Sexual Ideology Research Articles

Ad libidinem: Forms of female sexualisation in RoastMe humour

This article reports the findings of a qualitative and quantitative study of seemingly aggressive but inherently benevolent humorous jibes that involve the sexualisation of women in the RoastMe practice performed by a growing social media community on Reddit. Based on a corpus of jocular insults, six forms of sexualisation comments are proposed: hyper-sexualisation, de-sexualisation and meta-sexualisation, each concerning the female body or practices. We account for the distribution of these categories, offering conclusions about humour and sexist ideologies, which RoastMe insults jocularly echo. Although the RoastMe community operates with a humour mindset, producing and recognising sexualisation jibes as a playful activity within a humorous frame, RoastMe insults speak volumes about the contemporary sexist ideologies and the salience of sexuality as a topic arbitrarily invoked in humour performance.

G. A. Cohen’s historical materialism: a feminist critique

ABSTRACT Forty years on, G. A. Cohen’s reconstruction and defence of Marx’s theory of history is still widely, and justifiably, considered the best of its kind, and it remains unsurpassed in clarity, argumentation and textual support. This article presents an under-explored critique of the theory that arises once we recognize that it is meant to apply to the circumstances of women as well as men. The article argues that, when extended to women, the reconstructed theory’s predictions fail to materialize, its characterizations of historical stages fall apart, and its functional explanations appear implausible. In addition, although the theory claims to be able to explain the emergence and diffusion of different ideologies by their effects on productive development, it cannot plausibly explain the presence of sexist ideologies despite their pervasive and profound impact across history. The article concludes by showing that these flaws highlight the many respects in which Cohen’s orthodox version of Marxism is a conservative ideology, and one that egalitarians in particular should view with suspicion. Once we analyse the different components of the theory, the idea of a right-wing Marxism no longer seems as odd as it sounds.

Salome: Oscar Wilde’s Transgressive but Modernistic Story

This essay examines how, as transgressive aesthetics, Wilde employed the sexual challenge in Salome to subvert the dichotomous notions of gender and sexuality in the Victorian fin de siecle. This essay argues that Wilde’s transgressive aesthetics in Salome becomes the main-source to encourage us to reinvent and utilize a modernized Salome in our time. In the second part of the essay, there will be a description of Salome and the attempt to make a correlation between Wilde and the New Woman in order to mark them as sexual libertines, while, in the third part of the essay, there will be an analysis of Salome to find out how Salome subverts the phallocentric sexual ideology. Although Wilde’s Salome was an unaccepted attempt to go against the rigidity of Victorian sexual discourse, his bold transgressive aesthetics eventually prefigured our own modern time, which is the core reason why modern critics and artists are still looking into Wilde’s Salome to bring out another modernistic story.

Sexism and Power Play in the Nigerian Contemporary Hip Hop Culture: The Music of Wizkid

The proliferation of hip hop culture in Nigeria today is a trend which occurs as a result of adoption, adaptation and popularization of American hip hop music. Since its inception in the 1990s to date, the Nigerian hip hop culture has evolved among the youth. The impact of this form of cultural imperialism is evident in the manner in which Nigerian male and female artists copy their American counterparts in the objectification of women as sex symbols. A worrying trend in this popular culture is the sexist representation of women in the lyrics, videos and live performances. This attitude is alien, since women were not widely portrayed as mere sex symbols in the music genres that preceded hip hop in Nigeria. The sexist ideology expressed by most Nigerian hip hop artists has been an issue of academic inquiry in recent times; thus, a content analysis of Wizkid's music was undertaken for this study. Wizkid is one of the most popular Nigerian hip hop musicians. By focusing on a selection of his songs and music videos, this paper aims to ascertain the politics of overtly sexualized images of women in his music. It argues that sexual objectification of women in Wizkid's hip hop music serves as a means of boosting his social status and commercial viability in the Nigerian popular music industries.

The Aging Queer Body

Due to discriminatory patriarchal belief systems, American society prizes youthfulness and celebrates an idealistic, yet virtually unattainable image of the human body. Such beliefs profoundly inform conceptualizations of aging in American society. In addition to a double standard of aging pertaining to sexist ideology that exposes elderly women to particular social sanctions, I seek to explore how individuals of non-heteronormative sexualities and gender identities experience a distinct kind of vulnerability stemming from the relationship between their aging bodies and heteronormative power structures. More precisely, this article looks at Stu Maddux’s documentary Gen Silent (2011) to argue for the necessity of a discourse on aging bodies that includes people of non-heteronormative sexualities and gender identities and thus demands a queering of normative assumptions about aging in general.

Duffs and Puffs: Queer Fashion in Iranian Cyberspace

In Iran, the politically sanctioned discourses of embodiment and body management are based on binary notions of gender and sexuality. These discourses are contested by social trends that reflect political dissent. This article uses a combination of content and visual analysis of three Instagram profiles dedicated to fashion to answer the question: ‘Is queer fashion present in Iranian cyberspace’ and if so, ‘How does it persist against the existing queer-phobic political forces?’ The article explores aesthetic and fashion categories called ‘duffs’ and ‘puffs’ that offer queer embodied extravaganza in Iranian cyberspace, which is a more relaxed geography of morality and leisure in comparison with offline public spaces. The analysis includes duffs and puffs’ life style and performance that entails excessive deployments of femininity and masculinity, and exploration of their political significance and potential to undo gender norms in Iran. While they do not explicitly reject heteronormativity and/or capitalism, their non-participation in the conventional modes of money-making, and their erotic and sexual performance contributes to transformative politics. They offer antagonism to the normative power of mainstream gender and sexual ideologies by staining their heterogeneity through performances of fun, shock and failure.

Manly Colors: Masculinity and Mobility among Globalizing Korean Men

South Korea and its mobile citizens provide a fruitful point of entry for observing how US-based racial hierarchies shift and circulate through and against transnationally and locally inflected ideologies of race, nation, gender, and sexuality. This article explores how the Korean state’s aspirations for global significance and regional dominance express themselves as staged presentations of ostensibly superior Asian masculinity at home (in Asia) and abroad (in the West). Against the backdrop of the South Korean state’s zealous globalizing efforts, cisheteronormative Korean men increasingly assert aspirational Korean masculinities within a transnational field of ranked races and nations. Korean males’ complex and contingent proximities to whiteness demonstrate how state efforts to transform the image of South Korea from a notoriously inhospitable “backward country” (hujin’guk) to a welcoming “advanced country” (sŏnjin’guk) play out in diverse everyday contexts. In making this claim, I follow recent scholarship on men in contemporary Asia that stresses the need for analyzing masculinity through the lens of sexuality and desire. Additionally, this article extends the analysis of practices that transgress the socially constructed boundaries of heteronormative masculinity (e.g., homosocial bonding) beyond the realm of sexuality-defined gay masculinities.

How much of the dark triad is accounted for by sexism?✰

This study explores the relationship between sexism (both hostile and benevolent) and the dark-triad personality traits of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, the Short Dark Triad, and the Dirty Dozen. It also assesses whether the genders differed in dark-triad scores, as in other studies, and whether any gender differences are mediated by sexism scores. In bivariate correlations, sexism accounted for 12%-17% of dark triad scores. The magnitude of correlations between sexism and dark-triad scores were similar for men and women. Replicating earlier research, t-tests indicated that men had higher dark-triad scores than women. Analyses of covariance indicated that these gender differences in dark triad scores were substantially, though not completely, accounted for by hostile sexism. These findings demonstrated that sexist ideology substantially predicted dark-triad scores, suggesting sexism as one source of dark-triad traits. Though correlational, these findings are consistent with the idea that, the dark triad, unlike many other traits, is partly the result of sexism and the socially-supported, unearned male power and privilege that sexism reflects.

Guilt and Its Purification

Guilt and Its Purification

Expected and unexpected effects of sexism on women’s mathematics performance

Research has shown that gender differences in Math performance are partially predicted by sociocultural aspects such as sexist ideologies and stereotypes. This study examined sexist ideologies as predictors of women´s achievement in standardized Math tests, and the mediation role of Math-gender stereotypes and Math self- efficacy, while controlling for abstract reasoning, among high-school girls (H.S.), and university women majoring Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), and in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). Among H.S. girls, data showed the expected indirect effect of Math gender stereotypes on Math achievement via Math self-efficacy. Among university students, model adjustment was less optimal. An unexpected positive relationship between hostile sexism and Math performance in STEM fields emerged. Out data suggest several mechanisms by which ideologies and gender stereotypes affect women´s Math performance.

Bigger, faster, stronger: how racist and sexist ideologies persist in college sports

ABSTRACT US college sports are prime cultural sites of racist and sexist ideological production [Coakley, Jay. 2015. Sport in Society: Issues and Controversies. 11th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill; Eitzen, Stanley D. 2016. Fair and Foul: Beyond the Myths and Paradoxes of Sport. 5th ed. Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield]. Much of the research into the ideological production in college athletics centres media coverage of two men’s commercialized sports (American football and basketball) as the producers of ideologies and one subject (fans) as the consumers of ideologies. Less is known about how ideologies are produced, circulated, and ultimately reproduced amongst college athletes. To address this gap, I use [Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy. New York, NY: Monthly Review] approach to ideology to analyse 47 interviews with Olympic (or non-commercialized) college athletes. Findings position college sport as an ISA with at least three mechanisms – time, behaviour, and language – that hail participants to racist and sexist ideologies rooted in ‘biological’ difference. Findings also explore how college athletes question how their own bodies are constructed by dominant ideologies.

More Than Child’s Play: The Scaffolding Role of Toys, Games, and Play in Children’s Literature

ABSTRACT Scholars have explored the way books about toys inculcate consumer, racist, and sexist ideologies in the young, subversively controllinng their attitudes and behavior. Judging from the scholarship in this area, teachers, librarians, and parents may hesitate before recommending or purchasing toy-centered stories for children. Using insights from play theorists and psychology researchers, this article argues that toy fiction can empower children by both acknowledging their marginalized status and providing models of coping, learning, and agency.

The Street Ideology: Sexual Contours in Nigerian Hip-Hop Music

Nigerian hip-hop thrives on open discussion of sex and sexuality. Although it is generally viewed as unacceptable to engage in uninhibited sexual discussion or behaviour in Nigeria, especially where females are concerned, Nigerian female hip-hop artistes freely indulge in blatant sex-talk and overt sexual display in their music and videos. This study examines sexual ideologies in the lyrics of Nigerian female hip-hop artistes with the aim of teasing out the sex and sexual themes portrayed in relation to the prevailing Nigerian cultural attitude towards sex and sexuality. In this regard, ten song excerpts of seven Nigerian female hip-hop artistes are selected for analysis, using ideological strategies and an aspect of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics—the ideation function of language. The analysis reveals that the success of hip-hop music lies in its lyrical appeal to, and the existential representation of, the subculture of sex and sexuality of the artistes on the street. The study also notes the need for rethinking the concept of sexploitation since women themselves exploit sex (as reflected in their music) and their sexuality to wield power against male hegemony and dominance. On balance, the significance of survival, as a vital human instinct, comes to the fore; and this instinct, which is embodied in the street culture of sex and sexuality, can help the Nigerian female hip-hop artistes thrive in a music industry that operates in the context of male domination and a culture that discourages open expression of sex and sexuality.

The Feminization of Poverty

Poverty among women and girls remains a prevalent social justice and health issue that stunts the life potential and freedom of females throughout the globe. Through referencing four published articles, this text explores the incidence of poverty among women and girls due to gender discrimination, sexist ideologies and practices, and oppression on the basis of gender. Due to the presence of mechanisms that disproportionately generate poverty among females, many girls and women are automatically confined to a life that uniquely strips them of their inherent rights to dictate their future, and are instead forced into a life of perpetual suffering, violence, social exclusion, and ultimately, impoverishment. Examining this issue from a feminist lens is imperative in understanding the inner complexities of how women and girls in different areas of the world experience disadvantages on the basis of gender, especially from a social, political, cultural, and economic perspective. This can allow healthcare providers, such as nurses, to be able to examine such issues from a critical thinking lens, and become increasingly politically active and involved in female advocacy efforts and policy reform. Through nurses becoming increasingly involved in such efforts, dramatic positive change in the lives of women and girls throughout the globe can occur.

Subversive humor against sexism: Conceptualization and first evidence on its empirical nature

Through its many faces, humor may perpetuate inequalities and intergroup differences (disparagement humor) or, on the contrary, it may question such inequalities and differences and try to subvert hierarchies and social asymmetries (subversive humor). This research focuses on the kind of subversive humor that questions and confronts sexist ideology and behaviors and has come to be called subversive humor against sexism or feminist humor. Despite repeated allusions to the subversive function of this type of humor, no empirical evidence shows that subversive humor against sexism constitutes an empirical entity independent from other types of humor. After conceptually defining subversive humor against sexism, in Study 1, five experts analyzed the content validity of a pool of subversive humorous stimuli compared to stimuli from other humor categories (i.e., man disparagement humor and neutral humor). In Study 2 (n = 203), exploratory factor analysis (EFA) empirically isolated three related factors identified as subversive humor against sexism, man disparagement humor and neutral humor. Study 3 (n = 229) replicated these results through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and provided evidence on the specific relationships among this type of humor, feminist identity and collective actions for gender equality.

Representasi Ciuman Romantis-Seksual dalam Film Ada Apa dengan Cinta?

This study aims to identify and analyze representations of romantic-sexual kissing in Indonesian fiction films, those are Ada Apa dengan Cinta? (2001) and Ada Apa dengan Cinta? 2 (2016). This study uses the kissing concept of Linda Williams (2008) which links the presence of kisses to the terminology of romanticism and sexuality and Willem Frijhoff’s (2014) shape and type of kissing that influence the meaning of kisses. The kissing scenes in both films was identified by Roland Barthes’s semiotics method. The results of the study indicate that those two films contain romantic-sexual kissing that further strengthens romantic and sexual ideologies.

Southern Resistance and Northern Defiance: African American Women’s Quest for Freedom and Political Agency

In Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household and Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South, Thavolia Glymph and Hannah Rosen not only illustrate the gruesome violence inflicted onto black women’s bodies, but these historians also show the ways that black women resisted such violence and degradation, re-configuring the definition of citizenship and respectable womanhood. Whereas the prevailing ideology of nineteenth-century conceptions of blackness and womanhood sought to remove, often forcibly, black women from their claim to respectability, virtue, autonomy, and voice, Glymph and Rosen highlight the immense struggles yet tenacious persistence of black women in the American South who imagined an identity for themselves outside of the racist and sexist ideology under which they lived and laboured. When we place Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s book A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City in conversation with Glymph’s and Rosen’s texts, we observe a more nuanced approach to the study of African American women’s experience with and transgression from nineteenth-century American racial conventions. Dunbar charts the social mobility and individual agency of African American women in Philadelphia during the decades preceding the Civil War.

Doing gender online through flirtation

The art of flirtation seems to have proliferated since the advent of Web 2.0 because, among other reasons, online communication is perceived as having lowered risk for embarrassment compared to in-person communication. My research explores the phenomenon of digitally mediated flirtation among American students that involves the formation of new sexual scripts or social norms for online interactions. Findings from interviews and focus groups with students at a small liberal arts college in the northeastern United States reveal the persistence of traditional gender norms within romantic relationships despite ambivalence towards sexual double standards. Heterosexual and queer students alike participate in the reification of gender inequality through their flirtatious interactions. Cultural constructions of risk, as shaped by ideologies of gender and sexuality, play a role in the development of online norms for romantic interactions. The inconsistencies between their awareness of gender inequality and their conventional approach to gender dynamics is evidence of the slow pace of social change in private relationships. This study has implications for understanding how heteronormativity and male dominance shape the ways in which young people do gender in the co-construction of developing digital cultures.

Unweaving Colonial Frames, Restorying Indigenous Potentialities

Unweaving Colonial Frames, Restorying Indigenous Potentialities

Decoding the Undecoded: Sexist Ideology in Sherry Argov’s Why Men Love Bitches?

This paper explores the various strategies of sexism employed by Sherry Argov, the author of the best- selling narrative “Why men love bitches?”: From Doormat to Dream girl- A Woman’s Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship, that was sold and published across the globe in more than thirty languages. The book schools women on ways to succeed in their relationship with men. It appears to empower women to be in control of their lives. The writer employs the term “Bitch” throughout the whole book as an ideal positive symbol of strength that all females should strive to be like. The study aims to analyze the language used to address, describe and guide women. It hypothesizes that women are devalued and negatively represented. The language used is not as it seems to be to authorize women but rather to degrade and humiliate them. It investigates the semantic, lexical and rhetorical strategies that are utilized in the narrative to underpin the hidden ideology. For the data analysis, the paper follows an eclectic approach that applies the theories of Mills’ model of sexism (2008), Feminist Critical discourse analysis developed by Lazar (2005) and the connotations of words and presupposition as introduced by Yule (1996). The study reveals some conclusions that validate the hypotheses. It shows that writers can intentionally choose words of their choice that carry covert meanings to impact readers’ perception. Women should pay more attention to word choices rather than simply accepting what is written as it is.