comes as our toehold on our own institutions (that is, the endurance and relative autonomy of university literature departments) seems increasingly tenuous.

Missions and the Construction of Gender in the Middle East

Abstract The introduction to this special issue considers interdisciplinary approaches to the study of gender within missions to the Middle East, from the nineteenth century to the present. By highlighting the piecemeal nature of existing historical and anthropological research, it throws light on the transnational dynamics and gendered constructions of missionary activity, along with its nationalist dimensions. The studies presented here examine long-term gendered constructions of missionary activities in ways that encompass both femininities and masculinities, along with constructions of womanhood and manhood. By putting the question of gender at the heart of their works, the contributors to this special issue affirm the centrality of gendered approaches for understanding the social, cultural and religious relationships between missionaries and local peoples whom they encountered.

Do innovation and sustainability influence customer satisfaction in retail? A question of gender

As a consequence of advances in the digitisation process and increased consumer awareness of social, economic and environmental issues, more and more companies are embarking on innovative and sustainable initiatives in response to these new demands. However, given the nature and scope of these practices, research in this direction has not reported clarifying results to date, especially when pursuing a marketing approach to their analysis. Through this research, it is intended to test a model that makes it possible to analyse the effect of innovative and sustainable actions on retail and explain their contribution to customer satisfaction. To do this, this research is based on those studies stating that the progress in retailing is based on two main pillars: innovation and sustainability. From a sample of 510 customers across three retail business formats, empirical evidence has been obtained that both innovation and sustainability drive customer satisfaction, but in a different way according to gender, evidencing the moderating nature of this last variable when explaining satisfaction. In this way, the study highlights that the path to achieving satisfaction in retail trade requires the promotion of both innovative (product, marketing and relational innovation) and sustainable (environmental, social and economic) practices, especially in the case of women.

The peculiarities of ideology of the first-wave feminist movement in Alberta: maternal feminism, Anglo-Canadian nationalism, and eugenics

This article examines certain ideological peculiarities of the first-wave feminist movement in the Canadian province of Alberta, and intertwinement of Anglo-Canadian nationalism, maternal feminism and eugenics in the ideological basis of the feminist movement in the early XX century. The author examines the fusion of the questions of gender and nationality in ideology of the feminist movement, and analyzes the formation and realization of a particular feminist agenda in Alberta, which was based on the specific ideology of maternal feminism. Paying special attention to similarity of the ideology and objectives of the Anglo-Canadian nationalistic and feminist movements in the province, the author notes the causes for rapid success of the feminist movement by pivotal goals of the agenda. The scientific novelty of this research is substantiated by the fact that the author is first within the Russian historiography to explore the intertwinement of nationality and gender in ideology of the feminist movement in Alberta. The conclusion is drawn on the interinfluence of Anglo-Canadian nationalism, maternal feminism and eugenics in the ideological basis of the first-wave feminist movement in Alberta, as well as placing in the agenda the question of equal rights of men and women as an important aspect in preservation of Anglo-Canadian ideals for the future generations in Alberta.