Staying with People Who Slap Us Around: Gender,Juggling Responsibilities and Violence in Paid (and Unpaid) Care Work

Little is actually known about women's occupational health, let alone how men and women may experience similar jobs and health risks differently. Drawing on data from a larger study of social service workers, this article examines four areas where gender is pivotal to the new ways of organizing caring labour, including the expansion of unpaid work and the use of personal resources to subsidize agency resources; gender‐neutral violence; gender‐specific violence and the juggling of home and work responsibilities. Collective assumptions and expectations about how men and women should perform care work result in men's partial insulation from the more intense forms of exploitation, stress and violence. This article looks at health risks, not merely as compensable occupational health concerns, but as avoidable products of forms of work organization that draw on notions of the endlessly stretchable capacity of women to provide care work in any context, including a context of violence. Indeed, the logic of women's elastic caring appear crucial to the survival of some agencies and the gender order in these workplaces.     

Sex,gender and money in African teenage conceptions of love in HIV contexts

In much of Africa, teenage sexualities are often understood through the optic of danger, violence and disease without much attention to love within relationship dynamics. There is a strong case to be made for the continued focus on African teenage sexualities within unequal relations of power. However, whilst focusing on the structural factors that expand sexually aggressive masculinities and limit teenage women's sexual agency, the expression of teenage love in the daily battle for power remains neglected. Drawing on an interview study of teenage Africans, aged 16–17 years, in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, the paper focuses on the micro-dynamics of love, sex and gender. Teenagers account of love highlights changing discourses and include relationships based on care, negotiation and agency showing potential for equality. Such constructions however sit in tension with teenage women's vulnerability in relation to the sexual economy and money, masculine power and gender hierarchies. Intervention programmes that address teenage sexuality must pay careful attention to how love matters in their conceptualisation of relationships and requires consideration of the social and economic context within which they are located. The challenge is to build on equality, address gender hierarchies and ideologies within relationships which create vulnerability.     

Understanding Men's Health and Illness: A Gender-relations Approach to Policy,Research, and Practice

Abstract

Men's health has emerged as an important public concern that may require new kinds of healthcare interventions and increased resources. Considerable uncertainty and confusion surround prevailing understandings of men's health, particularly those generated by media debate and public policy, and health research has often operated on oversimplified assumptions about men and masculinity. A more useful way of understanding men's health is to adopt a gender-relations approach. This means examining health concerns in the context of men's and women's interactions with each other, and their positions in the larger, multidimensional structure of gender relations. Such an approach raises the issue of differences among men, which is a key issue in recent research on masculinity and an important health issue. The gender-relations approach offers new ways of addressing practical issues of healthcare for men in college environments.     

Is Domestic Violence a Gender Issue,or a Human Issue?

Abstract

Domestic violence, like all violence, is a human issue. It is not merely a gender issue. Classifying spousal and partner violence as a women's issue, rather than a human issue, is erroneous. In domestic relations, women are as inclined as men to engage in physically abusive acts. Yet most reports appearing in the popular press, and in scholarly journals, have framed the issue as essentially a masculine form of assaultive behavior, thereby imbedding into the national consciousness a false and inaccurate view of the problem. This article presents the results of selected empirical studies that contradict the popular view of domestic violence, briefly focuses on the phenomenon as it relates to race, offers several elucidating case accounts, and suggests that the popular view of domestic violence not only contributes to men's increasing legal and social defenselessness, it also leads to social policies that obstruct efforts to address the problem of domestic violence successfully.     

Constructions of local culture and impacts on domestic violence in an Australian rural community

Studies of domestic violence in rural areas have predominantly focused on barriers that keep women trapped in abusive relationships. The literature has frequently suggested that rural culture influences the incidence of domestic violence, the forms it takes, and how it is experienced. Yet there is surprisingly little research on how rural culture plays out in relationships between women and men who experience domestic violence. The study described in this paper explored local culture in a South Australian rural community and how it affected women's experiences of, and men's perpetration of, domestic violence. It found several local cultural discourses that bore on the issue, including self-reliance, pride, privacy, belonging and closeness, family, and Christianity. The power and influence of these discourses made it difficult to name and challenge domestic violence. The paper concludes with the argument that it is important to acknowledge and understand the values and beliefs of rural women and men when developing effective and appropriate responses to rural domestic violence. There is a need to move away from universal understandings of a rural culture to acknowledge discourses that have power and strength within a community so that we can sensitively challenge discourses that silence domestic violence.     

Distorted Views Through the Glass Ceiling: The Construction of Women's Understandings of Promotion and Senior Management Positions

The article explores the issue of whether women's under‐representation in senior management positions can be explained in part by the messages they are given about the promotion process and the requirements of senior jobs. Through interviews with over 50 male and female junior and senior managers in a UK high street bank, issues relating to the required personality and behaviour characteristics seen to be associated with success and with the long hours culture emerged as important. In many cases men and women identified the same issues but the significance of them for their own decision‐making and the way others interpreted their behaviour varied — particularly in relation to the perceived incompatibility between active parenting and senior roles. The findings provide an account of the context in which women make career choices which highlights the limitations of analyses which see women's absence as the result either of procedural discrimination or women's primary orientation towards home and family. The findings also highlight the problems of treating commitments towards gender equality as an isolated issue and stress the importance of understanding responses to policies and ways of achieving change within the broader context of an analysis of the organization's culture.     

Risk and Resilience of Immigrant Women in Intimate Partner Violence

Violence inflicted against women by their intimate partners presents an especially critical area of inquiry among battered female immigrants following the striking ethnic diversification after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This article reviews contemporary literature of intimate partner violence; seeks to illustrate the current state of knowledge; and provides a conceptual framework that summarizes the unique experiences of immigrant women confronting the challenges of couple violence. Five underlying cultural and structural mechanisms influencing immigrant women's susceptibility, re-adjustment, and recovery were identified: (1) acculturation, (2) cultural mechanisms, (3) mental health, (4) structural elements, (5) legal contexts, and (6) social support. A synopsis of practice implications in the context of the literature is discussed.     

Without love there can be law but no justice

ABSTRACT

This special issue of Globalizations builds the case across a diverse group of papers that law is in need of decolonization, especially law systems structuring settler-colonial societies. This is because law's dispossessing character in these contexts is hidden by the prevalence of nomophilia; that is, an uncritical love of law for the neutrality and objectivity it self-proclaims to possess. The collection of papers for this special issue constitute a collective critique of colonial law and crime that does its part in disrupting law's empire of violence by tracking the legalized violence across the axes of class, race, gender, and sexuality. The popular expression of ‘fuck the law’ captured by Agozino in the leading paper of this issue establishes the context in which we make a call for the necessity of love to enter the realm of law as an urgent decolonizing praxis. Without love there can be law, but no justice.     

Attitudes towards Women's Work Roles and Women Managers in a Sports Organization: The Case of Turkey

In recent years the need to apply gender equality principles to all sectors of Turkish society has been widely acknowledged and has become an increasingly important issue because of the modernization and recent Europeanization project of Turkey. However, even as this has been acknowledged, attempts to apply gender equality in employment in sports organizations have been mostly ignored. This article reports on the attitudes towards women's work roles and women managers of 83 women and 138 men who work in the General Directorate of Youth and Sport (GDYS) which is the biggest national governing body for sport in Turkey. The findings of this study indicate that both female and male workers in the GDYS scored lower on their attitudes towards women's work roles and held more negative attitudes towards women managers. Although male workers scored higher on attitudes towards women's work roles than female workers they held more negative attitudes towards women managers. In addition, femininity scores were found to be the only predictor of attitudes towards women's career advancement. Finally, we discussed these findings regarding previous studies and the sociocultural context of Turkey.     

Domestic Violence against Men in India: A Perspective

In the absence of any systemic data, with more men coming up and reporting violence by women, it is important to understand and examine the issue of violence against men by women and associated factors. With changing gender roles and power relations, the author predicts that this will increase in the future, which will have far-reaching consequences and implications for the larger society and relationships between men and women. The paper attempts to understand the dynamics and factors that play or will play a crucial role in escalating violence against men by women. The paper is based on author's counseling sessions, discussion with men victims of violence, and other secondary sources.     

From spoils to weapons: framing wartime sexual violence

The way an issue is ‘framed’ (viewed and understood) has a profound effect on whether it is viewed as a priority for action by international organisations, states, and civil society. Wartime sexual violence used to be framed as a ‘women's issue’, but since the issue gained widespread notoriety in the mid-1990s, it has shifted to being understood as a ‘security issue’. Activists and campaigners have used this as an opportunity to press for more attention at international and national levels, and policymakers have given higher priority to the issue of ending wartime sexual violence. Yet framing wartime sexual violence in terms of security – and in particular, a focus on ‘rape as a weapon’ – comes at a cost. First, it isolates this violence conceptually from the wider context of gender-based violence before, during, and after active armed conflict, and other types of violence may receive little attention. In addition, the specific emphasis on ‘rape as a weapon’ affects the types of wartime sexual violence recognised and condemned by the international community, the kinds of ‘victims’ granted assistance, and the extent to which women and men are perceived as victims, empowered agents, or perpetrators.     

Abortion Counselling in Britain: Understanding the Controversy

This article reviews literature from a number of disciplines in order to provide an explanation of the political controversy attached to the provision of abortion counselling. It will show how this is an area of health policy debate in which women's reproductive bodies have become a setting for political struggle. The issue of abortion counselling in Britain has undergone a number of discursive shifts in response to political manoeuvring and changing socio‐legal framing of abortion. In particular, the article shows how much of the controversial reframing of abortion counselling was a tactical shift by political actors opposed to abortion per se, and this work is critiqued for not contextualising abortion. The article then focuses on women's abortion experiences and discusses research that shows how women's decision‐making processes, and responses to an abortion, are related to gendered socio‐cultural contexts: the extent to which women having an abortion feel they have transgressed societal norms and values, for example, is likely to affect their abortion experiences. Finally, it is suggested that providing a non‐judgemental context, and challenging negative discourses on abortion, may be the most effective way of minimising the possibility of negative emotions.     

“Bad Girls Rule”: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Commentary on the Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls

Feminist, critical, and postmodern scholars have long recognized sexuality as a site of power relations. The recently released Report of the APA (American Psychological Association) Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls is a welcome addition to ongoing feminist and activist conversations on how to intervene on issues of sexuality in the name of girls' and women's health. This article offers a critical interdisciplinary analysis of this influential APA report, expanding on and challenging several of its main claims. This article critiques the report as over-determining the negative impact of sexualization; offers other literatures as critical additions including feminist literature on media, consumer culture, gender, and the body, and earlier “pro-desire” feminist psychology scholarship; and critiques the task force's conflations of objectification and sexualization. The article concludes with a call for broadening feminist scholarship and activism across disciplinary boundaries to emphasize girls' and women's sexual agency and resistance, as well as sexual health and rights.     

Women's rights in Peru: insights from two organizations

In this article we explore the appropriation of ideas about women's rights in Lima, Peru through an ethnographic study of two non‐governmental organizations. SEA is a local NGO grounded in the Catholic Church's liberation theology movement, which seeks to promote integrated human development, and is linked to the worldwide Catholic Church. DEMUS, the second NGO, with feminist roots, actively fights gender discrimination and belongs to networks of international women's human rights movements and UN organizations. We argue that the struggle for women's rights is part of a broader struggle for recognition and equality for the poor, shaped by changing notions of national identity, citizenship and diversity. Our research revealed clear examples of vernacularization, whereby local context, values and culture played a decisive role in the adoption of women rights ideas. Encounters with other concepts and movements, including social justice, family violence and women's mobilization, intimately shaped the vernacularization of women's rights. Ultimately, the adoption of rights ideas involved changes in women's individual and collective empowerment.     

The Diverse Fathering Practices of Men Who Perpetrate Domestic Violence

Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered from in-depth interviews with 17 Australian fathers who were participating in a men's behaviour change program. The study found that men's fathering varied and posed significant, yet different, risks to women, children, and young people. Variations were particularly evident when analysing narratives of masculinity with perceptions of control over the use of domestic violence. Other aspects of men's identities such as class, culture, and health intersected with gender and contributed to the diversity of harmful fathering practices. This paper spotlights the substantive issue of men's domestic violence and its impact on all aspects of family life, rather than current practices which frequently focus on women and their mothering practices.     

‘We are not Victims,we are Protagonists of this History’

This article centers on the Mexican and Argentinean ‘Dirty Wars’, examining the limitations inherent in human rights and women's human rights responses to these epochs of violence. I situate Argentina's report on the dictatorship, Nunca más (1984), in conversation with Elena Poniatowska's text on the 1968 Mexico City massacre, La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), to trace the rise of a global human rights discourse that has become the dominant manner of conceptualizing human rights violations and gender violence in the latter half of the twentieth century. While feminist critiques of human rights have centered on the lack of gender-specific focus of violence committed against women, this article questions whether the women's human rights discourse disengages the historical, economic and geopolitical realities from which these violations were committed and instead focuses on women's sexual violations to garner international condemnation of gender violence. By turning to these texts, this article centers on the possibilities and limitations of women's human rights discourse and the impact this has on the shaping of women's political agency. This article calls for a critical feminist approach to women's human rights in order to document narratives of women survivors of human rights abuses without obfuscating their political subjectivities.     

Women's Organizations and Civil Society in China Making a Difference

This article explores the changing terrain of women's organizations in the reform period in China. It identifies the internal and external factors which have triggered both changes within the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF), the officially designated mass organization representing women's interests, as well as the emergence of new, more autonomous women's organizations. It looks closely at the influence of these organizations on government policy. While the ACWF is particularly well positioned, as a Party organization, to influence policy, the ability of new women's organizations to bring about policy change is more limited. Through the study of women's organizations the article draws broader conclusions about the changing nature of civil society in China. Though women's organizations do not have political change as their prime organizational motive, they are nevertheless symbolically important. As occupiers of non- governmental organizational space and as components of a critical public sphere, they have implicit political agency, and as such, are as much makers of herstory as its product.     

Feminist politics, domestic violence and the state

This paper explores the relationship between feminist politics and the state around the issue of domestic violence. Its focus is the refuge movement in Wales. Feminist analyses of the state and feminist political practice identify the state as an important object of struggle. A particular form of feminist politics, the refuge movement, has engaged with the state while retaining its autonomy. It has been instrumental in effecting legal changes which bestow certain rights on women threatened with domestic violence, and in increasing women's access to resources in the form of temporary refuge and permanent housing. Feminist political practice can affect the distribution of resources through engaging with the state, thereby enabling women to challenge the gendered power relations which structure their daily lives.     

WEAPONS OF SEX,WEAPONS OF WAR

Recent international attention has focused on designations of rape and sexual violence in conflict zones. The most formative debates on this issue centre on the 1990s-era conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which also involved heated debates amongst feminists over designations of rape as genocide. While the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda case, the Prosecutor v. Akayesu, resulted in the first formal charge of wartime rape as genocide within international criminal law, the first case to charge wartime rape as genocidal occurred in US federal court. This project looks for the overarching social and political meaning of the contemporary international legal focus on rape and sexual violence. It examines why, how, and to what extent US and transnational feminist legal academics and activists transmitted and secured their understandings of the relationships between sex, violence and ethno-religious difference within the international legal arena. In doing so, I argue that their participation in the contemporary recognition and narration of sexual injury in a global context both retreads and reconfigures the heated 1980s-era US Sex Wars debates on the workings of gender, sex, race and power.     

LEGITIMATING TRANSPHOBIA

Transgender persons are strangers to the law; or put more accurately, the legal imagination is so deeply entrenched in normative gender binarism as to effectively render transsexuals a ‘freakish’ anomaly to law. This essay attempts to offer a reflection on transgenderism, law and sexual crime from a human rights and criminal law perspective. It focuses on one of the most violent types of institution in society – the prison – and asks: what are the legal imagination and practice surrounding transgender prisoners as they are linked to social and cultural transphobia? What ‘human’ rights can be practiced for a dehumanized class? It first surveys the legal predicament of transgender prisoners in the US prison system in relation to Eighth Amendment rights provided by the US Constitution. The US situation has seen cases that have importantly shed light on other jurisdictions when engaging with the combined questions of prisoners’ rights and transgender rights together. The analysis is then taken to the context of Hong Kong prisons in a modest application. In contrast to some other Asian contexts (such as Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia), critical cultural studies of transgenderism are non-existent in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, human rights studies of the same have only emerged through the work of legal scholar Robyn Emerton. It is hoped that a rights-based approach will emerge in Hong Kong for the protection of transgender inmates from sexual violence in local correctional facilities.