Social Gender Relations Research Articles

Le défi des femmes haïtiennes de se construire en tant que sujet à la suite des violences basées sur le genre (note de recherche)

This article begins a discussion on gender-based violence against women, especially in the Haitian context. Approached from the perspective of decolonial feminism, gender-based violence is understood through the proliferation of structures of domination, which ensure their production and reproduction. Indeed, an examination of Haiti’s foundation in it’s early years testifies to a configuration of social gender relations that disadvantage women, a situation not unrelated to the gender-based violence of which they are victims. The article focuses on the dynamics between experienced violence and the construction of the subject.

The gendered violence of injecting-related stigma among relatively affluent, suburban women who inject drugs.

In honouring the legacy of Jude Byrne's life-long advocacy for women and mothers who use drugs, this paper presents a case study of a group of women about whom we know little about and hear even less from: women who inject drugs in relatively affluent suburbs. Based on a 2020 qualitative study of people who inject drugs in an affluent area of Sydney known as 'The Beaches', we use in-depth interview data to thematically explore the lived experiences of gendered stigma among women who inject drugs. Even when women occupy the 'ideal' social position in terms of class (middle-class) and race (White) they remain subject to harmful forms of gendered stigma related to injecting drug use. Participants had internalised negative attitudes around injection drug use as a form of failed femininity and, despite being part of 'good' families and neighbourhoods, participants experienced forced child removal. Taking the lead from feminist intersectionality scholarship, our data illustrate how stigma and discrimination act as a form of structural violence against women who inject drugs in affluent communities. While the social relations of gender provide some degree of protection by 'performing proximity to Whiteness', gendered stigma and violence persist.

Representation of Tribal women in Panchayat Raj Institutions

Tribal women play the significance role in every society of that particular composition of population. It amount to nearly half of the population and therefore this significant half of its population it is inherently important to ensure their equal presence and participation in the larger process of decision local governance. Panchayati Raj institution as integral, both to democratic self-governance and democratic decentralisation in grass root level in India. Women have always and almost everywhere been on the fringe of political and social power. Women’s leadership has to emerge from the grassroots to gain confidence and to make a claim at higher levels. But it is being said that “Women have come into politics as proxy candidates and continue to be manipulated by powerful patriarchal elites. The barriers of gender division of labour, women’s low levels of mobility, seclusion, lack of information and negotiation skills, internalised low self image, stereotypes and lack of confidence continue in some degree. Generally Panchayats and the higher level political institutions have the same ideology for women’s place there - no women or token women though giving absolute formal equality with one person, one vote and no formal barriers to their entry. For the first time the constitutional amendment mandated one-third minimum reservation for women in the Panchayats. The constitutional amendment has made the composition of Panchayats wider within a broad framework of this amendment, but the social relations of gender are intertwined with local social, economic and political institutions. Decentralisation promotes participation and improves the controlling function held by the lower levels of the political system and hence could be a good policy option for enhancing women’s political participation.

Visual Gender Stereotypes (Advertisement, Social Media)

Visual Gender Stereotypes (Advertisement, Social Media)

Social relations of gender in contexts of precarious water supply and their impacts on women in rural areas

A significant portion of the Brazilian population is excluded from easy access to water, especially in rural areas. Women play a fundamental role in terms of water resources in this context. Given the theoretical gaps on this subject, this study aims to analyse the social construction that determines the unequal division of domestic demands related to water supply between women and men in three rural areas studied for the development of the National Rural Sanitation Programme of Brazil: Barreiro Amarelo and Nova Esperança in the State of Bahia and Pontal do Buriti Settlement in the State of Goiás. The qualitative methodology, based on the principles of grounded theory, applies semi-structured interviews, direct observation, and thematic-categorical content analysis. The results indicate that the unequal dedication to water demands is based on sexist logic, determined by the sexual division of labour and influenced by the patriarchal culture. Thus, activities with less social prestige demanding daily dedication are women’s responsibility. There is evidence that improvements in water supply positively impact women’s lives, especially their health. Moreover, water policies should be interrelated with social and gender policies, reducing inequalities and improving women's quality of life.

Efficiency Analysis in Brazil's Sao Paulo State Local Unified Health System (SUS): From Gender-Ethnicity-Power Inequities to the Dissolution of Health Effectiveness.

Health equity is cross sectioned by the reproduction of social relations of gender, ethnicity and power. The purpose of this article is to assess how intersectional health equity determines societal health levels, in a local efficiency analysis within Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS), among Sao Paulo state municipalities. Fixed Panel Effects Model and Data Envelopment Analysis techniques were applied, according to resources, health production and intersectoral dimensions. The effect variables considered were expectation of life at birth and infant mortality rates, in 2000 and 2010, according to local health regions (HR) and regionalized healthcare networks (RRAS). Inequity was assessed both socioeconomically and culturally (income, education, ethnicity and gender). Both methods demonstrated that localities with higher inequities (income and education, gender and ethnicity oriented), associated or not to vulnerability (young and low-income families, in subnormal urban agglomerations), were the least efficient. Health production contributes too little to health levels, especially at the local level, which is highly correlated to the intersectoral dimension. Intersectional health equity, reinforced in its intertwining with ethnicity, gender and social position, is essential in order to achieve adequate societal health levels, beyond health access or sanitary and clinical efficacy.

Representing “Diversity”: The Social and Professional Conditions for Accessing Public Funding in the French Audiovisual Sector

In France, public funding occupies a specific place in the production and consecration cycles of film and television. Offering both financial resources and legitimacy to works determined to be of “quality,” this funding constitutes an ideal empirical platform to identify the interconnected social relations of gender, race, and class which shape access to French audiovisual production. Taking as its subject the Images de la diversité commission, a unique public funding scheme aimed at combating discrimination in the audiovisual sector, this article seeks to analyze the modalities of this state-funded support to a cultural industry. Established in 2007 to support works that “represent diversity” in film and television, this commission has institutionalized award criteria that fall between art and politics, and at the intersection of race, class, age, and migration status. By analyzing quantitatively a body of 1,318 works, stories, and production companies funded by the commission, this article aims to identify the social and professional conditions of this support for “diversity” and of access to production and legitimacy in the French audiovisual sector.

Gender, shape, and sociality

Many languages of the world have genders, that is, grammatical agreement classes, based on such core semantic properties as animacy, sex and humanness, and also shape. In Manambu, a language of New Guinea, nouns are assigned genders according to the sex of a human referent, and to shape and size of any other referent. Men are assigned to the masculine, and women to the feminine gender. A long tube and a large house are masculine, and a round plate and a small house are feminine. Switching gender for humans has pejorative overtones: an unusually boisterous or bossy woman can be treated as masculine, and a squat fattish man who does not display fully masculine behaviour as feminine. Classifying humans by their shape and size implies downgrading them to the level of inanimates. Gender switch also reflects social stereotypes. Feminine gender is functionally unmarked for non-humans, but not for humans. The noundu, “man” can be used as a generic term for “human being.” Linguistic Gender of humans in Manambu unequivocally reflects Social Gender relations.

Dam-induced displacement and resettlement and masculinities: the case of India and Malaysia

Dams are the biggest ‘development’ displacement agent. In this paper, we explore the gendered processes and structures of dam-induced displacement and resettlement on Indigenous communities and how displaced men conceptualise masculinities and gender relations within those communities. Drawing upon results of previous research undertaken in India and Malaysia, these two disparate cases allow us to examine how displacement affected men and changed their lives, and subsequently how they (re)constructed and (re)negotiated masculinities and gender-social relations in post-resettlement lives. We highlight two critical issues, namely, household and community land/resources, and compensation and rehabilitation processes to illustrate how gender roles, and in particular masculinities and men’s roles, were transformed in dam displacement in both the countries, and analyse the consequences for women, family life and gender relations. We argue that the outcomes of gender and social asymmetries have largely depended on the realities of power, allowing men to reconstruct their masculinities to retain stereotyped notions of male superiority and female subordination.

Experiences of Being a Couple and Working in Shifts in the Mining Industry: Advances and Continuities.

In this study, we sought to understand, from a gender perspective, the experiences of mining couples in Antofagasta, Chile, especially the balance between their intimate lives and the absences of their partners due to the shift work modality. We analyzed testimonies from men and women living in Antofagasta, which is considered to be one of the world’s three largest mining regions. Among the main findings, power relations based on the hegemonic gender model supported by the sexual division of labor were identified, which persist in this mining area, despite progress in gender equality issues in Chile. Although there are differences between the discourses of men and women and their subjective positioning, we propose that both actively collaborate with the reproduction of social gender relations marked by male domination. We propose that the way in which couples live is associated with the organization of mining work and especially the shift system, which is central to the reproduction of the gender order with a heteropatriarchal tone.

Girls and women in the educational system: The curricular challenge.

This Viewpoint argues that, while efforts must continue to achieve universal primary and secondary education at the global level for both boys and girls, the concern with access and thus enrollment and completion parity has blinded many governments from seeing the crucial need to examine what is actually learned in school. Stronger concern with curriculum would bring a stronger focus on the formal knowledge conveyed in schools and on the ways in which this knowledge might (or might not) facilitate a substantial change in the social relations of gender.

Enhancing coastal livelihoods in Indonesia: an evaluation of recent initiatives on gender, women and sustainable livelihoods in small-scale fisheries

In recent decades, there have been considerable efforts to enhance, diversify, or implement alternative livelihood activities in marginalized coastal communities, to ease reliance on deteriorating coastal resources, reduce poverty and improve well-being outcomes. To date, gender has been notably absent from the literature on small-scale fisheries and associated livelihood improvement programs, despite increasing evidence of the importance of gender equality and women’s empowerment in achieving such outcomes in other contexts. In this paper, drawing from an evaluation of the effectiveness of 20 livelihood development projects implemented in coastal communities in Indonesia since 1998, we report on how gender was considered in these projects. We assessed whether and how gender was included in project rationales, and how men and women were included in project activities. We found that, despite the women being reached by many project activities, particularly efforts to increase women’s productive capacity through training and group-based livelihoods enterprises, 40% of the projects had no discernible gender approach and only two of the 20 projects (10%) applied a gender transformative approach that sought to challenge local gender norms and gender relations and empower women beneficiaries. Our assessment suggests the need for greater understanding of the role of gender in reducing poverty and increasing well-being outcomes in coastal communities. Lessons from comparable agricultural settings suggest that this may be facilitated by locally situated gender social relations analysis, integration of gender throughout livelihood improvement project cycles, gendered capacity building activities and shared learning from the evaluation of the gendered outcomes of project activities.

Relações entre gêneros na teorização curricular tradicional, crítica e pós-crítica

Esta pesquisa versa sobre as relações entre gênero e educação, nomeadamente sobre gênero e currículo, objetivando compreender o lugar ocupado pelas relações sociais de gênero na teorização curricular. Trata-se de uma investigação teórica que buscou apoio em três diferentes fases formadoras do campo de estudos sobre o currículo e do campo dos estudos de gênero. A pesquisa toma como objeto de análise os pressupostos da teorização curricular – tradicional, crítica e pós-crítica – em seus contextos de emergência e desenvolvimento, com vistas a identificar distanciamentos e aproximações entre currículo e gênero nesses estudos. Os resultados revelam que, embora o currículo escolar tenha sido desde sempre atravessado por relações entre os gêneros, tais relações estiveram ausentes da teorização tradicional ou não crítica em razão de sua vinculação ao paradigma da racionalidade técnico-científica e à consequente tese da neutralidade e objetividade do currículo. Estiveram ausentes também da fase inicial da teorização crítica, por sua centralidade na categoria classe social. Inserem-se no discurso curricular na segunda fase dessa teorização a partir do entendimento de que a cultura, como elemento constituído e constituinte de diferenças, também institui desigualdades, entre as quais se incluem as desigualdades de gênero. Assim, a teorização crítica, por meio da corrente da resistência, anuncia o atravessamento do currículo pelas diferenças de gênero e etnia, entre outras, aproximando-se da perspectiva multiculturalista. A teorização pós-crítica, ao atribuir centralidade à linguagem, aponta novas formas de olhar as relações entre gênero e educação, mais especificamente entre gênero e currículo.

Theorising women’s health and health inequalities: shaping processes of the ‘gender-biology nexus’

ABSTRACTSince the theoretical frameworks and conceptual tools we employ shape research outcomes by guiding research pathways, it is important that we subject them to ongoing critical reflection. A thoroughgoing analysis of the global production of women’s health inequality calls for a comprehensive theorization of how social relations of gender and the biological body mutually interact in local contexts in a nexus with women’s health. However, to date, the predominant concern of research has been to identify the biological effects of social relations of gender on the body, to the relative neglect of the co-constitutive role that these biological changes themselves may play in ongoing cycles of gendered health oppressions. Drawing on feminist and gender theoretical approaches, and with the health of women and girls as our focus, we seek to extend our understanding of this recursive process by discussing what we call the ‘shaping processes’ of the ‘gender-biology nexus’ which call attention to not only the ‘gender-shaping of biology’ but also the ‘biologic-shaping of gender’. We consider female genital mutilation/cutting as an illustration of this process and conclude by proposing that a framework which attends to both the ‘gender-shaping of biology’ and the ‘biologic-shaping of gender’ as interweaving processes provides a fruitful approach to theorising the wider health inequalities experienced by women and girls.

Reflexões sobre o poder mediadas pelo empoderamento das mulheres na condição de sujeito político

Este artigo tem como objetivo refletir sobre o empoderamento das mulheres na condição de sujeito político, elemento fundamental para sua emancipação e participação ativa na sociedade. Com vistas a alcançar o objetivo proposto, desenvolveu-se uma pesquisa qualitativa de natureza bibliográfica em diálogo com vertentes do conceito de gênero, patriarcado e empoderamento das mulheres. O empoderamento envolve um processo político para gerar compreensão dos complexos fatores que criam subordinação/exclusão das mulheres do mundo público/político e engendrar consciência sobre a reformulação/desconstrução dos atuais esquemas políticos e sociais da sociedade. Captamos, pois, que é preciso levar em conta as relações de poder entre homens e mulheres, e, desta maneira, buscar solucionar não somente condições concretas materiais das mulheres, senão também mudar as relações sociais de gênero na sociedade, construindo democracias com equidade de gênero.

Internet Based Social Networks – New Informal Spaces for Gender Social Relations and Life-long Learning

Internet Based Social Networks – New Informal Spaces for Gender Social Relations and Life-long Learning

OS SIGNIFICADOS DAS ATIVIDADES DA CULTURA CORPORAL E OS OBJETOS DE ENSINO DA EDUCAÇÃO FÍSICA

Discuto neste ensaio uma conceituação sobre os objetos de ensino da Educação Física a partir da sistematização dos significados das atividades da cultura corporal. Assumindo a dança como um exemplar para a análise, apresento alguns critérios teórico-metodológicos para a proposição dos significados da cultura corporal em uma perspectiva histórico-cultural. Considerando que essas atividades possuem uma dimensão autônoma (o que não quer dizer independente) das determinações sociais de gênero, classe, etnia etc., destaco como eixo dessa sistematização aquelas características relacionadas à singularidade formativa, ou ao “fazer criador”, que a dança, o jogo, a luta e a ginástica têm ou podem vir a ter para os sujeitos que ensinam e aprendem tais atividades na escola.

From Patriarchy to Composite Gender Arrangements? Theorizing the Historicity of Social Relations of Gender

From Patriarchy to Composite Gender Arrangements? Theorizing the Historicity of Social Relations of Gender

The social organisation of boasting in the neoliberal university

ABSTRACTThis article unpacks the social construction of the ‘ideal academic’ in the context of major shifts in the global and national governance of academia that have introduced managerial practices, standardised notions of excellence and accounting logics with the aim of increasing the efficiency and quality of higher education and academic knowledge production. More specifically it explores how the enacting of this ideal involves practices of boasting and explores how people are differently positioned in that regard. Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study at Aalto University in Finland the article shows how boasting involves the (re)production of gendered and classed social inequalities and leads to increasing polarisation between those who succeed and those who fail to meet the new quality standards. I draw on the resources of Institutional Ethnography which enables me to analyse the social relations of gender and class and show how culturally and situationally specific forms of boasting, become textually recognised and encouraged as appropriate behaviour for the ‘ideal academic’.

Trajectories and Experiences of Teaching Socialization in the Perspective of Gender

The aim of this article is to show that the trajectories and experiences of teachers’ socialization are important to reflect about the senses and meanings assigned to the teaching practice. The methodological choice fell on qualitative approach, using Case Study to the collection of data, through the application of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. It was concluded that the trajectories and the diversity of socialization experiences of teachers are relevant to the analysis of social gender relations in the teaching field. The fact is that it is in life trajectories that are configured senses and meanings of the teaching practice, highlighting its forms of production/reproduction in socialization spaces and in the relationship between training/work/family contexts.