Gender differences in European volunteer rates

The main goal of this research is to identify the reasons for gender differences in European volunteer rates in different types of voluntary organisations. To that end, we focus in volunteer rates at individual and national levels. We have drawn our data from the European Values Survey (EVS, 1999 and 2008). We have employed Logit models carrying out independent estimations for the individual likelihood of working as a volunteer for four categories: social awareness, professional, education and social justice. We have carried out independent estimations and we have also repeated estimations by gender subsamples. Our main result is that social factors might be even more relevant for decisions to volunteer than individual socio-economic factors. Specifying the peer group as much as possible allows better control of social variables. For example, studying the female volunteer rate is more relevant to control for the female national NGO membership rate than the total national rate. We also highlight important gender differences. For example, education is positively correlated with decisions to volunteer for both genders in all categories, but the educational effect is stronger for men in relation to professional activities and stronger for women in relation to social awareness and social justice activities.     

An Ideational Approach to Gendered Institutional Change: Revisiting the Institutionalization of a New Prostitution Regime in Sweden

Recent work in the field of feminist institutionalism has made important progress in furthering our understanding of gendered institutional change. I argue that gradual ideational changes play an essential role in processes of gendered institutional change, and that examining the interaction between ideas and gendered institutions is of great importance for gaining a better understanding of processes of this type. This article revisits an empirical study of gendered institutional change in Swedish prostitution policy in the effort to specify two idea-based mechanisms that are conducive to gendered change, namely, consensus concerning the problem and gendering of the problem.     

Postmillennial femininities in the popular romance novel

Popular romance fiction was thought to carry a patriarchal ideology and was often dismissed as a manifestation of ingrained prejudice and bigotry against the female sex. However, there appears to have been influence from feminism, particularly where Harlequin Mills and Boon stories use the contemporary world and ‘reality’ as a touchstone. In this article I will discuss how the heroines of Harlequin Mills and Boon postmillennial ‘Modern’ novels display various expressions of feminism which contribute to the construction of their identities but that ultimately these tales rely on the dismantling of these autonomous identities sine the heroine is still required to be ‘swept off her feet’.     

Talent alone does not suffice: erotic capital,media visibility and global popularity among professional male and female tennis players

Following Catherine Hakim’s notion of the increasing significance of ‘erotic capital’ in contemporary society, this paper addresses the effects of erotic capital in the realm of professional sports. Erotic capital may be closely related to popularity and thus represents a key marketing asset, in particular for female athletes facing a predominantly male audience. These ideas are examined here through analysing the media visibility of top tennis players in the German print media, as well as their global popularity (measured by search engine queries). The results provide further evidence of gender discrimination in sport since they show that the popularity of female athletes depends on their physical attractiveness whereas such a relationship does not exist for male athletes. Given gender-discriminatory consumer and print media preferences, female athletes face strong incentives to adapt to a sexualized sports culture that reinforces hegemonic masculinity.     

Gender and Vernaculars in Digital Humanities and World Literature

Abstract

This article discusses the large-scale and world-encompassing aspirations of digital humanities and world literature and their methodological accordance with the analysis of literature in smaller languages and of texts understood in social, transnational, and gendered contexts. Are Digital Humanities and World Literature establishing themselves as fields utilizing analytical tools that are at odds with the aims and perspectives of feminist literary history and reception history as a part of literary history? We argue that gender research and theory is insufficiently developed in both computational literary history and World Literature. An unproblematic understanding of translations, canonization, English as a global language, and the use of large-scale computational methods and formalized interpretive models is in many cases not beneficial for the understanding of texts by women writers or from feminist perspectives. Drawing on feminist criticism of computational methods and arguments for specialized rather than generalized knowledge about literary history, we propose that digitization in some form, be it a bibliographical database or digitization of a corpus of texts, may be thought of as part of the research process in projects oriented towards gender and cultural exchange.     

Cross-Currents: Elizabeth von Arnim,Max Beerbohm and George Bernard Shaw

Abstract

When Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Introduction to Sally appeared in 1926, the critical response was divided. Dame Ethel Smyth may have told von Arnim the book was her ‘masterpiece’ but some were less convinced; the reviewer in Punch, for instance, considered it ‘a coarse-grained fantasy’. By situating Introduction to Sally in a wider literary context that includes Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911 Beerbohm, Max (1964a), ‘To Reggie Turner, 3 November 1911’, in Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), Letters to Reggie Turner, London: Davis, p. 126. [Google Scholar]) and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914 Shaw, George Bernard (1914), ‘Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts’, Everybody’s Magazine, Vol xxxi, (5). [Google Scholar]), this article explores the personal connections between these three authors and the thematic cross-currents in these texts. Is von Arnim’s novel really as ‘coarse’ and ‘vulgar’ as some earlier critics suggest? Or is it a novel that successfully mixes the plausible with the artificial, the comic and the socially catastrophic, in ways that, more than a decade later, resonate with the work of her friends to highlight several continuing preoccupations?     

Gender discrimination in Vietnam: the role of personal face

This paper examines gender discrimination using two novel perspectives: its relationship with personal face and its manifestation in contemporary Vietnam. Interviews with a sample of college teachers in Nha Trang city suggest that gender discrimination is reflected in and institutionalised through learning and enacting ‘acceptable’ face-related behaviours. These processes are exemplified in gender based linguistic conventions, role differentiation and segregation, the higher value associated with male roles, the (surface) acceptance of double standards by both genders and the recognition of public sanctions as effective reinforcers of gender inequality. Despite limitations in generalising from this research, an approach based on personal face-related language, behaviour and attitudes has promise for understanding how gender inequality functions at both individual and societal levels.     

The identity of ‘the other’ for sexual violence victims: is there anything new in sexual violence prosecutions before the International Criminal Court?

Despite the spectacular development in the field of international criminal law, critical feminism stresses the narrow scope of the sex and gender crimes in the Rome Statute establishing the first permanent International Criminal Court. The current international criminal law discourse, as expressed by recent case law, is geared towards the protection of certain groups targeted on account of their distinctiveness within the framework of a conflict situation, and gender is not recognized as one of these group identities. The question whether international criminal law on sexual violence applies only to inter-group conflicts brings to the fore an uneasy likelihood of exclusion of some recently emergent situations where identities of the conflicting parties transcend a particular ethnicity or nationality, and where victims of sexual violence belong to the same group as their perpetrators. The article argues that, rather than the Rome Statute or newly introduced rules and regulations, a significant obstacle in developing gender justice is the narrow interpretation of sexual violence to inter-group hostilities.     

This is your afterlife: gender,slavery, and televisual subjection

In 1957 Arries Ann Ward, who was formerly enslaved, appeared on the classic television interview-entertainment program, This Is Your Life. Despite Ward’s practices of refusal, the rare interview enacts an idealization of black female servitude and indebted obligation through performances of affection and racial benevolence. Ward’s appearance effectively works to resolve national crisis produced by widespread images of civil-rights protest and counterinsurgent violence, reifying discourses of American exceptionalism in Cold War context.     

What Mothers Do: Motherhood as a Resource for Negotiating Sick-Leave Legitimacy in Swedish Sickness Insurance Interactions

Sick leave in the Nordic countries is a gendered issue. Alongside other explanations, women’s higher levels of sick leave have been linked to their far-reaching family responsibilities. Meanwhile, studies have shown how such responsibilities induce questioning of the legitimacy of sick leave, indicating that normative aspects linking these categories cannot solely be approached in terms of causal explanations. The current study suggests an alternative way of studying this relationship, approaching motherhood as something being “done” in situated ways, to particular ends; a resource for interaction. By analysing naturally occurring interactions—meetings held by the Swedish Social Insurance Agency—the study renders visible the collaborative production of sick leave as a gendered matter, and motherhood as part of the negotiation of sickness insurance. The analysis shows the meaning and import of motherhood for sick leave to be a live issue for participants, drawing attention to how these categories are neither culturally predefined, nor dispositional, but flexibly assembled for certain purposes. Motherhood functions as a resource in two ways: (1) displaying restricted ability to care for children supports claims of impairment; (2) invoking motherhood works to account for slow or inactive rehabilitation. However, occasioning motherhood in the examined context is also risky: (3) displaying extensive mothering may be treated as indicating low commitment to rehabilitation, and (4) displaying limited mothering may be taken as indicating unfitness as a parent.