Au cours des années 1970, le développement de la vente directe à domicile a donné lieu à la formation de cercles de sociabilité entre femmes dans le cadre des réunions Tupperware. Ces rencontres ont contribué à diffuser par capillarité nombre d’idées et pratiques féministes. Elles n’ont pas été sans incidence sur le déroulement de certaines trajectoires de femmes des classes moyennes et populaires. Le partage d’expériences de la soumission féminine, conjugale, et la confrontation aux modèles de femmes professionnalisées, les (...) démonstratrices, ont ainsi parfois ouvert à la prise de conscience du sentiment de soi et permis d’accéder à une certaine autonomie. (shrink)

This reflection considers recent United Nations’ normative developments in international human rights law and their potential to assess, with a gender perspective, retrogressive economic policies being promoted by International Financial Institutions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Orthodox and androcentric economic policies, such as structural adjustment, austerity, privatisation and deregulation of labour and financial markets, normally have devastating effects on women’s rights. Yet, the financial responses with which IFIs are trying to help states manage the effects of the pandemic (...) seem to continue promoting those androcentric economic policies. This piece concludes that ex ante human rights and gender impact assessments of multilateral loans’ conditionalities should be conducted and that women’s participation in this process as well as access to adequate quantitative and qualitative data to understand the differentiated effects of those economic policies on gender equality, are crucial. These reflections were born out of the authors’ own family and country challenges. (shrink)

The starting point of many feminist studies on information technology is the question of how to create equal access to the computer and computer science for women. This question has raised further more profound questions concerning the computer and its effects on the relationship between the sexes.In my contribution, I will firstly look at those symbolic constructions whichgenderise this technology itself and the ways of handling it. Secondly, I will look into how information technology influences the area of private reproduction (...) and the public division of labour between the sexes. With the advent of information technology, new tendencies, their outcome still undecided, can be seen in both areas. These tendencies could lead to a stabilisation of the current relationship between the sexes. The (inherent) contradictions could however, be used by the women's movement to promote changes which further emancipate. (shrink)

The World Bank’s premise that “gender equality is good business” characterizes the current gender and economic development model. Policymakers and development practitioners promote and encourage women’s entrepreneurialism from the conviction that increasing women’s market-based opportunities is key to lifting women, their families, and communities out of poverty, resulting in the construction of a gendered entrepreneurial subject. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with home-based garment workers in Ahmedabad, India, this article questions the portrayal of women informal workers as entrepreneurs. (...) Employing a social reproduction framework, I argue that the exploitative characteristics of informal work are falsely interpreted as features of entrepreneurialism. Because work is completed in the worker’s own home, work and care become a mutual burden in which woman’s sense of providing for her family is impeded by both these roles. A feminist social reproduction framework of embodied labor links women’s responsibility for and contribution to family well-being with women’s marginalized economic position. Examining home-based work through this lens reveals the contradiction of the entrepreneurialism discourse. (shrink)

As we live in a culture where “everything can be commodified, measured and calculated and can be put in the competitive market for sale, detached from its roots and purpose,” there is need to redefine our humanness in terms of the changing nature of science, technology, and their deeper impact on human life. More than anything else, it is Information Technology that now has tremendous influence on all spheres of our life, and in a sense, IT has become the destiny (...) of our life. And this is where the real trauma lies. On the one hand, our being in the cyberspace opens up new and exciting horizons before us; on the other hand, we ourselves are changed and transformed in the process. The virtual world transforms human users to a problem-solver technocrat. The speed at which Information Technology is changing the way that youth around the world are socializing, playing, and researching, it is the common practice now for a 15-year old to go home and update their MySpace page, followed by playing online games, or looking up the new trendy YouTube video. These forms of technology are often the topic of adolescent conversations as YouTube, blogs, e-magazines, Face book, MySpace, iPhones, and iPods dominate the commercial and social networking market. Some researchers refer to this phenomenon as ubiquitous technology drawing attention to the fact that ubiquitous technology acknowledges the speedy adoption of day-to-day use of technology as a global phenomenon. In this background, this article aims at revisiting the question, “What is to be human in the era of Ubiquitous Technology?” From a feminist perspective, one can still redefine the boundaries between femininity and masculinity in the context of IT and its impact on our lifestyle and thought style. While examining the ways in which our definitions of “woman” and “man” are shifting in this new communication environment, Elizabeth Lane Lawley observes that we cannot fix a single center from which the experiences of women with computer and communication systems can be viewed and that such fixity would only serve to deepen inequities rather than exposing and removing them. She finally submits, “It is possible to use new theoretical perspectives on the shifting boundaries of gender definitions to rethink a previously deterministic view of the effect of new technologies on society, and particularly the effect of those technologies on women. While the gradual absence of the subject from the field of Artificial Intelligence leads to the invisibility of feminine care along with social and relational nature of man, some feminists dismiss the biological sex distinction on such issues and encourage females to ‘imitate man’ and to become more aggressive, assertive and dominating” (Lawley 1993 ). What are the possible impacts of this new technology on the so-called feminine traits of our human nature? How far our definitions of “woman” and “man” are shifting in this new communication environment? This is what this article seeks to explore. (shrink)

On her arrival in Travancore in 1819 Mrs Mault, as wife of the new missionary, immediately set about establishing a school for convert girls and a ‘lace industry’ to employ convert women. Her actions reflect that pattern of activism and organization historians of gender and imperialism have identified as the ‘mission of domesticity’ conducted by European and North American Christian missionary women to their non-Christian ‘sisters’ in the colonial empires being established by their respective nation-states throughout the nineteenth century. Mrs (...) Mault was herself among the first generation of missionary women to pioneer this specifically female branch of colonizing endeavour, designed to ‘emancipate’ Indian women in terms of the norms of metropolitan ideologies of femininity and womanhood. Drawing on a case study of the London Missionary Society's activities in South Travancore, South India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I argue that this ‘mission of domesticity’ was not a straightforward transfer of conventions of marriage and motherhood to the colonial context. On the contrary, the project was from the start caught in a complex and contradictory web of agency and discourse which ‘remade’ not only convert women but missionary women as well. Central to this process of refiguring femininity on the imperial fulcrum were changes to the meanings of ‘work’ in relation to both ‘home’ and womanhood, articulated through a religious idiom and framework of action. The consequences of these processes, the article argues, were somewhat contrary. On the one hand, the Indian Christian woman is reconstructed as a wife, mother and worker, while on the other, the missionary women are bifurcated: the missionary wife increasingly viewed as an amateur appendage to her husband, firmly secured in the domestic sphere, while the single woman attains a new status as a professional worker. (shrink)

Bosnian refugee women adapted more quickly than their male partners to their host environments in Vienna and New York City because of their self-understanding and their traditional roles and social positions in the former Yugoslavia. Refugee women's integration into host societies has to be understood through their specific historical experiences. Bosnian women in exile today continue to be influenced by traditional role models that were prevalent in the former Yugoslavia's 20th-century patriarchal society. Family, rather than self-fulfillment through wage labor and (...) emancipation, is the center of life for Bosnian women. In their new environment, Bosnian refugee women are pushed into the labor market and work in low-skill and low-paying jobs. Their participation in the labor market, however, is not increasing their emancipation in part because they maintain their traditional understanding of zena (women) in the patriarchal culture. While Bosnian women's participation in low-skill labor appeared to be individual families’ decisions more in New York City than in Vienna, in the latter almost all Bosnian refugee women in my sample began to work in the black labor market because of restrictive employment policies. In contrast to men, women were relatively nonselective and willing to take any available job. Men, it seems, did not adapt as quickly as women to restrictions in the labor market and their loss of social status in both host societies. Despite their efforts, middle-class families in New York City and Vienna experienced substantial downward mobility in their new settings. Women's economic and social downward mobility in (re)settlement, however, did not significantly change the self-understanding of Bosnian women. Their families’ future and advancements socially and economically, rather than the women's own independence and emancipation remained the most important aspect of their being. (shrink)

Feminist writings often argue that the welfare state, like the society that underpins it, is patriarchical, and that a major overhaul of policy is necessary in the quest for gender equality. This is possibly a valid claim, if not for all welfare states, then at least for some. The very same objective would, nevertheless, appear additionally persuasive if women-friendly policy can be shown to improve not only the welfare of women, but of all. In this article I shall attempt to (...) demonstrate that the feminist case need not be based on the narrower cause of women's emancipation because improving women's welfare will, simultaneously, improve upon societal welfare. Or, to put it differently, gender equality is potentially a substantial Pareto improvement in so far as women are emerging as the axial principle of any positive welfare equilibrium for post-industrial society. The post-war welfare equilibrium was built around the male breadwinner's earnings and job security, coupled to the family's internalization of caring needs. The “standard production worker” cum male breadwinner became the normative guideline for institution-building. Be it the full employment commitment, collective bargaining, labour market regulation, or social protection, all were primarily designed to safeguard his job, earnings capacity, and social entitlements. His security was assumed to deliver universal security. The male breadwinner constituted the nexus between economy and family, between production and consumption. As research has shown, women's economic dependence on men was near absolute in the post-war decades. This dependency was doubly reinforced because few married women worked and if they did, their wages were typically low. (shrink)

In activist circles feminist political thought is often viewed as abstract because it does not help activists make the kinds of arguments that are generally effective with donors and policy makers. The feminist political philosopher's focus on how we know and what counts as knowledge is a large step away from the terrain in which activists make their arguments to donors. Yet, philosophical reflection on the relations between power and knowledge can make a significant contribution to women's human rights work (...) in the area of evaluation. Feminist political philosophy can offer guidelines for how to evaluate the work of women's human rights organizations and their funders in light of the social, political, and economic conditions that render their work necessary and difficult. This article offers 1) an account of the difficulty in showing the impact of social change activism using conventional modes of measurement, particularly those that focus on first order effects, 2) feminist theoretical insights into the interrelatedness of global gender injustices that may help us develop better benchmarks of evaluation for women's human rights programming, and 3) a sketch of how to approach the evaluation of organizations and donors who seek to support global gender justice. (shrink)

Feminist theory needs both explanatory-diagnostic and anticipatory-utopian moments in order to be truly critical and truly feminist. However, the explanatory-diagnostic task of analyzing the workings of gendered power relations in all of their depth and complexity seems to undercut the very possibility of emancipation on which the anticipatory-utopian task relies. In this paper, I take this looming paradox as an invitation to rethink our understanding of emancipation and its relation to the anticipatory-utopian dimensions of critique, asking what conception of emancipation (...) is compatible with a complex explanatory-diagnostic analysis of contemporary gender domination as it is intertwined and entangled with race, class, sexuality, and empire. I explore this question through an analysis of two specific debates in which the paradoxical relationship between power and emancipation emerges in particularly salient and seemingly intractable forms: debates over subjection and modernity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that a negativistic conception of emancipation offers the best way for feminist critical theory to transform the paradox of power and emancipation into a productive tension that can fuel critique. (shrink)

Following the International Women's Year in 1975, a group of men and women met every month for a year at the home of psychoanalyst Edith Weigert to reflect on what was then called the "psychology of women." Recently, a few members of that original group, joined by several others, began a seminar on gender and psychoanalysis with the goal of reexamining old and new writings infeminism, psychoanalysis, and related fields. The nine essays in this book are a result of (...) those discussions. Written by distinguished and varied contributors, they explore the complex relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis and address broader questions of gender. Psychiatry and the Humanities, Volume 14. (shrink)

Through exploring some of the foundational and structural aspects of the experience of home from a feminist perspective, this article will draw from Iris Marion Young’s reflections on home, female experience and embodiment to argue that home is central to our ontological and subjective constitution. While acknowledging that home can be a problematic concept in the socio-political realm, particularly for feminist thinkers, this article contends that a feminist reading of the phenomenology of home is crucial (...) to understanding some of the foundational features of human subjectivity. In doing so, it will explore aspects of some existing phenomenological accounts of home and dwelling which posit that home is an ontological structure, outlining a feminist phenomenology of home that explores three interwoven aspects: (1) home as forming an on-tological ground of human subjectivity; (2) home as a gendered space; (3) and pregnant embodiment as the “first home.” Dans cet article, nous explorerons quelques aspects fondamentaux de l’expérience du « chez-soi » dans une perspective féministe, inspirée par les réflexions d’Iris Marion Young à propos du chez-soi, de l’expérience féminine et du corps vécu. Nous affirmerons que le chez-soi est au centre de notre constitution ontologique et subjective. Tout en prenant acte du caractère problématique du « chez-soi » dans le champ sociopolitique, et ce, tout particulièrement pour les philosophes féministes, nous soutiendrons qu’une approche féministe de la phénoménologie du « chez-soi » est nécessaire pour comprendre plusieurs aspects fondamentaux de la subjectivité hu-maine. Pour ce faire, nous présenterons d’abord quelques théories phénoménologiques existantes du chez-soi et de l’habitation [dwelling] qui considèrent le chez-soi comme une structure ontologique. Ensuite, nous insisterons sur trois aspects entrelacés d’une phénoménologie féministe du chez-soi : (1) le chez-soi comme fondation ontologique de la subjectivité humaine; (2) le chez-soi comme un espace genré; et (3) l’expérience corporelle d’être enceinte comme le « premier chez-soi ». (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 575 Geneviève Pagé Gender at the Crossing: Ideological Travelings of US and French Thought in Montreal Feminism This article recounts a story about Montreal feminism using the narrative thread of its conceptual language. It is a story of language as a political choice that guides our actions, but also language as a political issue, a barrier, a tool (...) that structures our thinking and that reflects and reproduces relations of power in knowledge production and dissemination. Gender is the central character in this story—its role representing the way US, French, and Quebec theoretical traditions are deeply in dialogue with each other; yet this dialogue is arbitrary and filled with long silences. In reviewing the dialogue, this article identifies a few elements that play a significant role in favoring or impeding the traveling of ideas and concepts, focusing, in the case of Quebec, on how part of the feminist movement, comprised of radical or “revolutionary” feminists, engages with and constructs theory. The article begins by briefly tracing the evolving meanings of gender in the United States from the 1920s to the twenty-first century. Then, turning to France, a second section identifies elements limiting the traveling of US understandings of gender in French feminist theory, especially the predominance of specific traditions of thought, namely existentialism and Marxism, leading to different ways of thinking about oppression, patriarchy, sexism, and the idea of womanhood. In a third section, I shift the focus to Quebec, particularly Francophone Montreal, to survey its feminist thought, political traditions, and 576 Geneviève Pagé translation. Its history, its people, and its geographic location put it at the convergence of US and French influences, but with a distinct added local imperative: the struggle for national liberation. The specific ways in which Quebec nationalism has foregrounded power and politics around language has had a major impact on how Quebec feminists have negotiated relations with their southern feminist neighbors. In this sense, Quebec feminism presents an excellent case study of language operating as an axis of power. Furthermore, in the context of globalization and resistances to globalizing processes, Montreal provides a perfect example by which to highlight both transnational influences and local specificities. Montreal, as a classic example of Mary Louise Pratt’s cultural and linguistic “contact zone”—the space where communities of practices interact—is a city in which one can clearly identify “the intellectual and linguistic points of contact between cultures, and make visible the political pressure that activates them.”1 I treat translations that occur in this context as the process of connecting and communicating between communities. As queer theorist Juana María Rodríguez has noted in another context, “the process of translation involves more than merely translating languages; it involves translating cultures, values, and institutions of power.”2 Similarly, translation here involves an exchange between symbolic and semiotic structures of both the original and the new communities. Zooming out of Montreal, I then address the politics of translation on a more global scale, pointing out the particular ways the production and dissemination of knowledge is especially beholden to market relations. All these reflections help us understand the traveling of ideas, concepts, and ideologies across linguistic barriers. I conclude that it is in the interest of feminists to pay particular attention to what knowledge is produced from different standpoints and in different languages and what it can teach us. 1. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34; Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York: Routledge, 1996), 36. 2. Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 19. Geneviève Pagé  577 Gender in the United States It is among US feminists that the conceptualization of the gender/sex dichotomy first developed. However, gender—the word—ironically comes to English from the French genre and shares with that word its derivation from the Latin genus, meaning “kind,” “sort,” or “type.” The derivation is most visible in the borrowing in English of the French genre, for example, in literary forms such as fiction or poetry. Similarly, both the English... (shrink)

If capitalism is being increasingly understood as performative and processual, and if these understandings are being folded into capitalism's production of itself, what place does gender have in performing the commercial world? This article argues that the significance of gender as genre or type has been overlooked in the recent literature on the performance of the market or market relations. While the role of economic theories and management practices in making markets has been examined, and the place of women in (...) organizations has been explored, little attention has been paid to how gender as a productive process marks the creation and maintenance of market relations. Using material from a recent ethnographic study of the advertising industry, I examine how advertising practitioners incorporate vitalist understandings of market relations and of knowledge-producing activities into their practices. Framed as `creativity' and `innovation', these discursive practices perform what practitioners understand as a reproductive function in commercial life. (shrink)

This paper explores a contrast between the Marxist and feminist traditions of emancipatory social theory: whereas in the Marxist tradition theorists have spent considerable time and energy discussing the problem of the viability of classlessness as an emancipatory project, feminists have spent relatively little time defending the viability of a society without male domination. The paper argues that this difference in preoccupations reflects, at least to some extent, differences in the relationship between prefigurative egalitarian micro experiences and macro institutional change (...) with respect to gender oppression and class oppression. The paper also explores the implications of this contrast for the kinds of explanatory theory developed within the two traditions. Marxists' greater tendency than feminists to seek relatively deterministic accounts of the demise of the form of oppression on which they focus is viewed as at least partially a way of contending with the difficulty in establishing the viability of the emancipatory project of classlessness. (shrink)

1. The most original discovery in Beauvoir’s book is one more Columbus’s egg, namely that it is far from evident that a woman is a woman. That is, she discovers that a woman is the result of a process that made so that she is like she is. The paper discusses two aspects of the so-to-say ‘ideology’ inspiring the work. The first is its ideology in the proper, Marxian sense. My claim is that the work still pays a heavy price (...) to the dominating ideology. It leaves still too much unquestionedof what was assumed at the time to be obvious, necessary, and unchanging. This ballast depends firstly on the inherited prevailing climate of opinion, corresponding to a situation of alienation, producing two distorted views of the male and female gender. On the other hand, it depends on an unquestioned legacy from the modern episteme (in Foucault’s sense of the word) carrying presupposed Cartesian dualism. The other side of the work’s ideology, that is, the positive program presented or better the utopia it formulates is less innovative than it could be, In a few passages, where she seems to make use of suggestions from Merleau-Ponty, she points at a view where the bodily and emotional dimension is rescued from its negation in the male-dominated Capitalist society. Still, these suggestions are forgotten in the bulk of the work. -/- 2. The making of a philosophical work does not depend just on the kind of philosophical influences behind it. A book is also the product of an author with a story living in one society at a given time of social history. In this case, the book was written in the afterwar time when women were pushed back home again from the wartime labor market and when several of the goals reached by the first phase of feminist movements had gone lost in several European countries under Fascist or semi-fascist regimes and were being eroded in America by the reactionary climate of McCarthyism. It was a book written by an intellectual young woman in almost total isolation. These circumstances account for some more naïve suggestions from work: for ex., the idea that the alternative to the strategy once adopted by nineteenth-century emancipationist movements should be an individual inner process of transformation confined within the boundaries of one woman’s consciousness, or also, the idea that the goal of women’s liberation should be to bring all women to a condition similar of Simone de Beauvoir herself who, as an educated woman, earning her life by her work, and living in an allegedly equal state with an enlightened man (Jean-Paul Sartre!) in a relationship free from constraints (an unmarried couple!), was already exemplifying what a liberated woman’s life would be. -/- 3. The reconstruction of the idea of femininity is still the most fruitful part of the work. It rejects the notion of femininity as an essence depending on biology or other factors and explores the making of this image as a result of a condition made of the social and economic state of affairs but as revived and actively mirrored through and by the consciousness of the very subjects suffering an oppressive situation. And the main novelty is the ‘discovery’ of asymmetry between the self-image of the male and the (self)-image of the woman, an asymmetry depending on the fact that the woman sees herself through the other’s eyes. -/- 4. Later feminist writers such as Shulamit Firestone remarked that 'The Second Sex' heavily depended on several key-ideas from Sartre existential ontology. One crucial aspect is accepting the mind-body dualistic framework without any suspicion that such dualism could have been itself a projection of the basic experience of the male-female duality. I suggest that the philosophical legacy inherited from Sartre is on occasion an asset for Beauvoir’s innovative existential analysis of the feminine ‘condition,’ but on several occasions, it creates unnecessary obstacles for her project of a new comprehension of the feminine ‘situation,’ aimed at rescuing women from an 'inauthentic' self-definition. -/- 5. The first among these poisoned gifts is Sartre’s idea of the individual as pure freedom and project. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism is well-known: Sartre draws a picture of the world as containing no more than ‘human beings and things,’ thus denying any substance to social relations, institutions, and culture. -/- 6. The second is Sartre’s reconstruction of dialectics, understood as dialectics without synthesis. This is an enlightening tool when used to describe conflicts, in so far as it accounts for the emergence of the ‘other’ as what is excluded. But it becomes a boomerang when used to interpret any kind of relationship, leading to equate inter-subjectivity with conflict. -/- 7. Suggestions coming from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach of positive value of the bodily dimension as such, and hence of the feminine body, are evoked here and there but never fully spelled out. The most shocking consequence of acceptance of the Cartesian or Sartrean dualist view is an almost total de-evaluation of sexuality, understood as an activity involving just one tiny part of the human body, going with the idea that overcoming the oppression of women implies de-empathizing biological differences that are after all tiny and devoid of value. Besides, Beauvoir falls back into the trap of grounding claims of equality between men and women on the assumption that biological differences are of limited relevance. The eventual reason for such a step back is the distorting Cartesian mirror into which Beauvoir still looks in the vain hope of discovering a disembodied self as the (Cartesian) subject of an impossible kind of liberation.The first among these poisoned gifts is Sartre’s idea of the individual as pure freedom and project. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism is well-known: Sartre draws a picture of the world as containing no more than ‘human beings and things’, thus denying any substance to social relations, institutions and culture. The second is Sartre’s reconstruction of dialectics, understood as a dialectic without a synthesis. This view of dialectics is an enlightening tool when used to describe conflicts. It may account for the emergence of the ‘other’ as what is excluded. However, it becomes a boomerang when used to interpret any relationship, leading to equate inter-subjectivity with conflict. Suggestions coming from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach would tend to admit that the bodily dimension as such has a positive value, and hence the feminine bodily dimension is not just indifferent, but instead gives women a point of view on the world different from the male point of view. These suggestions, yet, are evoked here and there but never fully spelt out. The most shocking consequence of acceptance of the Cartesian or Sartrean dualist view is an almost total de-evaluation of sexuality, understood as an activity involving just one tiny part of the human body, going with the idea that overcoming the oppression of women implies understressing biological differences that are after all tiny and devoid of value. Furthermore, Beauvoir falls back into the trap of grounding claims of equality between men and women on the assumption that physical differences are of limited relevance. The eventual reason for such step back is the distorting Cartesian mirror into which Beauvoir still looks in the vain hope of discovering a disembodied self as the (Cartesian) subject of an impossible kind of liberation. -/- . (shrink)

Childbirth in the United States is in crisis. This is especially true for Black and brown mothers. This childbirth emergency constitutes a failure of the social contract: because society has failed to provide minimally decent care for all birthing mothers, but especially for Black and brown mothers, it is necessary to allow mothers to choose home birth. I amplify the voices of Black and brown scholars and midwives to defend home birth, and I argue that home birth (...) is safe and empowering and that it is rational for those who desire it to choose it. (shrink)

While journalism traditionally is considered a ‘masculine’ domain, it is said that public relations are a ‘feminine’ profession. The legitimation for this gendered coding of two professions are so-called gender different characteristics. The aim of this article is to show how the differentiation of professional roles in journalism and journalism-related fields goes hand in hand with processes of gender differentiating ascriptions on the symbolic and discoursive levels. Additionally, the communication research reproduces these binary codes in context with gender codings. The (...) history of professions shows that gendered practices of ascription are arbitrary and only needed to legitimize gendered positionings in the professional field. A closer look at the gendered positioning of the two professions journalism and public relations shows that both have primary and secondary job markets, horizontal and vertical segmentation, and gender-based differences in pay. The gendered positioning – existing on two levels between journalism and public relations as well as within both professions – is not the product of gender different characteristics but of gendered ascriptions of meaning to different job positions. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze both the gendered practices of ascription on the symbolic and the discoursive levels, as well as the gendered positioning in the relationship of journalism and public relations and within both professions. Finally, the consequence for the main/malestream research in the relationship between journalism and public relations could be that the ‘feminization’ of public relations leads public relations researchers to underestimate the power of public relations. (shrink)

The history of market regulations provides an important perspective on the gendering of systems of food within the evolution of urban economies. This article addresses an important and distinctive period in this process, when New York shifted away from colonial and English-derived institutions in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. The legal status of women was unsettled during this time, introducing uncertainty into women's economic activities. New York City's public marketplaces were carefully regulated through a network of ancient (...) and sometimes arcane laws that inscribed particular activities within well-defined spaces while prohibiting them elsewhere. While these laws were derived from traditional English practices, enforcement was becoming increasingly legalistic rather than customary. While these market laws did not specifically invoke gender, they produced a system that was less navigable to women due to their problematic status as legal subjects. Because the system's navigability differed by commodity, these laws significantly shaped the gendered identity of foodstuffs, such as meat and fruit. Carefully delineating these legal constructions allows us to better understand how women navigated the real and conceptual spaces of the food system, and to see how the changing legal realities of New York impinged on women's employment. (shrink)

Strengthening the abilities of smallholder farmers in developing countries, particularly women farmers, to produce for both home and the market is currently a development priority. In many contexts, ownership of assets is strongly gendered, reflecting existing gender norms and limiting women’s ability to invest in more profitable livelihood strategies such as market-oriented agriculture. Yet the intersection between women’s asset endowments and their ability to participate in and benefit from agricultural interventions receives minimal attention. This paper explores changes in gender (...) relations and women’s assets in four agricultural interventions that promoted high value agriculture with different degrees of market-orientation. Findings suggest that these dairy and horticulture projects can successfully involve women and increase production, income and the stock of household assets. In some cases, women were able to increase their control over production, income and assets; however in most cases men’s incomes increased more than women’s and the gender-asset gap did not decrease. Gender- and asset-based barriers to participation in projects as well as gender norms that limit women’s ability to accumulate and retain control over assets both contributed to the results. Comparing experiences across the four projects, especially where projects implemented adaptive measures to encourage gender-equitable outcomes, provides lessons for gender-responsive projects targeting existing and emerging value chains for high value products. Other targeted support to women farmers may also be needed to promote their acquisition of the physical assets required to expand production or enter other nodes of the value chain. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue the cooking is a fraught issue for women, and especially women who self-identify as feminist, because it is so deeply gendered.

The sixteen essays in Gender Struggles address a wide range of issues in gender struggles, from the more familiar ones that, for the last thirty years, have been the mainstay of feminist scholarship, such as motherhood, beauty, and sexual violence, to new topics inspired by post-industrialization and multiculturalism, such as the welfare state, cyberspace, hate speech, and queer politics, and finally to topics that traditionally have not been seen as appropriate subjects for philosophizing, such as adoption, care work, and the (...) home. (shrink)

This article examines the ways that managers in a rapidly globalizing industry use gendered discourses of skill to justify and frame their search for inexperienced workers in low-wage regions, using a case of a U.S.-based apparel firm that relocated and subcontracted its sewing operations in the 1990s. It uses feminist theory to examine managers' claims that women's sewing skills in the United States were disappearing and that they needed to seek out these skills in parts of the world where women (...) were not yet active participants in labor markets. Feminist researchers have long understood the ways that naturalization of skill cheapens women's labor. The case presented here highlights the way in which the portrayal of certain skills as naturally occurring resources justifies the movement of capital in search of new pools of workers without labor market experience or union representation. (shrink)

This collection of theoretical and empirical research on gender and politics assembles contributions from a group of international scholars providing varied accounts of the political interests of gender. It examines how to bridge the gap between discursive and socio-materialist accounts of gender relations and politics. Offering new models for theoretical and empirical research, the first five chapters provide a theoretical framework for the collection, while the following eight chapters shed light on key concepts through detailed case studies of such topics (...) as human rights, womens movements, gendered labor markets, international monetary policy, equality policy, and queer politics.--Publisher's description. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 403 Gyanendra Pandey Men in the Home: Everyday Practices of Gender in Twentieth-Century India This article responds to a call by feminist historians of South Asia to attend to the “complex experience of family” as conditioned by age, gender, and class, and the ordinary “daily practices of gender” in the domestic arena.1 My essay focuses on the (...) comparatively neglected aspect of men’s domesticity—their performance of life in the home—as revealed in the writings and practices of prominent nationalist thinkers and activists who lived and worked in an era of militant anticolonial agitation in India. The domestic sphere, with its assigned gender roles and routines, was at the heart of major debates between the colonizers and the colonized about the meaning of culture and enlightenment. “Among rude people, the women are generally degraded; among civilized people they are exalted,” James Mill declared, in his classic statement on domestic manners.2 From Mill, writing in the second decade of the nineteenth century, to Katherine Mayo in the third decade of the twentieth, colonialist 1. Indrani Chatterjee, introduction to Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia, ed. Indrani Chatterjee (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 4; Mrinalini Sinha, “A Global Perspective on Gender: What’s South Asia Got to Do with It?” in South Asian Feminisms, ed. Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 359. 2. James Mill, The History of British India, 4th ed. (1817), edited by H. H. Wilson, vol. 1 (London: James Madden, 1848), 309. 404 Gyanendra Pandey writers dredged up the condition of women, familial relations, and domestic life in India to demonstrate the necessity of colonialist-initiated improvement and reform.3 Colonial rule thus provided the impetus for “a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of Indian ‘tradition’ along lines more consonant with [a] ‘modern’ economy and society.”4 Faced with insistent colonial critique, nationalist reformers and thinkers set out to controvert suppositions about the fallen state of Indian women and the oppressiveness of Indian homes. They also further sought to ameliorate conditions where these had deviated from their version of a glorious past. The Hindi/Urdu writer Premchand sums up the nationalist rebuttal in a 1931 essay entitled “Nari-jati ke adhikar” (“The Rights of Women”): “In fact, the Indian woman has always been considered the goddess of the home, and she has a higher status than men in the society.” For a variety of reasons, Premchand suggests, women fell from this preeminent position over time and men began to appropriate the established rights of women. “But,” he concludes, “the [new] wave of nationalism and enlightenment that has arrived now will obliterate all these [gender] distinctions, and our mothers [sic] will be re-installed in the exalted place that is their right.”5 It was in this way that early nationalist thinkers and spokespersons produced an argument about the existence of a sacred and relatively uncolonized “inner” space of Indian society, as contrasted with a more quickly changing, compromised, and negotiated “outer” space. In what is now a familiar precept in South Asian gender history, women were cast as the (predominant) custodians of “tradition” in private and in public life; men were (predominantly) the instruments of national, social, and cultural transformation in the wider, public domain. With this framing came propositions about the need for rapid progress in the “outer” realms of science, industry, and voluntary association as well as the later goals of welfare and development, secularism, and socialism. The push 3. Ibid.; Katherine Mayo, Mother India (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927). 4. Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 88. Mani makes a powerful critique of the so-called “Indian tradition” and of claimed colonial efforts to improve Indian society. 5. Premchand, “Nari-jati ke adhikar,” in Vividh Prasang, vol. 3, ed. Amrit Rai (Allahabad, India: Hans Prakashan, 1980) 249. Gyanendra Pandey 405 for such advancements developed alongside a more guarded approach to change in the “inner” world and its inherited store of spiritual resources— symbolized above all... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lenore Davidoff 1923–2014 Lenore Davidoff, a pioneering historian of British women, died October 19, 2014, from Hodgkins’ lymphoma. We have lost a generous and influential leader in gender studies and an early supporter of Feminist Studies. Born in the United States, Davidoff left in 1953 to study sociology at the London School of Economics. Her first book, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (1973), led her to (...) a subject she made her own: the paid and unpaid work of women, not only of wives and mothers, but also of servants. In 1979 she published an article in Feminist Studies on the secret cross-class love between a master and servant, “Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick.” It remains one of Feminist Studies’s most frequently cited publications. Davidoff went on to publish numerous books and articles, including the influential Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (1987), co-authored with Catherine Hall, which argued that the formation of separate spheres—men for business, women for home—was an integral part of the early capitalist enterprise. Davidoff played a key role in building a community of fellow scholars in the 1970s and 1980s. She was instrumental in starting the Feminist History Group in London and the Women ’s Research and Resources Centre, now the Feminist Library. She served as the founding editor of the international journal Gender and History from 1987 until 1994 and remained active on its board till her death. Davidoff inspired countless feminists with her writings, mentorship, and friendship. She was invariably encouraging with younger scholars, offering incisive suggestions that could turn an early, inchoate idea into an exciting project. She will be sorely missed. —Martha Vicinus I n M e m o r y o f... (shrink)

Neoclassical economics has become the predominant school of economic thought, influencing scholarship on management, organizations, and business ethics. However, many feminist economists challenge the individualist and positivist foundations of neoclassical economic epistemology, arguing instead that purportedly gender-neutral and value-free methods routinely and systematically leave out and undervalue women. Extending this proposition, this article introduces the epistemic foundations of feminist economics and illustrates how they can produce novel insights relevant for business ethics. In particular, by examining economic phenomena from the point (...) of view of the people they affect, feminist economic epistemology is able to elucidate the ways in which power asymmetries and gender norms that constitute the social world can be reflected in business practices. I apply this methodological insight to three case studies of global supply chains to challenge the neoclassical assertion that including women in labor markets necessarily catalyzes gender equality. (shrink)

When women work in male-dominated professions, they encounter a “glass ceiling” that prevents their ascension into the top jobs. Twenty years ago, I introduced the concept of the “glass escalator,” my term for the advantages that men receive in the so-called women’s professions, including the assumption that they are better suited than women for leadership positions. In this article, I revisit my original analysis and identify two major limitations of the concept: it fails to adequately address intersectionality; in particular, it (...) fails to theorize race, sexuality, and class; and it was based on the assumptions of traditional work organizations, which are undergoing rapid transformation in our neoliberal era. The glass escalator assumes stable employment, career ladders, and widespread support for public institutions —which no longer characterize the job market today. Drawing on my studies of the oil and gas industry and the retail industry, I argue that new concepts are needed to understand workplace gender inequality in the 21st century. (shrink)

Gender, Power and Sexuality is a collection of original and exciting articles by well-known feminists which makes a major contribution to our understanding of the ways in which men exercise control over girls and women in their daily lives, in the home, at school, at work and in the courts. Women are seen to resent and challenge male power, but, the institutionalisation of male power is shown to mitigate against women taking control over their own lives.

This article probes the politics of the migrant caregiver/citizen-employer relationship in Palestine/israel as it unfolds within the Jewish-Israeli home. Based on interviews with migrants from the Philippines, Nepal, India and Sri Lanka and their Jewish-Israeli employers, I examine how Israel’s ethno-racially hierarchical citizenship regime and the transnational gendering and racialisation of carework manifest in this relationship. I begin by situating migrant women working as caregivers within the legal and political context of Palestine/israel, delineating how gendered constructions of the Jewish-Israeli (...) woman uphold the borders of the nation and paint non-Jewish migrant women as reproductively threatening. I then analyse two common tropes among citizen-employers in describing migrant caregivers. The first, what I term the ‘kinship trope’, characterizes them as ‘one of the family’, obscuring the ethno-racial basis of the state. I show how this trope contrasts sharply with Zionist settler colonial rhetoric portraying Jewish-Israelis as ‘one big family’. The second trope represents migrant women as individual agents of economic development and Israel as a market-driven, neoliberal society that is equally a state for all its citizens. By depicting Israel as a ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ state that is an exemplar of gender equality, this trope again masks the ethno-racial basis of citizenship, as well as gender disparities. Finally, I argue for a feminist approach to migrant carework that accounts for the ways neoliberal labour formations are mediated by gendered racisms specific to a particular state’s racial nation-building project. (shrink)

This article is a call to feminist science and technology studies to engage with debates about the intersectionality of gender with race and class in analyses of women’s relationships with their computers - these debates are well established in the broader field of gender studies, but comparatively absent from studies of gender and technology. Furthermore, in order to understand women’s many and varied technological relationships, it is necessary to explore the diverse ways in which individual women experience their gender, race (...) and class in their relationships with their PCs. The article draws on the stories told by 14 working-class women from ethnic minority communities about the introduction of networked computers in their homes, to argue that we need to account for women’s subjective experiences of the identity intersections that take place in the face of the machine. (shrink)

Rural women did not fare very well inthe land reforms carried out during the Latin American“reformist period” of the 1960s and 1970s, with womenbeing under-represented among the beneficiaries. It isargued that women have been excluded from access toand control over water for similar reasons that theywere excluded from access to land during thesereforms. The paper also investigates the extent towhich women have gained or lost access to land duringthe “counter-reforms” of the 1980s and 1990s. Underthe neo-liberal agenda, production cooperatives aswell (...) as communal access to land have largely beenundermined in favor of privatization and theindividual parcelization of collectives. Significantland titling efforts are also being carried outthroughout the region to promote the development of avigorous land market. This latter period has also beencharacterized by the growth of the feminist movementthroughout Latin America and a growing commitment bystates to gender equity. The paper reviews the extentto which rural women‘s access to land and, thus, waterhas potentially been enhanced by recent changes inagrarian and legal codes. (shrink)

가부장제의 집-가정 담론과 주거 디자인은 성별 구분을 고착화하며 여성의 점유와 환상을 재생산한다. 하지만 집과 가정에 여성을 위치시키는 것은 2가지 점에서 위험스럽다. 하나는 여성을 가정 공간에 고립시키고, 또 다른 하나는 여성 영역으로 할당된 미덕과 공간 디자인이 여성을 소외시키기 때문이다. 이에 저항하는 페미니즘은 여성 주체의 집-가정 담론을 모색해왔다. 본고는 ‘성차’를 중심으로 거주 공간에 대한 2∼3세대 페미니즘 미학의 한계와 가능성을 논의한다. 2장에서는 고대로부터 지속된 가부장제의 오이코스 담론을 비판적으로 검토한다. 3장에서는 여성 공간을 위한 이리가레의 성차개념과 주디 시카고의 을 분석한다. 4장에서는 성차 본질주의 비판을 재비판한다. (...) 재비판 논증은 이리가레의 부정의 성차로부터 본질주의에 대한 오해를 불식하는 것과 구체적인 위치에서 본질주의의 미적, 역사적 가치를 평가하는 것으로 구성된다. 그 사례로 마가레테 쉬테-리호츠키와 릴리 라이히의 실내 디자인의 양면성을 분석한다. 5장에서는 포스트가부장제의 공간 디자인을 위해 유목인, 양혜규, 올라퍼 엘리아슨의 공간 실험을 탐구한다. (shrink)

In contemporary discourses on gender, the kitchen has been a matter of much contention. On one side, it is considered a prison, but on the other, it is also viewed as a sacred heart of the home. However, in the Indian domestic sphere, the reality and meaning of the kitchen for most women remain much more complex. The article aims to highlight the multiple levels of association women have with kitchen space from the perspective of gender. By analysing Ambai’s (...) short story, ‘A Kitchen in the Corner of the House,’ the article strives to question the very idea of the kitchen as a woman’s space and attempts to understand why and how women’s identities are built around the space. The article mainly takes its theoretical base from feminist geography to understand both the spatial and symbolic construction of the space and the role of gender in such construction. Lastly, the article attempts to show that the kitchen in the Indian domestic sphere does not have a fixed set of gender rules and norms but contains an insidious web of gender ideologies that entail women to occupy the space. (shrink)

The inequitable distribution of domestic and caring labour in different-sex couples has been a longstanding feminist concern. Some have hoped that having both partners at home during the COVID-19 pandemic would usher in a new era of equitable work and caring distributions. Contrary to these hopes, old patterns seem to have persisted. Moreover, studies suggest this inequitable distribution often goes unnoticed by the male partner. This raises two questions. Why do women continue to shoulder a disproportionate amount of housework (...) and childcare despite economic and cultural gains? And why is there a widespread one-sided misrepresentation within different-sex couples about how domestic and caring work is distributed between the two partners? We answer these questions by appealing to affordance perception – the perception of possibilities for action in one's environment. We propose an important gender disparity in the perception of affordances for domestic tasks such as the dishwasher affording emptying, the floor affording sweeping and a mess affording tidying. We argue that this contributes not only to the inequitable distribution of domestic labour but to the frequent invisibility of that labour. We explore the consequences of this hypothesis for resistance and social change. (shrink)

Implementing a postcolonial feminist perspective in nursing research related to non‐Western populationsIn this article, I argue that implementing a postcolonial feminist perspective in nursing research transcends the limitations of modern cultural theories in exploring the health problems of non‐Western populations. Providing nursing care in pluralist countries like Canada remains a challenge for nurses. First, nurses must reflect on their ethnic background and stereotypes that may impinge on the understanding of cultural differences. Second, dominant health ideologies that underpin nurses’ everyday practice (...) and the structural barriers that may constrain the utilization of public healthcare services by non‐Western populations must be further examined. Postcolonial feminism is aimed at addressing health inequities stemming from social discriminative practices. I will draw on extant literature and data of an ongoing ethnography exploring the Haitian caregivers’ ways of caring for ageing relatives at home to unveil how the larger social and cultural world has an impact on caregivers’ everyday lives. Marginalized locations represent privileged sites from which health problems, intersecting with power, race, gender, and social classes, can be addressed. Postcolonial feminism provides the analytic lens to look at the impact of these factors in shaping health experiences. It also suggests redirecting nursing cultural research and practice to achieve social justice in the healthcare system. (shrink)

Despite feminism's uneven movements, it has been predominantly understood through metaphors of generations or waves. Feminism's Queer Temporalities builds on critiques of the limitations of this linear model to explore alternative ways of imagining feminism's timing. It finds in feminism's literary and cultural archive narratives of temporality that might now be diagnosed as queer, where queer designates modes of being historical that exceed the linear and the generational. Few theorists have looked to popular feminist figures, literature, and culture to theorize (...) feminism's timing. Through methodologically creative readings, McBean explores non-generational, anti-linear, and asynchronous time in the figure of Antigone, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, the film Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains, Valerie Solanas and SCUM Manifesto, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. The first to substantially bring together the ways in which time has come to matter in both feminist and queer disciplines, this book will appeal to students and scholars of feminist, queer and gender studies, cultural studies and literary studies. (shrink)

Advancing women’s empowerment and gender equality in agriculture is a recognised development goal, also within crop breeding. Increasingly, breeding teams are expected to use ‘market-based’ approaches to design more ‘demand-led’ and ‘gender-responsive’ crop varieties. Based on an institutional ethnography that includes high-profile development-oriented breeding initiatives, we unpack these terms using perspectives from political agronomy and feminist science and technology studies. By conceptualising the market as an ongoing, relational performance made up of discourses, practices and human and nonhuman actors, we trace (...) how the market is understood as an effective socioeconomic institution for soliciting demand, but also becomes a normative agenda. Construed as a demand variable, the relational and structural dimensions of gender are rendered less visible, which might strengthen rather than transform power relations’ status quo. On the other hand, a feminist science and technology perspective broadens the field of vision not only to the gendered dimensions of crop breeding, but also to the nonhuman actors, such as the crops and traits falling outside the market sphere of interest. By putting political agronomy and feminist science and technology studies into conversation, the article contributes to the development of a feminist political agronomy. (shrink)

This edited collection examines the relationship between three central terms-capitalism, feminism, and critique-while critically celebrating the work and life of a thinker who has done the most to address this nexus: Nancy Fraser. In honor of her seventieth birthday, and in the spirit of her work in the tradition of critical theory, this collection brings together scholars from different disciplines and theoretical approaches to address this conjunction and evaluate Fraser's lifelong contributions to theorizing it. Scholars from philosophy, political science, sociology, (...) gender studies, race theory and economics come together to think through the vicissitudes of capitalism and feminism while also responding to different elements of Nancy Fraser's work, which weaves together a strong feminist standpoint with a vibrant and complex critique of capitalism. Going beyond conventional disciplinary distinctions and narrow debates, all the contributors to this project share a commitment to critically understanding the connection between capitalism, exploitation, and the viable roads for emancipation.. They recover insights provided by classical traditions of political and social thought, but they also open new research directions adapted to the global challenges of our time. (shrink)

This article examines how non-linear time and circularity are deployed in the historical novel Nehanda, written by Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera. Using Adriana Cavarero’s work on inclination...

‘Gender ’ is a troublesome loanword in Japan. While this term has been prevalent in feminist and scholarly circles, it has evoked confusion in the government and stimulated a backlash from the ultra-conservatives against gender equality. Japanese reactionaries have attacked the concept of gender because of their anxiety about cultural destruction – I thus call them the ‘old guard’. Focusing on a dispute over the term ‘gender’ between feminists and the old guard, this paper examines the changes in the term's (...) usage and meanings in the Japanese political context. I first shed light on Japan's reaction to the newly arrived term ‘gender’, outlining different attitudes towards gender between the feminist/scholarly circles and the government. Secondly, I discuss the old guard's condemnation of the concept of gender, in which they distort its significance in order to diminish its positive impact on society. I then scrutinize the old guard's reasons behind their attack on the concept of gender. My findings reveal that the old guard, whose political cause is to protect traditional Japanese culture, asserts that gender equality damages this culture. Moreover, I refute their emphasis on Japan's uniqueness, demonstrating that Japanese women's traditional virtues under the patriarchal family system are not peculiar to Japan. To gauge how the concept of gender has been interpreted politically, I highlight legislative debates about the term ‘gender’. In doing so, I elucidate the extent to which the concept of gender has infiltrated Japanese society through the dispute.Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Feminism is all about demanding equality and learning to love yourself. But not too much - men hate that! From the writers of Reductress, the subversive, satirical women's magazine read by over 2.5 million visitors a month, comes HOW TO WIN AT FEMINISM: The Definitive Guide to Having It All--And Then Some! This ultimate guide to winning feminism--filled with four-color illustrations, bold graphics, and hilarious photos--teaches readers how to battle the patriarchy better than everybody else. From the herstory of feminism (...) to how to apologize for having it all, readers will learn how to be a feminist at work and at home with tips that include: How to Do More with 33 Cents Less How to Be Sex-Positive Even When You're Bloated How to Love Your Body Even Though Hers Is Better The 9 Circles of Hell for Women Who Don't Help Other Women Designer Handbags to Hold All Your Feminism How to Get Catcalled For Your Personality HOW TO WIN AT FEMINISM is a fresh take on women's rights through the lens of the funniest women in comedy today. With this book as your wo-manual, you'll shatter that glass ceiling once and for all (but you'll still need to clean up the mess). (shrink)

This article traces the gendered consequences of changes in the problem of combining work and family caused by the collapse of state socialism in former East Germany. The transition to capitalism made the trade-offs between work and family more extreme, amplified the experiential distance between work and family, and increased the perceived social value of work relative to family activities. These processes highlighted gender stratification: Women's labor power was devalued just as the value of paid employment increased, and women were (...) increasingly excluded from work just as women's family roles seemed to lose value for society. This study suggests that feminists should conceptualize postsocialist transitions not only as changing labor market conditions and state policies but also as shaping gender relations through changing the meanings and experiences of work and family activities. (shrink)