Anti-sexist men: A case of cloak-and-dagger chauvinism

The paper looks at the sexual behaviour of anti-sexist men as this is presented in writing, in discussion, and in personal experience of them. It shows that changes in the sexual behaviour of anti-sexist men have been those that serve their own interests. Some anti-sexist male writing about sex describes how some of them cannot get an erection without objectifying the women they're in bed with; and they don't tell these women about the misogynistic fantasies they have in order to objectify them. Drawing on this, on discussions with anti-sexist men and on personal experience, it seems that ‘impotence’ is a common reaction to stroppy feminists and sexually active women. The paper concludes that male anti-sexism is more a ‘cloak-and-dagger form of chauvinism’ than a genuine attempt to lose their power over women.     

Frances gillam holden and the children's hospital dispute, 1887: woman's sphere,feminism and nursing

This paper examines the confrontations of a late nineteenth-century ‘lady superintendent’ with men and masculinity. It analyses the problematical links between femininity, feminism and ‘reformed’ nursing, in a period when the latter two were emerging from the first. A central focus is the extent to which the discourse of ‘woman's sphere’ was meaningful for such single, employed, middle-class women as the subject of this paper, Frances Gillam Holden, in the specific context of hospitals and professional health care. This paper argues that such a discourse informed her challenges to male/medical professional power and her bids for authority and recognition in her workplace. Ultimately this challenge failed, in that male/medical power was vigorously reasserted. However, such attempts suggest the gradual shifts in late nineteenth-century constructions of femininity and domesticity towards the possibility of feminism, not only in the familiar suffrage struggles, but also in such obscure locations as the Children's Hospital in Sydney     

‘Male sexual politics and men's gender practice’

The responses to feminism and women's liberation, which men make when we define ourselves as ‘supportive’ of women's demands, are problematic. There continues to be debate within gender politics around the polarization ‘men's liberation’ and ‘men against sexism’, and critiques made from within various feminist understandings of, in particular, ‘men's liberationist’ preoccupations. The assumptions and contitutuent practices within the discourse of men's sexual politics in general are described and analyzed, rather than such debates reproduced. The assumption of ‘the sexual’ which men bring to our politics, and how our sexual politics is defined through these assumptions, is opened up. In particular, men's sexual politics seems precisely ‘male sexual politics’, in that it is defined through masculinist understanding of the sexual. Men's sexual politics is also male sexual politics, and our assumptions about the political, including the attempt to live from theory to action, are also instrumental in the ‘how’ of men's sexual politics.     

female sex tourism: a contradiction in terms?

This paper argues that the ‘double-standard’ applied to male and female tourists’ sexual behaviour reflects and reproduces weaknesses in existing theoretical and commonsense understandings of gendered power, sexual exploitation, prostitution and sex tourism. It looks at how essentialist constructions of gender and heterosexuality blur understandings of sexual exploitation and victimhood and argues that racialized power should also be considered to explore the boundaries between commercial and non-commercial sex. This paper is based on ethnographic research on sexual–economic exchanges between tourist women and local men and boys in the informal tourist economy in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.     

Margaret Thatcher is my sister: Counselling on divisions between women

This paper looks at the ways in which women are divided from themselves and each other as women: at the internalised oppression which results from THE oppression of patriarchy, at the systematic mistreatment of women as a group by men as a group reinforced by the social structures of male power. It also looks at the ways in which women are divided from each other as a result of other oppressive systems such as class and/or race or religion or physical ability or age.The paper then describes how the particular theory and practice of Re-evaluation Counselling can be used to ‘deconstruct’ or ‘discharge’ the internalised oppression of patriarchy and other oppressive systems, making the principles of Women's Liberation and sisterhood a practical possibility for ‘everywoman’ and all women—including Margaret Thatcher. Throughout, the word ‘patriarchy’ is used to mean the system of male power usually regarded as synonymous with sexism.The paper includes a basic summary of Re-evaluation Counselling theory and practice.     

Gender,Nationalism and Colonial Policy: prostitution in the Jewish settlement of Mandate Palestine, 1918–1948

The aim of this article is to discuss the way prostitution was perceived during the British rule in Palestine (1918–48), analyzing the differing perspectives of the British colonial authorities and the Jewish national community. The major concerns of the civil and military colonial authorities were focused on issues of ‘social hygiene’ and the trafficking in women and children. This often involved the transfer of both legislation and discourse from the metropolis. The Jewish community, on the other hand, was concerned mainly with the evolving national project. Prostitution was seen as a ‘mixing ground’ of Jewish women and British and Arab men, thus threatening the boundaries of the national collective. Whilst the article is attentive to the importance of studying prostitution in its historical specificity, it also considers the many ways in which this case study illuminates the complex series of relationships between both colonialism and prostitution, and gender and nationalism. Women were important to the imagining of the nation not only for their symbolic power—as ‘mothers of the nation’, for example; the construction of nationalist discourses also involved focusing on ‘negative’ gendered phenomena, such as prostitution. In these ways, the article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the multiple significance of gendered categories in the process of nation-building.     

Words speak louder than actions: the ‘peasant’ dimension of the Confédération Paysanne's alternative to industrial farming

Through its historical account of the Confédération Paysanne (CP)'s origins and early years (France), this paper explores the ways in which ‘peasant’ discourses are shaped by non-peasant understandings of what ‘being a peasant’ should mean. As we shall see, far from reflecting an innate and immutable ‘peasant’ way of being or seeing, references to ‘peasantness’ and ‘peasant farming’ act as discursive tools to both unite a heterogeneous activist base (composed of marginal and marginalized farmers) and advance organizational interests. This requires the CP – and its predecessors – to respond to a series of external constraints. In the course of this paper, we shall also show how academics play an important mediating role in the process of constructing or adapting the CP's ‘peasant’ discourse.     

Crisis,what crisis? A feminist analysis of discourse on masculinities and suicide

High male suicide rates are often constructed as evidence for an apparent ‘crisis of masculinity’. Conversely, ‘crisis of masculinity’ has been used to explain differential rates of male and female suicide in the UK (and elsewhere). We analyse three public cases where male suicide and ‘masculinity-crisis’ discourse are employed together. Our feminist analysis demonstrates that ‘crisis talk’ and male suicide are addressed in divergent ways. We therefore distinguish between ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ crisis narratives. Conservative narratives position high male suicide rates as a pernicious outcome of ‘threats’ to traditional gender roles and norms, suggesting the solution is to return to them. Contrastingly, progressive crisis accounts use male suicide to demonstrate that existing gender norms harm men as well as women and argue they should be altered to address male suicide. Conservative narratives often map on to anti-feminist politics, whereas progressive accounts reflect aspects of feminism. There is no neat feminist/anti-feminist distinction, however, as postfeminist ideas are also evident. We argue that, overall, each of the articulations of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ as evidenced by high rates of male suicide reinforces problematic gender politics. Further, in reifying simplistic, dualistic models of gender, they may ultimately constrain efforts to reduce suicide.     

Queering the ‘straight’ line: men’s talk on paying for sex

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with eight men who identified as clients of women sex workers, but who also spoke about paying to secretly explore their sexual desires for trans women and men. I draw on queer theory to approach the question of how, and to what extent, men’s paid sexual encounters functioned as sites where they could resist the constraints of compulsory heterosexuality and navigate more fluid sexual identities. Highlighting the complex nature and meanings of paying for sex, I argue that the secrecy of the paid sexual encounter provided a space for ‘breaking out’ of the confines of heterosexuality whilst simultaneously being the very thing that allowed men to stay ‘in line’ with what was expected of them within the heteronormative realities of their everyday lives.     

Women negotiating heterosex: Implications for AIDS prevention

The AIDS epidemic has made it imperative that sexual behaviour be changed. This paper examines heterosexual negotiation, which will form the focus for behaviour change. The processes involved in such negotiation are little understood.Research was carried out using the method memory work, which generated and theorised data relating to women's past experiences in sexual encounters. The method, originated by Haug, provides a way to examine how sexuality is produced and reproduced through reflection and reconstruction of past experiences. Memories are analysed by examining gaps and absences, cliches and metaphors, in the search for the common understandings and taken-for-granted assumptions which set the boundaries within which encounters take place.The memories obtained can be partly understood in terms of three discourses documented by Hollway. These are the male sex drive discourse, the have/hold discourse, and the permissive discourse. The data may also be understood in relation to three permissible figures for women identified in Irigaray's analysis, namely virgin, wife-mother, and whore. The paper acknowledges that these theoretical perspectives are quite distinct, even contradictory, but nevertheless finds that each in its own way illuminates the data. It is shown that some common understandings underlying sexual encounters render negotiation not only impossible but largely unintelligible. The permissive discourse may possibly provide space for some negotiation, but the paper concludes that it is essential to develop a truly woman-centered discourse of sexuality out of which male sexuality can be problematised.     

Restricted to Half the Sky: Unwanted Girls,Battered Wives and Inglorious Women

The proverb ‘women hold up half the sky’ was created by the Maoist government 64 years ago in order to show that women in ‘New China’ have equal power and rights to their male peers. I selected three photographs for my FLaK zine and called them ‘unwanted girls’, ‘battered wives’ and ‘inglorious women’. To examine the relevance of the proverb in Modern China, I will discuss three women-related problems behind these photographs and analyse their cultural and legal causes. By doing so, I aim to achieve two purposes—first, to help the reader have a better understanding of the problems of women in the region where one-fifth of the global population lives, and second, to argue that seemingly gender neutral law and policy can produce new and greater restrictions on women’s freedom.     

Call me Caitlyn: making and making over the ‘authentic’ transgender body in Anglo-American popular culture

A conception of transgender identity as an ‘authentic’ gendered core ‘trapped’ within a mismatched corporeality, and made tangible through corporeal transformations, has attained unprecedented legibility in contemporary Anglo-American media. Whilst pop-cultural articulations of this discourse have received some scholarly attention, the question of why this ‘wrong body’ paradigm has solidified as the normative explanation for gender transition within the popular media remains underexplored. This paper argues that this discourse has attained cultural pre-eminence through its convergence with a broader media and commercial zeitgeist, in which corporeal alteration and maintenance are perceived as means of accessing one’s ‘authentic’ self. I analyse the media representations of two transgender celebrities: Caitlyn Jenner and Nadia Almada, alongside the reality TV show TRANSform Me, exploring how these women’s gender transitions have been discursively aligned with a cultural imperative for all women, cisgender or trans, to display their authentic femininity through bodily work. This demonstrates how established tropes of authenticity-via-bodily transformation, have enabled transgender to become culturally legible through the wrong body trope. Problematically, I argue, this process has worked to demarcate ideals of ‘acceptable’ transgender subjectivity: self-sufficient, normatively feminine, and eager to embrace the possibilities for happiness and social integration provided by the commercial domain.     

Governing the souls of young women: exploring the perspectives of mothers on parenting in the age of sexualisation

The sexualisation of young women has emerged as a growing concern within contemporary western cultures. This has provoked adult anxieties that young women are growing up too fast by adopting inappropriate sexual practices and subjectivities. Psychological discourses have dominated, which position sexualisation as a corrupting force that infects the ‘true self’ of young women, so they develop in abnormal ways. This in turn allows psychological practices to govern how to parent against sexualisation within families. To explore this further, six mothers each with daughters aged between 8 and 12 took part in one to one semi-structured interviews designed to explore how they conceptualised and parented against the early sexualisation of young women. A Foucauldian inspired discourse analysis was employed, which suggested that the mother's talk was situated within a psychological discourse. This enabled sexualisation to be positioned as a corrupting force that disrupted the natural development of young women through deviant bodily practices (e.g. consuming sexualised goods), which prevented them from becoming their ‘true self’. Through the disciplinary gaze of psychology, class inequalities were reproduced where working class families were construed as ‘chavs’ who were bad parents and a site of contagion for sexualisation.     

exploring symbolic violence in the everyday: misrecognition,condescension, consent and complicity

In this paper, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘misrecognition’, ‘condescension’ and ‘consent and complicity’ to demonstrate how domination and violence are reproduced in everyday interactions, social practices, institutional processes and dispositions. Importantly, this constitutes symbolic violence, which removes the victim’s agency and voice. Indeed, we argue that as symbolic violence is impervious, insidious and invisible, it also simultaneously legitimises and sustains other forms of violence as well. Understanding symbolic violence together with traditional discourses of violence is important because it provides a richer insight into the ‘workings’ of violence, and provides new ways of conceptualising violence across a number of social fields and new strategies for intervention. Symbolic violence is a valuable tool for understanding contentious debates on the disclosure of violence, women leaving or staying in abusive relationships or returning to their abusers. While we focus only on violence against women, we recognise that the gendered nature of violence produces its own sets of vulnerabilities against men and marginalised groups, such as LGBT. The paper draws on empirical research conducted in Sweden in 2003. Sweden is an interesting case study because despite its progressive gender equality policies, there has been no marked decrease in violence towards women by men.     

Doing gender in Spanish same-sex couples. The distribution of housework and childcare

Housework and childcare have been considered mechanisms for ‘doing gender’ through the allocation of different functions to women and to men. Women continue to devote more time and effort to this type of work, in spite of their progressive incorporation into the labour market. Same-sex couples escape this gender binarism, and so this study set out to learn the distribution criteria work, as well as the influence of gender socialization when it comes to establishing this distribution. A qualitative investigation was carried out with 21 Spanish same-sex families. The results indicate that the majority of couples position themselves in an egalitarian discourse based on the absence of differentiated gender roles and a low level of specialization. No differences were found between male and female couples. Nevertheless, the female couples show higher levels of discontent when the distribution was not egalitarian. In conclusion, it is proposed that the effects of gender socialization are perpetuated beyond heterosexual relationships and also affect same-sex couples.     

Being women in a male preserve: an ethnography of female football ultras

This article looks at the characteristics of contemporary sports audiences from the perspective of gender, focusing on the phenomenon of female ultras or ‘professional’ football fans. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in an Italian football ultras group composed of male and female fans, this paper offers an analysis of female participation in communities of organized supporters. In examining the role and position of women inside the considered group, the paper pays attention to their perception of the existing gender differences showing how female ultras explain inequalities on the basis of ‘natural’ and ‘innate’ differences and capacities between men and women. Existing patterns of male dominance are supported by female fans’ own discourses and performance of their gender identity in the ‘male preserve’. Rather than questioning male dominance and gender hierarchies, female supporters’ efforts appear aimed at being recognized as ultras ‘despite being women’.     

the reinvention of feminism in Pakistan

This article argues that there has been a significant turn in the discourse of feminist politics in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The author suggests that the rise of a new feminism – rooted in Islamic discourse, non-confrontational, privatized and personalized, whose objective is to ‘empower’ women within Islam – is not a post-9/11 development but rather a result of unresolved debates on the issue of religion within the progressive women's movement. It has been due to the accommodation of religion-based feminist arguments by the stronger secular feminist movement of the 1980s that paved the way for its own marginalization by giving feminist legitimacy to such voices. The author argues that the second wave of feminism may have become diluted in its effectiveness and support due to discriminatory religious laws, dictatorship, NGO-ization, fragmentation, co-option by the state and political parties in the same way as the global women's movement has. Yet it has been the internal inconsistency of the political strategies as well as the personal, Muslim identities of secular feminists that have allowed Islamic feminists to redefine the feminist agenda in Pakistan. This article voices the larger concern over the rise of a new generation of Islamic revivalist feminists who seek to rationalize all women's rights within the religious framework and render secular feminism irrelevant while framing the debate on women's rights exclusively around Islamic history, culture and tradition. The danger is that a debate such as this will be premised on a polarized ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ Muslim woman, such that women who abide by the liberal interpretation of theology will be pitted against those who follow a strict and literal interpretist mode and associate themselves with male religio-political discourse. This is only likely to produce a new, radicalized, religio-political feminism dominating Pakistan's political future.     

Whales and minnows: Some sexual theorists and their followers and how they contribute to making feminism invisible

Past feminism was made to vanish, so that only now are we beginning to realise the full extent of our history. The same process is already beginning to happen to present feminism—we too are being made invisible. One instance of this process is examined in the work of some ‘radical’ male academics. They use the work of various sexual theorists (Lacan, Gagnon and Simon, Foucault) to construct a particular and de-politicized version of ‘sexual politics’; and in doing so they recognize only an equally partial version of ‘feminism’. It seems that ‘our friends’, ‘radical’ men, are at least as dangerous as the rest, for they increasingly claim the right to ‘name’ feminism and sexual politics for us.     

Jordanian women in education: politics,pedagogy and gender discourses

The ‘epistemic’ violence that has beset gender discourses in education refutes the claim that progress is measured by figures and numbers of Jordanian women in schools and the workplace. While such discourses demand to be contextualized, deconstructed and resisted, they also necessitate creating a link between political praxis and gender politics. My argument centres on the indispensable role critical discourse can play in locating these instances of ‘epistemic’ violence and revealing the manner in which the themes of constructed gender knowledge have been subjugated to the political praxis of each context. Interventions by donors and NGOs have more often than not been emasculated by the political considerations of governments and establishments. The result has been ‘disciplined’ gender politics in education, perpetuating traditional discursive practices, roles and stereotypes instead of acting as an emancipatory power. Human development reports and traditional literature on gender bias in education have failed to account for such discursive/power practices. In this paper, I shed light on the national, the international and the textual ‘knowledge’ that surrounds gender bias in education in a context like Jordan. I conclude by demonstrating the importance of the national and its discursive practices in reformulating approaches based on the international (human development reports) and the textual (literature on gender bias and stereotypes in education).