Foreign aid,democracy, and gender quota laws

Why do so many developing countries have gender quota policies? This article argues that foreign aid programmes influence developing countries to adopt policies aimed at fulfilling international norms regarding gender equality. This relationship is driven by two causal mechanisms. On the one hand, countries may use gender quotas as a signal to improve their standing in the international hierarchy, possibly as an end unto itself, but more likely as a means towards ensuring future aid flows. On the other, countries may adopt gender quotas as a result of successful foreign aid interventions specifically designed to promote women’s empowerment. I test these two causal mechanisms using data on foreign aid commitments to 173 non-OECD countries from 1974 to 2012. The results suggest that while programmes targeting women’s empowerment may have some influence on quota adoption, developing countries dependent on United States foreign aid are also likely to use gender quotas as signalling devices rather than as a result of ongoing liberalization efforts.     

Away From Home: Somali Women's Mediated Entry Into the United Kingdom

Based on in-depth interviews with 26 Somali women refugees, this article discusses structural arrangements around their settlement in the United Kingdom (UK). Their “male-centered” migration can be viewed as a specific form of patriarchal institution where men control women's trajectories. Based on Bourdieu's concept of social capital, I introduce a new category of knowledge capital—supplementary capital—to discuss sociocultural/political stratifications that affect integration of my informants in the UK. I show how a lack of familiarity with the dominant language became central to their integration difficulties. These underexamined problems are key factors in immigration processes.     

Improving psychosocial well-being of child laborers and young people who are engaged in low-income economic activities in Istanbul,Turkey

Child laborers are typically subjected to multiple and chronic traumatic experiences. With no parents or caregivers to act as a buffer zone against stressors, they grow up in chaotic and unpredictable work environments. Child laborers are more at risk of developing a range of psychological, emotional, and behavioral problems. The authors established an 8-month psychosocial support program for child laborers and young people attending a vocational training center one day a week. The authors found that anxiety and depression moderately correlated with negative self-concept, somatization, and hostility. Toward the end of the 8-month program, participants reported improved psychological and emotional well-being. The provision of a safe and mediated psychosocial program enhanced the emotional and mental well-being of vulnerable children and young people.     

‘No girl wants to be called a slut!’: women,heterosexual casual sex and the sexual double standard

Recent shifts in the western cultural landscape mean that practices such as casual sex are contradictory terrains for women. Although permissive and liberal discourses construct women’s casual sex as acceptable, and even desirable, traditional discourses and a sexual double standard, do not. This article examines 15 young women’s negotiation of the sexual double standard in their talk of heterosexual casual sex. Interviews were analysed using thematic analysis, with borrowed insights from discourse analysis, within a constructionist framework. All 15 women in this study gave accounts of an agentic and desiring sexuality, yet talked about casual sex and a sexual reputation in contradictory and contested ways. Three main themes were identified: the (un)acceptability of casual sex, a sexual reputation is what other girls have, and the making of a slut. Although an enduring sexual double standard was identified, all participants challenged its relevance and appropriateness. However, a sexual double standard also seeped into women’s accounts when talking about other women and the threat of garnering a negative sexual reputation was linked to women’s silencing of their own casual sex experiences. This work supports the continued need to dismantle un/changing codes of gendered heterosexuality.     

Chinese Fathers in the Twentieth Century: Changing Roles as Parents and as Men

ABSTRACT

Fathers and fatherhood are increasingly visible in social science scholarship and public discourse, although the father’s different roles are yet to be integrated. Moreover, most existing studies on fathers and fatherhood focus on either European or North American fathers, or contemporary non-Western fathers; little is known about the historical changes in fatherhood culture in non-Western contexts. This article explores how elite fathers in Republican, Socialist, and Reform-era China see their roles as parents and as men amidst dramatic social changes in intergenerational and gender relations. A close examination of five elite fathers’ family letters and autobiographical writings reveals that the parent–child hierarchy began to diminish as early as Republican-era China and continued to decrease during the Socialist and Reform eras, as seen in fathers’ increasing recognition of their children’s autonomy and the heightened sense of intimacy in the father–child bond. However, changes in gender relations, especially in the fathers’ generation (as opposed to the fathers’ gender beliefs and practices towards their children) followed a much less straightforward path. The asynchronized changes in different facets of Chinese fatherhood may be attributed to the unique and complicated modern history of China in the twentieth century.     

The Personal Is Political Yet Again: Bringing Struggles between Gender Equality and Gendered Next of Kin onto the Feminist Agenda

In spite of feminist criticism of the welfare state, Norwegian society is frequently perceived as gender-equal. As a truism of public discourse, gender equality affirms a neoliberal understanding of individuals as able to act independently and to freely choose their course in life. This article disrupts that truism with an analysis of a transitional process that occurred to a seemingly free and gender-equal married woman whose everyday life took an unexpected turn at the age of 50 when her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Using an abductive method, we construct a narrative with this woman as the main character. We then use the narrative as an optical device for scrutinizing encounters between the notions “free and gender-equal woman” and “gendered next of kin”, analysing the situated becoming of gender and understanding the encounters’ potential for agency and resistance. The inquiry brings a pattern of gendered encounters into being, demonstrating how a seemingly free and gender-equal woman’s strength and independence become subordinating weaknesses in encounters with the welfare state. This paradox raises questions about the politics of everyday life in a presumably gender-equal society, brings new struggles onto the feminist agenda, and demands that the personal becomes political yet again.     

The rough guide to love: romance,history and sexualization in gendered relationship advice

Sexualization is changing the way we think about romantic love. According to recent research, young people are increasingly confronted by narrowing ideals of sexual attractiveness making romantic intimacy increasingly difficult forcing a choice between ‘raunch or romance’. This article investigates the alleged distinction between romance and sexualization, in the process challenging claims that the current crisis of sexualization is a product of societal change in late modernity. Responding to a call to consider sexualization from a hitherto neglected historical perspective, the paper employs critical discourse analysis to identify the formation of gendered meanings and practices in How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, a late medieval advice text for young women, and twenty-first-century advice from the MyBliss website. Focusing on sexualized clothing, contact with others, reputation and social status, the paper argues that in both medieval and modern advice, discourses of romantic love and sexualization are mutually dependent. In addition, similarities between medieval and modern advice reveal that our current sexualization crisis is not solely a product of modern life, but is part of a longer pattern of gender normativity and inequality.     

Disrupting (gendered) Islamophobia: the practice of feminist ijtihad to support the agency of young Muslim women

Muslim feminist scholars highlight, and seek to transform, racist, sexist and Islamophobic discourses through feminist interpretations of their religion. This paper reports on data gathered from an interview-based study involving four young Muslim women from the same Brisbane (Queensland) community. The focus is on how these young women are understanding, and finding spaces of agency, within these discourses with reference to their faith. The Islamic principle of ijtihad (jurisprudential interpretation of religious text) and the practice of feminist ijtihad are theorized as powerful tools in supporting the young women to counter the Islamophobia and gendered Islamophobia in their lives. Using these tools, however, as this paper argues, is not unproblematic and can reinscribe disempowering gender and ethno-cultural relations. Amid unprecedented gendered Islamophobia and the clear imperative of supporting Muslim women to access the tools of feminist ijtihad, the paper provides important insight into the possibilities and problematics of these tools.     

School,sexuality and problematic girlhoods: reframing ‘empowerment’ discourse

This paper draws on ethnographic research with teenage schoolgirls in Tanzania to explore the impact of education on their experiences of sexual agency and empowerment. School-based education is frequently presented within international development as a route for empowering girls to exercise agency over their sexuality; yet school itself often constitutes a space in which the same restrictive gendered and sexual norms that exist outside the classroom are reproduced or go unchallenged by those working with girls. Despite the constraints to their agency from both outside and within school, girls themselves do resist the narratives of girlhood and sexuality imposed upon them. Recognising how these dynamics challenge our understanding of sexual empowerment is key to finding ways to support girls in navigating repressive norms beyond the classroom.     

Change Agents or Cogs in the Machine? Female Managers and Unofficial Gender Equality in Federal Agencies

This article combines administrative personnel data with survey data to examine whether increases in female representation among the managerial ranks of federal agencies are associated with increases in unofficial gender equality in those agencies. Specifically, female representation at multiple levels of agencies’ personnel hierarchies are measured so as to examine whether these measures are associated with increases in lower-level female and male employees’ subjective experiences of power, status, and opportunity. The results indicate that female representation among the SES has salutary effects on General Schedule (GS) level 7–12 and General Schedule level 13–15 females. Additionally, the results suggest that female representation among GS 13–15 supervisors has salutary effects on GS 7–12 females. Finally, the results suggest that top-level female representation has negative effects on GS 7–12 males. These findings speak to the ongoing theoretical debate concerning female managers’ ability and willingness to bring about equality-inducing change in their organizations. They also speak to the question of whether a representative bureaucracy has unfavorable distributional consequences for members of nonminority groups.