Women's Gender Identity Research Articles

Gender stereotypes and normative heterosexuality in matrimonial ads from globalizing India

Matrimonial ads serve as unobtrusive sites to observe the construction and perpetuation of normative heterosexuality through socio-cultural discourses. The current study focuses on gendered spousal expectations and sex role preferences in 1065 matrimonial ads from two popular newspapers in India. Gender differences in ad type, financial stability, physical attractiveness, fairness, slimness, personality traits, and occupational preferences were examined. Results found support for social exchange of men's financial stability for women's physical attractiveness, gender polarization in ideal spousal occupations, and the relative fluidity in gender identities of women as compared to men. A strong preference for fair and slim women was observed. Implications for sexual objectification of women and changing gender roles in globalizing India are discussed.

Fatherhood in Confessional Poetry: One Facet of Men’s Autobiographical Writing

Recent scholarship on confessional poetry has focussed for the most part on either the relationship of this work to feminine experience and questions of gender and sexuality for women on the one hand or the problems involved in assessing the poetry’s artistic merit on the other. This essay argues that Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass can be read for the light their work casts on one facet of masculine experience: fatherhood. Setting poems by each poet which are either about or addressed to their daughters in the context of both earlier poetry of a similar kind and contemporary theories of fatherhood, the essay argues that a common feature in both poets’ work—loneliness—shows something worth noticing about Cold War masculinity and illustrates the value of reading autobiographical poetry without foregrounding questions of artistic merit.

Discourses of single women accused of murder: Mid twentieth-century constructions of ‘lesbians’ and ‘spinsters’

Synopsis This article examines gender representations of ‘single’ women accused of murder in mid twentieth-century England and Wales. Specifically, it identifies discourses of the ‘lesbian’ and the ‘spinster’ as they arose during the prosecution process. These discourses are outlined and placed within their wider socio-historical context. The appearance of different constructions of lesbianism and/or spinsterhood is analysed in relation to five women's cases, with reference to material from their case files. The examination of discourses of singleness reveals how it was often construed in the mid twentieth-century criminal justice system as connoting marginal, or deviant, gender identity in women. Single women did not fulfil contemporary norms of femininity relating to marriage and motherhood. However, representations of single women were frequently contested and contradictory, and in the cases under discussion also related to the type of killing the woman had carried out.

Muslim businesswomen doing boundary work: The negotiation of Islam, gender and ethnicity within entrepreneurial contexts

This article discusses how female entrepreneurs of Moroccan and Turkish origin in the Netherlands construct their ethnic, gender and entrepreneurial identities in relation to their Muslim identity. We contribute to theory development on the interrelationship of work identities with gender, ethnicity and religion through an intersectional analysis of these women's gender and ethnic identities within their entrepreneurial contexts and in relation to their Muslim identity. We draw on four narratives to illustrate how the women interviewed perform creative boundary work at these hitherto under-researched intersections. Islam is employed as a boundary to let religious norms and values prevail over cultural ones and to make space for individualism, honour and entrepreneurship. Moreover, different individual religious identities are crafted to stretch the boundaries of what is allowed for female entrepreneurs in order to resist traditional, dogmatic interpretations of Islam. Our study contributes to studies on entrepreneurship by showing how these female entrepreneurs gain agency at the crossroads of gender, ethnicity and religion.

2D:4D finger-length ratios in children and adults with gender identity disorder

Previous research suggests that prenatal testosterone affects the 2D:4D finger ratio in humans, and it has been speculated that prenatal testosterone also affects gender identity differentiation. If both things are true, then one would expect to find an association between the 2D:4D ratio and gender identity. We measured 2D:4D in two samples of patients with gender identity disorder (GID). In Study 1, we compared the 2D:4D ratios of 96 adult male and 51 female patients with GID to that of 90 heterosexual male and 112 heterosexual female controls. In Study 2, we compared the 2D:4D ratios of 67 boys and 34 girls with GID to that of 74 control boys and 72 control girls. In the sample of adults with GID, we classified their sexual orientation as either homosexual or non-homosexual (in relation to their birth sex) to examine whether or not there were any within-group differences as a function of sexual orientation. In the sample of adult men with GID (both homosexual and non-homosexual) and children with GID, we found no evidence of an altered 2D:4D ratio relative to same-sex controls. However, women with GID had a significantly more masculinized ratio compared to the control women. This last finding was consistent with the prediction that a variance in prenatal hormone exposure contributes to a departure from a sex-typical gender identity in women.

Worker, Woman, Mother: Redefining Urban Chinese Women's Identity via Motherhood and the Global Workplace

This paper seeks to understand the complexity of the Chinese woman's gender identity in the global workplace in contemporary China. Based on data collected via in-depth interviews, participant observation and focus group discussions, this paper has developed a framework to examine how different forces, ranging from foreign companies, mass media and the women's own experiences, commingle to define these women's gender identity. The analyses also show that young educated women in urban China have been a privileged group compared to other women in China, as they redefined their gender identity based on their own work and life experiences. I conclude by discussing the class and regional implications of these findings on urban Chinese women.

Silent birds: metaphorical constructions of literacy and gender identity in women's talk

Most prior research on figurative language has looked at the cognitive aspects of metaphoricity. The present research attempts at going beyond metaphor's cognitive impact and aims to view the social and discoursal aspects of metaphorical constructions in relation to people's identities and social realities. This article reports an analysis and discussion of figurative language used by Pakistani women while talking about their literacies and selfhood. The article makes two claims about figurative language: first, metaphorical constructions are cultural and therefore rooted in social practices and discourses; second, figurative expressions are common to everyday talk, constrain and enable thinking processes and construct social reality. Methodologically too, the article offers an interesting departure from the traditional studies of metaphor as the data cited are `incidental' and natural, rather than elicited or experimental; the researcher `s aim was not to study figurative language but it turned out to be ubiquitous in women's everyday talk. Hence, the present data strengthen Tannen's and Carter's work that creativity and figurative language are not exclusive to literary discourse but are part of everyday discourses.

Doing Dress and the Construction of Women's Gender Identity

The purpose of this article is to build on and strengthen the understanding that occupation is central to the creation and expression of identity. The first goal is to explore the ubiquity of dress in Western society, as well as its seemingly mundane presence in daily life. The complexities and nuances of this occupation are explored. The second goal is to examine the occupation of ‘doing dress’ through the lens of women's gender identity. The authors utilize the specific lens of women's gender identity due to the significance of dress as a marker of gender identity. This article concludes with the need for more studies and analyses in occupational science that focus on dress and its importance to identity.

Preface

Preface Helga Kraft (bio) and Maggie McCarthy (bio) As Volume 23 goes to press, we're happy to report that the Women in German Yearbook continues to adapt to the electronic age. In recent years we transitioned to paperless editing, and as of 2008 the Yearbook's visibility will increase dramatically when it becomes part of Project Muse. Available online and in their entirety, our essays will be in the company of many other excellent journals of the humanities, arts and social sciences. Please alert your libraries and encourage them to subscribe. While the current volume also reflects advances in scholarship on gender, film and media studies, and Germanic studies, it begins with the voice of Esther Dischereit, last year's invited speaker at the Women in German Annual Conference at Sunbird, Utah. Lest we start feeling too smug about our progress on the electronic front, Dischereit keeps us grounded in the animism of everyday objects, like a piece of bread in a toaster, in a highly industrialized world. She also reflects on the complexities of writing from a Jewish identity, whether willingly or of necessity. Our film studies section features other kinds of thorny identities, born of the need to work through larger historical events and cultural anxieties. Cathy Gelbin's "Double Visions: Queer Femininity and Holocaust Film from Ostatni Etap to Aimée & Jaguar" offers a comprehensive overview of lesbian sexuality in Holocaust films, initially employed to underscore Nazi perversion and later to rewrite women's historical role as either victim or resister. Barbara Hales argues in her essay on the femme fatale in film noir that exiled German film directors in Hollywood used the female criminal and double to assuage the existential distress they experienced in the early days of the Weimar Republic. Christina Gerhardt's analysis of Hito Steyerl's film Die leere Mitte (1998) tracks several centuries of shifting historical boundaries around Potsdamer Platz and their implications for Germany's more liminal identities. Other kinds of concrete historical circumstances impacting women's lives and psyches emerge in a range of essays spanning the 18th to the 20th [End Page ix] centuries. Laurie Johnson's "The Romantic and Modern Practice of Animal Magnetism: Friedrich Schlegel's Protocols of the Magnetic Treatment of Countess Lesniowska" addresses Schlegel's investment in the psychiatric practice of "animal magnetism," its enactment on one woman's body, and its larger implications for philosophy and religion. Ritchie Robertson's essay on 19th-century Austrian writer Caroline Pichler argues that her conflicted notions of women's gender identity vis-à-vis both family and nation provide an important backdrop to her novel The Swedes in Prague. Twentieth-century women's expanded economic, intellectual, and political possibilities brought their own assorted consequences, evident in several essays that take journalism, political activism, and novels as their starting point. Julia Karolle-Berg's essay "Creating a Maidservant Community through Newspapers: The Berliner Dienstboten-Zeitung, 1898–1900" traces a newspaper editor's efforts to foster professional consciousness and community among female domestic employees not otherwise professionally organized. German-Jewish pacifist writer Clementine Krämer, the subject of an essay by Elizabeth Loentz, used both journalistic and literary outlets to promote her own brand of anti-war activism in the early twentieth century, while simultaneously negotiating her identity as a German/Jewish/feminist/pacifist. In a more personal realm, New Women struggled with the psychic downside of expanded choices, like the independent but melancholic heroines of novels by Franziska zu Reventlow and Gabriele Reuter that Lisabeth Hock an-alyzes, who nonetheless use their temperament to expand the creative possibilities associated with (single) motherhood. In a more conceptual rendition of emancipated lives, Lou Andreas-Salomé's novel Fenitschka, the subject of Laura Deiulio's essay, traces one academic woman's movement through the "forward" and "backward" spaces of Paris and St. Petersburg respectively, with the latter, paradoxically, offering a neue Frau more possibilities. Finally, Dagmar Lorenz's essay "Transatlantic Perspectives on Men, Women, and Other Primates: The Ape Motif in Kafka, Canetti, and Cooper's and Jackson's King Kong Films" expands our gendered frame to include "interspecies" concerns and the status of relations between humans and...

The Construction of Women's Gender Identity through Religious Activity in Classical Greece

While the emphasis of that branch of feminist studies which is concerned with religious structures, hermeneutics and religious literature has been on the core faiths of the modern world (and until relatively recently, in fact, on the Western religious tradition), the roles which women played in the two most important precursors to Christianity, ancient Greek and Roman religion, have been neglected. In ancient Greece, patriarchy prevailed. Yet while women were restricted in the social, political and legal spheres, they were active participants in religious activities. Many of the rites in which they engaged were connected with marriage and childbirth and could be said to reflect their societal roles. In addition, however, women participated in a variety of women-only rites which were not connected with their domestic status and in which they had a great deal of freedom from patriarchal restriction. Women’s freedom of religious expression owed much to the lack of androcentric sacred texts which could have been used to justify women’s lack of participation and/or the subordination of women’s roles in Greek religion, as well as men’s willingness for women to engage in meaningful religious activities.

Gender Self‐Definition and Gender Self‐Acceptance in Women: Intersections With Feminist, Womanist, and Ethnic Identities

The author explored the relationships among women's gender identity constructs as well as the relationships of those constructs to ethnic identity. Nine of the 12 hypothesized relationships between gender self‐definition and female identity development statuses and between gender self‐acceptance and female identity development statuses were supported. Gender self‐definition and gender self‐acceptance were also both positively correlated with ethnic identity. Analyses of the Hoffman Gender Scale (R. M. Hoffman, 1996; R. M. Hoffman, L. D. Borders, & J. A. Hattie, 2000) provided additional support for its use as a measure of gender self‐definition and gender self‐acceptance.

Agricultural body-building: Incorporations of gender, body and work

This paper is concerned with gendered embodiment of agricultural work, particularly the connection between women's gender identity and the body at work. Focussing on how the body enters into relations with the tools of work, four processes are identified by which women's bodies, work and machinery are incorporated into each other and give each other meaning. In the first category women's embodied competences are merged with the qualities of machinery much the same way as men. The second shows how women work to uphold a definition of their bodies as feminine despite the fact that they operate machinery. The third process shows that when machine work is incorporated into farm women's traditional work on the farm, neither the definition of women's bodies nor the tractor change. Finally, when women do not operate machinery as part of their work, the traditional conception of gendered, embodied farm work is maintained. The analysis establishes that there is no one to one relationship between work and the meaning of the embodied self, and highlights the complex and ironic relationship between machinery and femininities.

Counter-revolutionary women: Gender and reconciliation in post-war Nicaragua

In Nicaragua, gender ideologies - and, in particular, discourses of motherhood - have frequently been manipulated by political forces. In the early 1990s, at the end of the civil war, Sandinista and Contra women in Waslala united to form a group which aimed to end the political polarisation within their community and promote development. Aid agencies provided funds on the understanding that both sides would work together. Discourses of reconciliation were both powerful and pervasive, offering a way of overcoming the hatred caused by war, and bringing about a sustainable peace. These discourses draw on ideas of women as mothers and peacebuilders, which are appealing to many, including women themselves. Yet these simplistic characterisations of women are a flimsy basis on which to initiate reconciliation. This is because women's gender identities do not exist in isolation, but intersect with other identities, including those derived from political allegiances. Ultimately, this led to the failure of reconciliation in Waslala.

La Transmission De L’islam Auprès Des Nouvelles Générations De La Diaspora

This is an analysis of the cultural and religious socialization of young Muslims who were born and/or brought up in Europe. Is it possible to apply to them the category of “generation”, and why? The author goes on to examine religious socialization in the family, the diversity of ways in which young people re-appropriate Islam, and their current e.orts to return to a “line of faith”. Finally, identifying changes in the processes of transmission (content and practices) throws light on the questions raised by new generations: the claim to a gender identity for women through the prism of religion, a new demand for citizenship, the problem of the search for religious authority. All these developments remove Islam from its enclave and help to distance it from being socially constructed as an exception.

Contextual Variations in Young Women's Gender Identity Negotiations

This article explores young women's strategies for seeking personal power and resisting gender-based stereotypes in a wealthy, suburban, White community and a working-class, urban, community of color. Semi-structured interviews with 27 young women were used to examine contextual variations in these gender identity negotiation processes. Both groups of young women were acutely aware of women's subordinate social and cultural position and this awareness contributed to some negative feelings about being female. However, their strategies for locating strength in their identities varied by social contexts. Moreover, the two groups of young women encountered distinct sets of stereotypes in their respective communities. Forms of resistance to these stereotypes led to significantly different behavior patterns. These comparisons build a richer theoretical understanding of the contextual dimensions of young women's gender identity negotiations.

Bhojpuri songs, women's work and social control in Northen India

This analysis is concerned with the construction and reproduction of gender identity in women's work songs, specifically songs of the millstone, or jatsaars, in the Bhojpuri-speaking region. Sung as accompaniment to the daily grinding of grain and spices, the songs, rich in narrative content, cover a range of women's concerns including caste and patriarchal anxieties. As the songs also serve a pedagogical purpose whereby societal values are transmitted from older to younger women, they serve to warn and prepare women for the hardships of married life, also spelling out the limits of transgression, the nature of punishments, and the rewards for compliance. Through the delineation of family relationships which might be potentially threatening and antagonistic, and by outlining approved codes of honour and conduct in such contexts, the songs indicate the extent to which women are complicit in their own oppression. While the jatsaar cuts across caste lines, the songs presented below are collected from women belonging to a range of castes and classes, and thus can be said to represent an authentic female voice. The main issue concerns the extent to which lessons learnt through the jatsaar have a bearing on female subordination in the sphere of agricultural production, particularly in relations with the employer in the field

Demographic and Sociological Indicators of Privatisation of Marriage in the 19th Century in Flanders

Relying on the assumption that privatisation of family life intensified in the19th century and that women were the pioneers in this process, we formulate nine hypotheses concerning indicators on family and marriage. The hypotheses are tested using data for three municipalities in Flanders (roughly the northern part of Belgium) covering the period 1800–1913, taken from about 17,000marriage certificates. Special emphasis is on gender and social status distinctions. Most of the hypotheses, particularly those relating to first marriage, are confirmed. The various developments point to an underlying process which we refer to here as the privatisation of marriage, which can be explained by the changed social position and gender identity of women. The hypothesis put forward is that19th-century economic and political marginalisation encouraged women to develop their dyadic power in primary relationships. Marrying young and creating an identity around expressive family and motherhood tasks was, for many women, a reaction to and a remedy for their public exclusion and economic subordination.

Reading Fictions of Romance: Gender, Sexuality, and Nationalism in Postcolonial India

Through an ethnographic study the A. explores the implications of romance reading for young Indian women's gender, class, and national identities in one urban setting in South India. He demonstrates that the practice of reading Western romance fiction is deeply embedded within patriarchal discourses of feminine respectability that exert control over women's sexuality. Young women's fascination for the commodities of Western material culture in imported romance fiction is located in their desire to experience their identities as cosmopolitan, global consumers. In negotiating the boundaries of tradition, Indian women readers construct romance fiction as modern manuals on sexuality that afford them escape from the burdens of preserving the honor of family and community. The contradictory character of women's interpretations of sexuality in Western romance novels highlights the complex dialectic between postcolonial audiences' resistance to and collusion with the hegemony of global culture.

Mimetic Appetite for Marriage in Nineteenth-Century Flanders: Gender Disadvantage As an Incentive for Social Change

The development of age at first marriage in three regions of Flanders (roughly the northern part of Belgium) during 1800 to 1913 is examined by gender and social status. The study areas are Leuven, Aalst, and Bierbeek—three municipalities with different socioeconomic structures and cultural climates. All the data from these municipalities were coded and taken from almost 17,000 marriage certificates. The demographic marriage parameters point to the same thing: from the midnineteenth century, a passionate zest for marriage became obvious in Flanders. The proportion of those remaining unmarried fell sharply, and age at first marriage declined rapidly. This process occurred among all social groups. It is hypothesized that this process can be explained by the changed social position and gender identity of women, together with the new economic possibilities for men.

Menarche, Menstruation, and Gender Identity: Retrospective Accounts from Women Who Have Undergone Premenopausal Hysterectomy

Hysterectomy (the surgical removal of the uterus) precipitates the end of menstrual cycles in premenopausal women. In this article I explore whether that premature termination of menstrual function negatively affects women's subjective gender identities. Using the grounded theory research approach, I conducted in-depth interviews with 40 diverse respondents who had undergone premenopausal hysterectomy. These women generally acknowledged that, since the time of menarche, they had closely associated menstruation with their gender identities. However, despite some regrets, respondents' primary reaction was almost unanimous relief that they had ceased menstruating. This finding must be viewed in the context of overwhelming and uncontrollable menstrual pain and bleeding that many respondents had previously experienced. Contrary to expressing remorse that they no longer identified with “normal” women, who menstruate, most respondents sought to disassociate themselves from the normalized suffering that they perceived is endured by all menstruating women.