Showing papers in "Journal of Gender Studies in 2006"

Sisyphus' sisters. Can gender mainstreaming escape the genderedness of organizations?

Abstract: Currently, gender mainstreaming is presented as bringing new elan to gender equality policies. Gender mainstreaming is a gender equality strategy that aims to transform organizational processes and practices by eliminating gender biases in existing routines, involving the regular actors in this transformation process. In this article, we question the aspirations of gender mainstreaming. Can gender mainstreaming escape the genderedness of organizations; can it genuinely effect change, or does it inevitably become compromised? Our analysis of a case project within Human Resource Management in the Ministry of the Flemish Community in Belgium shows that gender mainstreaming does indeed bring about changes, but that it does not break down the genderedness of organizations substantially. While gender mainstreaming invokes an image of cooperation between equal parties that pursue a dual agenda of business needs and feminist goals, our analysis shows that crucial power differences between those parties determine ...

Never-aging Stories: Western Hegemonic Masculinity Scripts

Abstract: This article offers a conceptual model for understanding masculinity that stresses the temporal dimension. While deconstructing masculinity according to various factors, gender scholarship has disregarded one of the most crucial ones: age. In this respect, current theorization fails to recognize time as the basic dimension of the human condition. Combining the ideas of Bernice Neugarten with the central metaphor of narrative theory, the present model considers masculinities as temporal scripts. It is claimed that each culture, in a given time and place, offers its men hegemonic masculinity scripts that attach masculine ‘social clocks’ to men's life courses. Following the presentation of the theoretical model, its possible application is explored, focusing on the hegemonic masculinity scripts as they have being materializing in Western cultures. Failing to take into account old age, these are essentially incomplete scripts. Two main reasons for this disruption are identified: the portrayal of elderly peopl...

What's the Difference? Bringing Particularity to Queer Studies of Transgender

Abstract: This article explores the concept of ‘difference’ in relation to studies of transgender. I initially outline the importance of queer and postmodern theory, which have utilised ‘difference’ to incorporate transgender into analyses of sexual and gender diversity. I draw on debates within transgender studies to argue that a lack of emphasis on particularity within poststructuralist and postmodern theory has led to a homogenous theorisation of transgender. I propose that current limitations within queer approaches to transgender can be overcome through a queer sociological framework which grounds gender difference within a social analysis. Drawing on findings from recent empirical research into transgender identities in the UK, the article sketches out a range of distinct subject positions under the umbrella of ‘transgender’. Here I explore the ways in which transgender narratives are formed through divergent gendered experiences and constructed in relation to temporal factors of generation, transitional time...

‘It Never Struck Me as Female’: Investigating Men's Entry into Female-dominated Occupations

Abstract: Whilst occupational segregation by sex remains the most pervasive aspect of the labour market, some men cross gender boundaries to work in female-dominated jobs. This article explores how men who do ‘women's work’ articulate reasons for moving into such jobs. Drawing on testimonies from a purposive sample of ten British men working in non-traditional jobs, we present personal testimonies and insights that challenge existing accounts of why men enter female-dominated work places. Following Bradley, four explanations are suggested for why these men opted to do non-traditional work. They are: labour market changes; role models; possibility of different masculinities; and career ambition. We argue that existing explanations are simplistic and unable to make sense of the contingent aspects of working life that account for why men choose to pursue jobs currently dominated by women.

Interviewing Fathers: Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork

Abstract: This paper explores the dilemmas encountered carrying out empirical research using a feminist methodological approach. Specifically, I recount my experiences while undertaking qualitative research, in which I explored the experiences of employed mothers in the UK. At the beginning of my study, I adopted a feminist ‘position’. This paper explains how an initial decision to exclude men from the research sample proved more complex than anticipated, and was eventually reversed. The issue of equality between the researcher and participants is discussed and the question of whether the approach of the researcher should change, depending on the gender of the respondents, is considered. It is suggested that the experience of doing fieldwork may be different from the outcomes anticipated from the literature. In this case, the behaviour of male interviewees during the interview was very similar to that of female interviewees. Men were just as co-operative and articulate as women. This was not predicted on the basis ...

Medievalism and the Fantasy Heroine

Abstract: This essay aligns the narrative trajectories of a selected group of contemporary fantasy novels with various medieval sources, with an emphasis on the enduring cultural fantasy of the strong woman who rises above a general condition of female disenfranchisement. The article examines female exceptionalism as a source of narrative pleasure and considers the impact and significance of the insertion of feminist critiques into familiar story-lines. The article also considers the difficulties and delights of attempting to create a flexible language for female heroism in a series of ostensibly medieval contexts. While the reliance of the fantasy market on medieval motifs – its reliance on medievalism, to be more precise – is not news, there remain a few thoughts to be articulated about the means by which so many popular female protagonists continue to have staying power and high market value within particular systems of power, systems familiar to the medievalist even when decontextualized, displaced and relocate...

‘Who Cares About Gender at a Time Like This?’ Love, Sex and the Problem of Jeanette Winterson

Abstract: Amongst both fans and academic critics, Jeanette Winterson's work has been celebrated as a breakthrough in lesbian feminist writing. For the writer herself, however, this has been far from unproblematic. This essay examines some of the most influential readings of Winterson's texts through questions of gender and sexuality, against the author's own sense of her mis-appropriation by critics. Considering much of her oeuvre, but focussing especially on her most recent fiction, the essay traces the emergence of an evangelical strain in her fiction that troubles orthodox interpretations of this writer. In her twenty-first century writing particularly, Winterson's commitment to an exploration of Love in the terms of the agapeic tradition, with its sacrificial shedding of the erotic body, have made it more difficult than before for critics to sustain the idea of a lesbian feminist Jeanette Winterson. In this way the essay explores a crisis in the reception of this important contemporary writer.

Grotesque Bodies: A Response to Disembodied Cyborgs

Abstract: In this paper, my aim is to show some of the problems that the figure of the cyborg may raise, in order to show how in many cases the cyborg has been used, even if in a dissimulated way, to reinstate the ‘natural’, normative order with its known distinct and very well defined categories and divisions. But, more importantly, I propose here an alternative to the figure of the cyborg which, I believe, has more possibilities of ‘keeping the promises’ of subverting the normative order of Western thought. This alternative is the one presented by the figure of the grotesque body. The grotesque body, I will argue, contains in itself the seeds of a real hybrid, fragmented, non-binarian thought. The relevance of my proposal is that, in opposition to the cyborg, the grotesque body does not present the dangers of a reinforcement of the old categories which support the powers-that-be in maintaining oppression and domination. Unlike the cyborg, the grotesque body does not make possible a return to the Cartesian frame, ...

‘The Fire Will Not Consume Us’: Exploring the Link between Homophobia and Sexism in US Feminism

Abstract: Feminist scholars in recent years have argued that both sexism and homophobia are forces that maintain traditional gender roles and inequality in society. Further, these scholars suggest that sexism cannot be eradicated without addressing homophobia simultaneously. Building on such arguments, I examine how the National Organization for Women (NOW), as a case study of feminism in the US, understood the relationship between sexism and homophobia by conducting a qualitative content analysis of the organization's national newsletters from 1968 to 2000. I find that NOW did not address this relationship sufficiently; rather, NOW justified its work against homophobia in ways that are distinct from a relationship to gender.

‘Kiss My Royal Irish Ass.’ Contesting Identity: Visual Culture, Gender, Whiteness and Diaspora

Abstract: Feminist artists and critics have located postcolonial ‘Irish woman’ as ‘other’ to a dominant construct of ‘Irish manhood’, or to British colonialism. But what are the limits of a paradigm of woman as ‘other’ that privileges ‘gender’ and misses its intersections with ‘race’; or favours simplistic analogies between postcolonial Irish women and black and Third World women? Ireland's 2004 Referendum on Citizenship, which sought to exclude Ireland's non-white immigrants and reproduced national identity through gendered discourses of whiteness, highlights the need for feminist cultural critics to interrogate the hegemonic conflation of the categories ‘white’ and Irish. The referendum redefined the basis of citizenship as jus sanguinis – transmitted through bloodline – threatening many immigrants with deportation while affirming the belonging of the ‘Irish diaspora’ as a ‘blood’ inheritance. Influenced by Jacques Derrida's deconstructive methods, this essay shows that ironically, in works by women artists of th...

Shabina Begum and the headscarf girls

Abstract: The issue of headscarves has generated much cultural and political commentary in recent years. It has also been the subject of recent legal proceedings in the UK in the case of SB. The purpose of this article is to examine this case within its broader cultural, textual and interdisciplinary context. The article opens with a discussion of SB. The second part then introduces some of the broader debates which oscillate around the issues of headscarves and their cultural implications. Subsequently, the third and fourth parts argue the case for a specifically narrative intervention in these debates, one that resonates with the poetical aspirations of ‘law and literature’ scholarship. The final part includes a focused discussion of headscarves as a central theme in Orhan Pamuk's recent and much admired novel, Snow.

The Opposite of Sex is Politics – The UK Gender Recognition Act and Why it is Not Perfect, Just Like You and Me

Abstract: The outline of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 in Journal of Gender Studies 15:1, was, I am sure, enlightening for many. Most people now know Trans people have a right to a new birth certificate an...

The Wounded Woman and the Parrot: Post-feminist Girlhood in Alan Warner's The Sopranos and Bella Bathurst's Special

Abstract: The essay reads two British novels about teenage girls – Alan Warner's The Sopranos (1998) and Bella Bathurst's Special (2002) – within the context of recent sociological Girls' Studies research. Particular attention is given to processes of self-formation, group dynamics, and twenty-first-century girls' attitudes to both traditional femininity and feminist politics. Contrasting a group of working-class girls with a group of middle-class girls, the essay explores the discourse of ‘girl power’ by pitting the post-feminist ideal of the ‘can-do’ girl against the Ophelian spectre of the ‘at-risk’ girl, thus raising issues of low self-esteem as well as the politics of girls' anger and young female ‘re/sisterhood’. Comparing Bathurst's image of wounded femininity to Warner's carnivalesque symbolism of a parrot on the loose, the essay also interrogates the feminist commitment of both texts, especially in relation to Warner's novel as an example of male ‘cross-writing’.

Women, Power and Subversion in Orature: A Palace Performance in Yorubaland, Nigeria

Abstract: It is our contention in this paper that though royal wives in Oyo-Yoruba community are invisible in some social, political and religious lives of their people, they are visible in the sphere of poetic creation. We opine that Yoruba kings are powerful in most spheres, but in orature, the power of women in general, and royal wives in particular, cannot be underestimated. Through the examples of ‘yungba’ and ‘igbatiti’, two poetic spheres created by tradition for royal wives from Oyo-Yoruba community, this paper argues that royal wives reposition themselves as channels of poetic utterance. They use poetry to redefine their position as wives and women, reassert themselves and subvert unwanted values. In particular, they use their creative power as a weapon for subverting male-constructed structures and views in society. In exercising their creative power, the women use their power to speak, to perform and to decide the course of action. In conclusion, we state that contemporary women writers also enhance the ...

Annie Ernaux, Class, Gender and Whiteness: Finding a Place in the French Feminist Canon?

Abstract: This article attempts to identify the innovative qualities of the writing of Annie Ernaux, and their continuing relevance for feminisms. It discusses both the new literary forms and styles she creates, and the extent to which her writing contributes to the work of intersectionality in its representation of class, gender, sexuality, ‘race’ and ethnicity. The exceptional nature of Ernaux's foregrounding of social class in the French context, and its troubling nature, perhaps in a broader sense, is discussed through an analysis of its impact on the shape and style of the writing. There is some discussion of Ernaux's popularity in France as a writer and of the critical attention she receives in France and in university French departments abroad. The article raises the question of Ernaux's absence from the canon of French feminist works created by anglophone feminist theorists, and taken up by university departments of English and critical theory.

Opposite Sex – A Discussion of Rights Under the Gender Recognition Act

Abstract: This paper examines the UK Gender Recognition Act 2004. This Act removes some of the injustices of those wishing to register a gender different from that assigned at birth. However, there is some potential for inconsistencies with developing law and it is the aim of the piece to raise these.

Beyond Identity Politics

Abstract: In her book Beyond Identity Politics Moya Lloyd produces an interesting and significant argument that makes an important intervention in feminism and politics in the 21st century. I would like to argue here, however, that, whilst her analysis might fit a certain arena of the developed world (although only partially at that) it is less useful and significant for other parts of the globe and for some of the most pressing political issues that face the world at the present time.

Reply to Assiter

Abstract: In this paper I reply to Alison Assiter's discussion of my book Beyond Identity Politics. Against the contention that performativity negates real material difference, I explain how those differences are produced in the complex intersection of norms, power discourse, institutions and practices. Furthermore, I show how in order to contest both global inequality and human rights abuses (Assiter's two examples) it is necessary to examine that production precisely in order to challenge it.