The Second Sex
Abstract
de Beauvoir writes that "humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous human being" "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute--she is the Other" "When man makes of woman the Other, he may, then, expect her to manifest deep-seated tendancies toward complicity. Thus woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definate resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other"
"Christ was made a man; yes, but perhaps for his greater humility"
Colombia’s war conflict inspired crime fiction, mainly by male authors. This genre has reflected the nation’s harsh reality since the mid-twentieth century, revealing brutal aspects of Colombian society. However, women’s experiences as victims of violence and their literary contributions have been overlooked despite their early engagement in writing about these matters. This article analyses the novels En el brazo del río by Marbel Sandoval Ordóñez and Era mucho el miedo by Gloria Inés Peláez, published in 2006 and 2016, respectively. Both novels are representations of what could be considered the Colombian “Second State”—as named by Rita Segato: an illegal ruling state and economic scheme that thrives on the cruelest violence, primarily against women.
Introduction
This paper presents Enactive Artificial Intelligence (eAI) as a gender-inclusive approach to AI, emphasizing the need to address social marginalization resulting from unrepresentative AI design.
Methods
The study employs a multidisciplinary framework to explore the intersectionality of gender and technoscience, focusing on the subversion of gender norms within Robot-Human Interaction in AI.
Results
The results reveal the development of four ethical vectors, namely explainability, fairness, transparency, and auditability, as essential components for adopting an inclusive stance and promoting gender-inclusive AI.
Discussion
By considering these vectors, we can ensure that AI aligns with societal values, promotes equity and justice, and facilitates the creation of a more just and equitable society.
Patriarchy – literally “rule of the fathers” – is most commonly understood as a form of social organization in which cultural and institutional beliefs and patterns accept, support, and reproduce the domination of women and younger men by older or more powerful men. Today sociologists view as patriarchal any system that contributes to the social, cultural, and economic superiority or hegemony of men. Consequently, sociologists study the manner in which societies have become and continue to be patriarchal by investigating both social institutions and commonly held cultural beliefs. At the same time, scholars investigate the consequences of patriarchy, that is, differential access to scarce societal resources including power, authority, and opportunity by gender.
Images of sexualized women depicted as animals or alongside meat are routinely used in advertising in Western culture. Philosophers and feminist scholars have long theorized that such imagery reflects the lower status of both women and animals (vs. men) in society and argued that prejudiced attitudes towards women (i.e., sexism) and animals (i.e., speciesism) are interconnected, with meat‐eating as a core symbol of masculinity. Addressing these key ideas from ecofeminist theory, we review the psychological evidence on the associations between sexism, speciesism, meat, and masculinity. Research on the animalistic dehumanization of women provides evidence that sexism and speciesism are psychologically entangled and rooted in desires for group‐based dominance and inequality. Furthermore, research on the symbolic value of meat corroborates its masculine value expressing dominance and power, and suggests that men who abstain from meat consumption (e.g., vegans) are feminized and devalued, particularly by those higher in sexism. We conclude that a greater recognition of the interconnected nature of patriarchal gender relations and practices of animal exploitation, including meat‐eating, can help in efforts to improve the status of both women and animals.
This article grows out of the conviction that (some) films can philosophise. It looks to juxtapose the film Dogtooth and Wittgenstein's builders' example, such that they are seen as philosophising in similar ways over similar issues. Both strike me as probing the possibility—or denial—of a future with language. Using Stanley Cavell and Rush Rhees' responses to Wittgenstein's builders, I register the significance and meaning of themes from the film and Wittgenstein's work in a mutually enlightening way: language, games and breaking free. This results in two different pictures of our hope of a future in and with language.
This paper defines and analyzes the processes of “othering” as they manifest in the practice and praxis of nursing education. Othering is bound up in the establishment and reinforcement of norms, and shores up power inequities that negatively impact faculty, students, and patients. While previous analyses have addressed othering in nursing more broadly, this paper adds a consideration of the multiple processes of othering that operate within the context of nursing education spaces. Cases from recent nursing education literature are interpreted through the frameworks of exclusionary, inclusionary, and structural othering, and provide specific illustrations of the concepts described. The paper concludes by arguing for an application of norm‐critical pedagogical practice to counteract, disrupt and dismantle othering processes within nursing education.
This paper draws from a dataset focusing on two rural communities in Colorado (USA). Data collection occurred over two periods: late‐2019 and again during COVID‐19 lockdowns in mid‐2020. The communities differed demographically: one had a growing minoritized population, especially among its youth; the other was overwhelmingly white. The paper troubles the concept of subjective wellbeing (SWB) as it asks about the productive potentials of discomfort, with assistance from such concepts as colorblind ideology, motivated reasoning, and network homophily. While important to think about so‐called positive emotional states in the context of community development, we must also ask questions like, “SWB for who and at whose expense?” How respondents thought about individual‐ and community‐level SWB had much to do with the social networks they were in. I also explore why the community that fared pandemic‐related disruptions, from a SWB standpoint, better than the other performed worse during this same period from an economic (material) standpoint. Sociological factors explain these dynamics, which are leveraged to enhance our understanding of how to conceptualize community development in productive ways. In sum, I argue that certain expressions of discomfort have value and are therefore necessary for creating resilient, flourishing, and, ultimately, just communities.
In this article, I examine the phenomenological methodology at work in Fanon's revision of the body schema. I argue that he implicitly utilizes a methodology I call standpoint phenomenology and show how this methodology emphasizes experiences that are not “universal” but specific to certain social groups in order to uncover shared ontological structures of experience. Fanon's work illustrates two key theses of standpoint phenomenology: (1) the thesis of situated phenomenology and (2) the thesis of inverted phenomenological privilege. I also draw a deep connection between classical and standpoint phenomenology by showing that it is the phenomenological analysis of breakdown experiences (e.g., corporeal malediction) that enables a standpoint approach to phenomenology. This breakdown methodology is explicitly developed by Heidegger and utilized implicitly by Merleau‐Ponty. If I am right, standpoint phenomenology is both a natural development of and a considerable advance on the traditional methodology. This article, then, provides a better understanding of Fanon's place in the phenomenological tradition and, more broadly, makes explicit a new methodology for advancing phenomenological research.
Caryl Churchill's first professional play, Owners, is about ownership as its title implies. One of the highlighted themes in the play is misogyny which has been overlooked by scholars and critics who have commented on Owners. Thus, my aim in this study is to consider and disclose the reasons for misogyny, demonstrated by Churchill as a socio‐political critique, through a feminist reading. As the play is generally examined within the context of themes of power, politics or possession, this article may contribute to correct this omission in the academic domain. In her dark comedy, Churchill emphasises how gender roles are culturally learned and transferred to succeeding generations. In Owners, the married couple Marion and Clegg are both misogynists, but endowed with opposing world views. Churchill, like a sociologist, has made this family the main subject of her play and used it as a point of reference when explaining the reasons for misogyny in a comic and exaggerated style. In this family, while Marion is equipped with bourgeois feminist and anti‐patriarchal ideas, Clegg is a man supporting patriarchal principles. Churchill reveals in her play that Marion and Clegg hate women who do not fit into their ideal world views.
The Department for Education recently administered new Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) guidance, one of the aims of which is to foster students’ ability to develop and maintain healthy romantic relationships in adulthood. However, while an education aimed at developing this capacity in young people is welcomed, the RSE guidance does not directly address conceptions of romantic love that shape how we actually conduct our love lives. Romantic love myths are a fundamental part of cultures across the world and greatly influence our behaviour and decision‐making in romantic relationships. Belief in these myths is associated with negative relationship outcomes. Therefore, if we wish to improve students’ capacity to effectively negotiate future relationships, RSE must directly address conceptions of romantic love and its associated myths. This paper proposes five criteria against which to assess student beliefs to determine appropriate educational responses to them. Given love's complex nature, and the manner in which related beliefs are held, it is argued that addressing this topic through open philosophical exploration would be a prudent educational approach to adopt within the classroom. This may temper some of the potential harms of love myths while respecting the right of students to freely hold and pursue their own conceptions of love.
This article explains how the promotional studio narratives and filmmaker interviews for the frontier drama The Revenant (2015), along with the film’s masculinist adventure narrative, have misrepresented and underserved the ecological conditions at the film’s primary shooting locations in western Canada. Although the film ostensibly pays tribute to the beauty and power of spectacular wilderness regions, the media events involving its release and reception amplified the story’s tropes regarding male suffering in the face of hostile nature, thus hampering the film’s ability to call forth environmental identifications from audiences sufficient to helping effect systems change.
This paper brings together phenomena not often connected in the rural studies cannon to show an underlying relationality connecting digital agriculture, conceptions of the good life, and pursuits of happiness. Drawing from the scholarship of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, Agriculture 4.0 technologies are described as “cruel” happiness pointers. These platforms are shown to direct actors toward happiness while potentially accelerating the very conditions that produced the problems they are promising to solve. Highlighting conceptions of the good life that are fluid, contested, and multiple, which have connections to sayings and doings associated with these platforms, the analysis makes visible norms and values animating the so‐called digital revolution. At the same time, the paper interrogates what this changing affective politics means for the future of farming and farm‐based identities, at least in Western countries. The data analyzed, from individuals who had adopted smart farming applications in the US, were collected from focus groups and personal interviews, the latter conducted pre (2019) and post COVID outbreak (2020 and 2021). This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
Genograms are a key technology for family therapists, but in many respects they remain distinctly underexplored. This is especially the case when it comes to the basic structure of the genogram. Other authors have added other lenses on top (e.g., the cultural genogram, the spirituality genogram, and many others), but very few have explored in depth the core assumptions of the circles and squares which make up a genogram. In this article, I engage with the genogram literature to suggest that these shapes lead the genogram session to proceed in a way which privileges gender identity ahead of all other social graces, through the process of deconstruction. I then consider if a model of genogram creation which uses a universal symbol and then refers to gender later through symbology might allow for greater flexibility and curiosity in genogram sessions. This idea is offered with the intention that practitioners will engage with this deconstruction of the genogram in a variety of different ways.
What does it take for a property to be a social property? This question is different from questions about what it takes for a property to be socially constructed. That is: it is one thing to be social, it is another to be socially constructed. Compared to questions about social construction, this question about sociality has received relatively little attention in social metaphysics. Here, I work from a very specific set of observations which arise from the social metaphysics literature to uncover a sufficient condition on sociality for properties, a condition which I argue all non‐social properties fail to satisfy.
The aim of this paper is to summarize key psychoanalytic concepts first developed by Sigmund Freud and apply them to a critical exploration of three terms that are central to nursing's self‐image—empathy, caring, and compassion. Looking to Menzies‐Lyth's work, I suggest that the nurse's strong identification as a carer can be understood as a fantasy of being the one who is cared for; critiques by Freud and others of empathy point to the possibility of it being, in reality, a form of projective identification; reading Lacan and Žižek, I propose that repeated research into caring and repeated complaint about barriers to caring can be understood as manifestations of the death drive first posited by Freud. I conclude that psychoanalytic insights suggest that caring roles can raise profoundly ambivalent issues for those who care but they can also point the way to freedom from painful and self‐destructive symptoms inherent in such work.
The widely accepted “continuing bonds” model of grief tells us that rather than bereavement necessitating the cessation of one's relationship with the deceased, very often the relationship continues instead in an adapted form. However, this framework appears to conflict with philosophical approaches that treat reciprocity or mutuality of some form as central to loving relationships. Seemingly the dead cannot be active participants, rendering it puzzling how we should understand claims about continued relationships with them. In this article, we resolve this tension by highlighting two fundamental aspects of paradigmatic loving relationships that can, and often do, continue in an adapted form following bereavement: love and mutual shaping of interests, choices, and self‐concepts. Attention to these continuing features of relationships helps to capture and clarify the phenomenological and behavioral features of continuing bonds. However, love and mutual shaping must also change in important ways following bereavement. Love becomes unreciprocated, and although the dead continue to shape our interests, choices, and self‐concepts, we predominantly shape their legacies and memories in return. These changes place important constraints upon the nature of our interpersonal connections with the dead.
With the progression of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), lockdowns were introduced, movements were restricted, and the people were confined to their homes. On the other side, the social distancing measures and the shutdown of movements showed a significant impact on the ecosystem resulting in an explicit revamp of nature. These nature rejuvenation and home confinement measures were presumed to improve the human-nature connection and affect the wellbeing of the individuals. Guided by this aspect, the present study attempted to examine nature relatedness and mental wellbeing of the Indian population during the COVID-19 pandemic. We further tried to investigate the relationship between the two considering age and gender as moderators. In addition, the association between nature relatedness and various socio-demographic factors were also inquired. A three-week online survey was conducted among the general Indian population with the age group ranging from 18 to 65 years. Results exhibited a higher nature relatedness and moderate mental wellbeing among the individuals. The association between nature relatedness and mental wellbeing produced a significant positive relationship among the sample. Meanwhile, individuals with higher nature relatedness were found to be female, unemployed, research scholars, and possessing ‘very liberal’ political ideology. When assessed for potential moderators, neither gender nor age influenced the relationship between nature relatedness and mental wellbeing. Possible explanations of our findings were discussed that shall provide constructive directions for future research in the area of human-nature connection and public health.
The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing conversation on critical phenomenology with reflections on its method. The key argument is that critical phenomenology should be understood as a form of historico‐transcendental inquiry and therefore it cannot forgo the phenomenological reduction. Rather, this methodological step should be centered in critical phenomenology, and appropriated in problematized and rethought forms. The methodological assessment of critical phenomenology has implications also for how we read its canon. The paper shows that while Simone de Beauvoir did not adopt the phenomenological reduction in its full Husserlian meaning, her analyses of experience did not remain on the level of personal or experiential description either. The contention is that if we want to read her as a critical phenomenologist, we should focus on her seminal modification of the historico‐transcendental method of phenomenology.
Indian films, both mainstream Hindi and those in regional languages, have successfully portrayed the everyday sociopolitical and cultural maps of Indian life. No doubt, contemporary filmmakers have experimented with forms and techniques and have also given enough space to address gender issues to provide empowerment. Recent films like Ki and Ka (2016) and The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) have used visual media to represent varied dimensions of gender performances, to negotiate gendered spaces, and to ask pertinent questions about women’s bodies. Using the cinematic narrative, I explore deep‐rooted marriage‐and‐family structures that are layered within the patriarchal psyche that limits women’s freedom and sexuality. Through analysis, I explore how these films subvert and negotiate “naturalized” gender dictums and allow us to reorient our thoughts on gender.
Purpose
Despite the implementation of professionalism curricula and standardized communication tools, inter-physician conflict persists. In particular, the interface between emergency medicine (EM) and internal medicine (IM) has long been recognized as a source of conflict. The social nuances of this conflict remain underexplored, limiting educators’ ability to comprehensively address these issues in the clinical learning environment. Thus, the authors explored EM and IM physicians' experiences with negotiating hospital admission to better understand the social dynamics that contribute to inter-physician conflict and provide foundational guidance for communication best practices.
Methods
Using a constructivist grounded theory (CGT) approach, the authors conducted 18 semi-structured interviews between June and October 2020 with EM and IM physicians who have been involved in conversations regarding admissions (CRA). They asked participants to describe the social dynamics that influenced these conversations and to reflect on their experience with inter-physician conflict. Data collection and analysis occurred iteratively. The relationships between the codes were discussed by the research team with the goal of developing conceptual connections between the emergent themes.
Results
Participants described how their approaches to CRAs were shaped by their specialty identity, and how allegiance to members of their group contributed to interpersonal conflict. This conflict was further promoted by a mutual sense of disempowerment within the organization, misaligned expectations, and a desire to promote their group’s prerogatives. Conflict was mitigated when patient care experiences fostered cross-specialty team formation and collaboration that dissolved traditional group boundaries.
Conclusions
Conflict between EM and IM physicians during CRAs was primed by participants’ specialty identities, their power struggles within the broader organization, and their sense of duty to their own specialty. However, formation of collaborative inter-specialty physician teams and expansion of identity to include colleagues from other specialties can mitigate inter-conflict.
Positive body image is a contemporary construct, having only received research attention within the past two decades in an effort to elicit a more holistic, comprehensive account of the concept of body image. Nevertheless, emerging literature has suggested its direct and indirect association with improved outcomes, including indicators of well-being (e.g. self-compassion) and feelings towards the self (e.g. self-esteem). Positive body image has therefore been suggested as both a potential technique and a target of actionable therapeutic work for cultivating both physical and psychological well-being. First, through insights from quantitative and qualitative seminal works, this paper demonstrates that positive body image is: (i) a multidimensional construct, distinct from negative body image; (ii) a confluence of theoretical disciplines and influences; (iii) protective, with therapeutic capacities; (iv) a positive outcome; (v) young, yet flourishing; and (vi) socially and politically relevant. Thus, complementing what positive body image is, this paper further situates therapeutic practice within the field of positive body image by delineating and contextualising their reciprocal capacities and relevant techniques.
This article explores the role of voice and voicing as a gendered construct in the performance of rakugo in Japan. Rakugo is a traditional genre of comedic storytelling, performed by a single actor. The genre sets a nostalgic tone for the simplicity of life in preindustrial Tokyo, through portrayals of foolishness and mockery of various human situations. A great majority of the rakugo performers are men. Despite the fact that rakugo is characterized with a technique of cross gender vocalization, rakugo performers state that the female voice is considered unsuitable for vocalizing the protagonists in rakugo stories. On the basis of ethnographic data gained from participant observation, and my own apprenticeship under a prominent rakugo master, I investigate the role of female voice as a “speaker” in the Bakhtinian “double‐voiced discourse” of rakugo. The female voice is considered unsuitable to perform rakugo well, because women are denied the agency to reciprocate the androcentric ideology that views the genre as exclusively male authored.
An important question confronting feminist philosophers is why women are sometimes complicit in their own subordination. The dominant view holds that complicity is best understood in terms of adaptive preferences. This view assumes that agents will naturally gravitate away from subordination and towards flourishing as long as they do not have things imposed on them that disrupt this trajectory. However, there is reason to believe that ‘impositions’ do not explain all of the ways in which complicity can arise. This paper defends a phenomenological account of complicity, which offers an alternative explanation.
The purpose of this paper is to explore how business ethics textbooks include Indigenous and gendered persons and peoples and whether they acknowledge Indigenous philosophies and theories. We explore 363 cases from eighteen (18) business ethics textbooks. A form and theme based content analysis was employed to help us better understand the inclusion, obfuscation and omission of Indigenous and gendered persons. A purpose of business ethics education is to disrupt injustice and oppressive practices in business. We find that business ethics education can provide more inclusive and respectful cases as it relates to Indigenous and gendered characters. There are cases that marginalize, obfuscate and omit Indigenous peoples, females, and gender diverse persons. This study contributes to diversity scholarship by identifying ways in which Indigenous and gendered persons and peoples can be included in management and business ethics education.
The choice of childlessness is a socially constructed process that evolves across a lifetime. Grounded in a literature review, this article proposes an existential‐feminist conceptual framework for counselors working with intentionally childless women. Tenets of existential therapy and feminist therapy are reviewed and applied to experiences of intentionally childless women.
The fast-growing social media in Indonesia has opened up opportunities for spreading feminist ideas to a wider and more diverse audience. Various social media accounts especially Instagram that focus on gender advocacy and feminism such as @indonesiafeminis , @lawanpatriarki, and @feminismanis have developed in Indonesia. However, the development of the social media platform also presents groups that oppose feminists. One of the accounts of women’s groups that oppose feminists is @indonesiatanpafeminis.id ( @indonesiawithoutfeminist.id ). The research objectives are namely to analyze the diversity of issues and reveal the discourse contestation that developed in the @indonesiatanpafeminis.id , and dynamic relationships on the online and offline spaces between groups of feminists and anti-feminists or the other interest. This research employed the digital ethnography method that utilized observation, interview, and literature study as data collection techniques. This study found that the online conversations at @indonesiatanpafeminis.id revealed misconceptions on feminism from a group of women with a religious identity. Furthermore, the conversation also tends to strengthen patriarchal values with religious arguments that are gender-biased. However, the @indonesiatanpafeminis.id serves as a public space for open debates and education on feminist issues. The anti-feminist group behind the @indonesiatanpafeminis.id are women who identify themselves in a certain Muslim circle that has political, cultural, and religious agendas. One of the agendas is to influence the public to reject the Sexual Violence Eradication Bill. This study also noted the Muslim supporters of anti-feminism in Indonesia are less popular compared to progressive religious-based Muslim women organizations such as Aisyiyah (Muhammadiyah), Muslimat NU (Nahdlatul Ulama), and Rahima (Center for Education and Information on Islam and Women’s Rights). The study also evokes discussion on how the feminist and anti-feminist discourses can be utilized to criticize and develop the women’s movement or feminism in a multicultural context.
Drees makes a strong case for the importance of the humanities in the university, providing an excellent resource for anyone in the Western Academy. Its usefulness for those who want to work outside the West is limited, however, because he does not engage with literature that challenges its methods and disciplines. If we are to have a positive global impact, we need to do more than clarify existing boundaries, we need to blur them, beginning with an examination of inherent biases reflected in its history, structure, and content. This article focuses on one critique, a decolonial critique of the Western view that ontology precedes epistemology (an external reality produces knowledge). Outside the modern Western Academy, epistemologies create ontologies (epistemic creations/stories about the world give us a sense of the world and its materiality). I describe a relational understanding of knowledge and how this changes our understanding of the humanities and our epistemic responsibilities.
What is feminist curiosity? Or better yet, how is feminist curiosity practiced, where is it practiced, and with whom is it practiced? In this essay, I develop a philosophical account of feminist curiosity by drawing on direct contributions from the feminist philosophical tradition, but also by interweaving scattered testaments to feminist curiosity from critical race theory, intersex studies, disability studies, and trans studies. What surfaces in this inquiry is an account of feminist curiosity that goes far beyond the act of asking feminist questions. Feminist curiosity proper, I suggest, reconfigures not simply what gets asked, but with whom, where, and how inquiry happens. Feminist curiosity is rooted in companionship (with self and others), reorients time (a visionary future, but also a material past and present), and resists oppressive forms of inquiry such as spectacularization and the presumptions of access. As such, feminist curiosity is committed not only to a relational world but to a relational investigation of that world.
Anscombe distinguishes two notions of “self-conscious”: the philosophical notion, which refers to the special form of awareness one has of oneself as oneself, and the ordinary notion, which we employ when we speak of “feeling self-conscious before another”. My aim in this paper is to show that ordinary self-consciousness cannot be understood in terms of either of the forms of intersubjective relation standardly acknowledged in the philosophical literature. It cannot be understood reductively, in terms of the psychological states of each subject nor can it be understood in terms of an irreducible second personal relation. Instead, I argue that in order to understand the phenomenological structure of ordinary self-consciousness, we must rehabilitate Sartre's thought that when I am conscious of myself as being the object of another's gaze, I experience myself as being acted upon by them, in such a way that what I experience them as doing to me and what I experience myself as thereby undergoing are two aspects of an irreducible interpersonal transaction.
In global production organizations, the production process is broken down into diverse tasks distributed across the globe depending on the comparative advantages of a particular region. This in turn has generated opportunities for paid work for hundreds of millions of workers in emerging and low‐income countries, drawing in a substantial number of women with limited previous labor market access. Those processes of gender division can be seen through a variety of different lenses including liberal, feminist, postfeminist, socialist, or poststructuralist ones. Another strand of gender and organization literature is influenced by observations and critical discussion of management and organization processes within existing companies, primarily in metropolitan regions. This type of research draws attention to the asymmetric representation of genders in the hierarchical organization of companies. A completely different topic of empirical discussion on gendered enterprises is business start‐ups, where the number of women as new business founders is increasing. Finally, advertising is not just a medium for selling products but is also a place where gender power relations are mirrored. Through advertisement processes women are increasingly used as objects to sell products or services. Gender stereotypes in advertising translate societal values and use existing values of society to promote their brands.
This collaborative paper explores ways in which a ‘haptic’ mode of representation can challenge restrictive academic logocentric forms of representation, by imagining an ‘affective wisdom’ related, mode of embodied writing. The first author draws on three French feminist scholars to depict this as an affinities based, ethical framework, which reflects the depth of expression that marks our organisational lives. The second author illustrates this philosophically grounded representational aesthetic, by advancing a series of craftwork culturalist interpretations, which enhance our appreciation of leadership practice as a relationally embedded phenomenon
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The purpose of this article is to summarize and examine how contemporary traumatological research serves to complicate and enrich what we know about how people attempt to make meaning of their experiences in the aftermaths of traumas.
The aim of this article is to emphasise physicality and embodiment in child‐centred research, fieldwork and intellectual activity. It will argue that research is not a separate form of action, placing the researcher in a position of epistemological privilege, but an embodied capacity developed through practical activity. This will be explored through an examination of the ‘least‐adult’ positionality. Drawing from a large ethnographic study of primary schools in Dublin, Ireland, this article contends that the body must be put at the centre of the research process. I introduce the conceptualisation of the ‘passive’ and ‘active’ body, as key components for the relational context of fieldwork. Moreover, through an engagement with phenomenology, it is argued here that knowledge production is an embodied capacity developed through a sensuous relationship with the field.
This paper examines the nature of spirit and spirituality as organic response to threat in the context of a global pandemic. Drawing from the fields of neuroscience, philosophy and theology, the author defines spirit as the biological capacity of a living organism to maintain homeostasis in response to changes in its environment. The capacity of individual human organisms to respond to changes that are perceived as threats to homeostasis with passive and active power is posited as a spirituality that is crucial for the survival of the human species. The paper represents a form of secular spirituality that is synonymous with the natural power of organic life.
Aadhaar (literally ‘foundation’) is the largest national biometric identification drive the world has witnessed. An Aadhaar is a twelve‐digit ID number linked to its holder's iris scans, fingerprints, facial photograph, and demographic information in a centralized database. In but a decade, India has expeditiously enrolled over 90 per cent of its billion‐strong population into a Central Identities Data Repository. This essay is an ethnographic consideration of the processes by which Aadhaar enrollees become data, focusing on the sociopolitical valence of biometric data. It argues that the datafication of the body via Aadhaar occasions re‐examinations of – and contestations over – the idea of the individual in postcolonial India, a country often deemed sociocentric in popular and scholarly discourse alike. Further, it suggests that biometric socialization facilitates belonging in a ‘Digital India’, often rendered as a data cosmopolis in emergent technocratic imaginations.
This paper explores motherhood as an organisational subjectivity. Highlighting the experience of older women in a global engineering firm, and my own experience as an academic leader, the paper shows how the maternal body is culturally produced and how discourses of motherhood perpetuate highly gendered notions of who can give and receive care in organisations. The paper argues that the patriarchal construction of women as endlessly maternal, but never complete, limits the possibility for gendered agency. The paper calls for a reinterpretation of the maternal in organisations that would allow women to reclaim a feminine space where they can draw on the full repertoire of their embodied potentialities in order to experiment and assert their subjectivity. This reinterpretation of the maternal would also facilitate an uncoupling of notions of care and motherhood which would allow for a de‐gendered reciprocal care offered and received by all members of the organisation.
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This article explores performative enactments of gender at work in a UK‐based Search and Rescue voluntary organisation, QuakeRescue. Based on ethnographic research, we analyse how gender is performatively constituted in this male‐dominated setting, focusing in particular on how hegemonic masculinity is enacted through bodies, physicality, and technical competence. Our findings show how performative acts, predicated on essentialist understandings of superior masculine bodies, constructed femininity as limited, deficient and Other, legitimising the assigning of mundane, routine tasks to women volunteers. By endorsing women's presence, albeit as low‐status team members, there was sufficient recognition to ensure that sedimented practices of ‘doing gender’ at QuakeRescue remained largely unquestioned. We conclude that hegemonic masculinity predicated on bodily practices in male‐dominated workspaces is oppressive in its effects, and until this is recognised and acknowledged, transformative potential is limited.
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The power of popular culture lies today in its global reach, its ubiquity, and its ability to reproduce itself virtually without limit. Popular culture also shapes and is shaped by ideology, including gender ideology. For this reason, early second‐wave feminist theory and activism saw popular culture as one of the most important impediments to women's liberation. Where liberal feminists sought more representative models for women in popular culture, Marxist feminists, like Marxists more generally, tended to see popular culture as a product of capitalist production and therefore problematic not only at the level of gender analysis but also as antithetical to class struggle. Psychoanalytic perspectives shifted the focus of cultural analysis from production to consumption, but even those more nuanced views theorized women's reception of popular culture as passive and constrained. Regardless of their differences, all such views construct popular culture as monolithic, top‐down, and univocal. In contrast, more recent postmodern, multicultural, and third‐wave feminist theory have deployed an eclectic mix of theoretical lenses, and, in doing so, have emphasized women's ability to find agency by “reading against the grain,” to find a non‐alienated pleasure in popular texts, and to see fissures and contradictions within such texts. This chapter explores debates within feminism about popular culture, and how gender ideology plays out within popular culture. The chapter concludes with a brief look at the ways that feminism is currently figured as a “character” within popular culture itself.
White women's obtaining the suffrage began the extension of civic equality to all adults. In many nations, this happened in the wake of World War I. American feminism tended toward gender difference rooted in the body, while British feminism tended toward socialist or Marxist feminism, emphasizing the social formation of women as a gender. Under the leadership of right‐wing and religious men, as well as more and more white women, American states introduced restrictions on reproductive rights, including banning abortion even in the case of rape or incest. Australia and New Zealand mobilized women to work in the “Land Armies,” growing food for Britain. With fewer children, households grew smaller, averaging just over two in 2016; single‐person households accounted for at least a quarter of all households in Australia, Canada, and the US, more in Western Europe and the UK.
This chapter explores feminist interventions in the study of social movements with a focus on feminist movement building and sustainability. Major trends in feminist social movement scholarship – including dominant conceptions of gendered emotion, intersectional identities, and a global perspective – are examined. The chapter begins with a brief history of traditional social movement scholarship, examining the origins of social movement theory and strategies for success; surveying the arc of social movement traditions situated through an historical lens enables a broad view of the progress that has been made as well as areas that require sustained attention. The relationship between feminism and social movements is then interrogated, highlighting the achievements and challenges of centralizing gender equality within social change agendas. In the final section, two examples of social justice movements explicitly impacted by the concerns outlined above are explored: Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development (PWWSD) and Black Lives Matter (BLM).
This chapter starts with a historical overview of biological explanations of the nature of women and differences between the sexes, followed by definitions of biological determinism and essentialism. Recent and contemporary manifestations of biological determinism, primarily centering on genes, hormones, and the brain, are discussed and criticized. Essentialist theories about male–female differences are outlined along with the feminist response to them. After a review of the status of biological and essentialist approaches to sexual orientation, new perspectives on the role of biology are highlighted, including nondeterministic and nonessentialist ways of incorporating the body into approaches to theorizing human nature and difference. The persistence of biological determinism and essentialism, despite decades of criticism, is noted, leading to the conclusion that the need for critique and resistance to these outmoded ways of thinking persists.
This chapter explores the social movement of radical feminism. Emerging out of the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s, radical feminism began with a group of American second‐wave feminists referring to themselves as “radical women” and then eventually adopting the radical feminist label. While the movement was born in the United States, it soon spread to other English‐speaking countries. While the heyday of radical feminism is aligned with feminism's second‐wave – from the mid‐1960s until the early 1980s – some scholars have suggested that the movement isn't totally historic. Radical feminism has, in recent years, substantially impacted on public policy in Scandinavian countries and while the number of radical feminist groups and the volume of their activity may have reduced in the last half‐century, radical feminist scholarship is still being produced. In this chapter, I examine the principles of radical feminism and explore its criticisms and shortcomings. I end with a discussion of legacy and radical feminism's continued relevance into the twenty‐first century.
In this paper, I argue that so called “systematic critiques” of the liberal conception of law in Catherine MacKinnon and Critical Race Theory which have traditionally been seen to reject liberalism should really be understood as subjecting the liberal conception of law as impartial and just to an immanent critique. Critical Race Theory and MacKinnon both seek to unmask the seemingly neutral subject which authorizes law as in reality a hegemonic and oppressive subject. They also employ the tools of liberalism, demanding justice and equal protection under the law. I argue that the apparent contradiction of their demands can be understood by seeing the subject itself as combining these contradictions at the level of the relation between the unconscious and consciousness. The ego strives for rational self‐organization while the unconscious contains sedimented socially transmitted prejudice. There is thus room within both for the struggle for freedom and justice espoused by liberalism at the conscious level as well as for the unconscious perpetuation of prejudice and domination. I conclude that MacKinnon’s work and that of CRT show that liberalism must not be abandoned as post‐structuralism does, but that liberals is in fact aided by its critics.
The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ratified 17 goals as a global blueprint towards “economic, social and environmental sustainability” of all nations. It includes “Gender Equality” (Sustainable Development Goal 5) that seeks to empower women and girls by eliminating discrimination and providing equal opportunities for their fuller participation in all aspects of life. This case study provides an exploratory assessment of web‐based information for women in Alabama's public libraries located in the “American South” and its Appalachian region. Both have experienced ostracization and stereotyping in popular culture owing to political and religious conservativeness, Civil Rights struggles, gender prejudice, and hostile conditions towards women/minorities. This exploratory website content analysis identifies seven examples of information offerings categorized into three groupings: (a) information sources (collections, resources); (b) information policy and planning (assigned role, strategic representation); (c) connections (internal, external, news and events). It develops a taxonomic framework with representative examples that challenge the regional stereotype in its images of solely deficit marginalization. The discussion provides new directions and potential opportunities to build collaborations of sharing within Alabama's public libraries and beyond to better address women's concerns and gender inequities in their local and regional communities.
The aim was to explicate persistent psychological and bodily memories of sexual abuse and how they are expressed during dental appointments. The participants comprised 13 sexually abused individuals (11 women), who recalled and expressed these experiences during a dental appointment. They were encouraged to describe, in detail, aspects of the appointment which triggered memories of the sexual abuse. The interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using Qualitative Content Analysis. The identified overall theme illustrating the latent content was ‘An echo of sexual abuse transformed into (dys) functional reactions’. The first category covering the manifest content was ‘The inner invisible struggle’, with two subcategories: (i) mental inscriptions of the abuse experience; and (ii) consequences of the dental encounter. The second category was ‘The discoverable manifestations’, with two subcategories: (i) enigmatic communication; and (ii) expressions of bodily memories. The dental appointment arouses similar psychological stressful reactions as the episodes of abuse; both implicit and explicit expressions are recognizable. Dental staff can contribute to disclosure by improved understanding of the strain a dental appointment can cause in patients who have been subjected to sexual abuse and familiarity with the associated bodily expressions.
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