The Palestinian Family in Israel: Simultaneous Trends

In this article, I seek to present the spectrum of contemporary family structures in Palestinian society in Israel, focusing on those that emerge in various contexts of changes in education, employment and place of residence. To enable attention to the multiplicity of identities engendered by intersection of the positions of gender/class/nationality and to assess the family patterns that maintain them and are shaped by them, I evaluate relations between two concepts: Connectivity, as proposed by Joseph (1999) and translocational positionality conceived by Anthias (2008). The former relates to the development of a feminine identity that develops in a patriarchal gender context, while the latter refers to the constant negotiation that women conduct with the contexts of their sense of belonging and the manner in which they use various resources. Those concepts help determine whether the process that Palestinian in Israel have been undergoing are accompanied by a greater variety of family patterns.

The article will be based on a study in which I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Palestinian mothers in Israel. The data were subjected to intersectional analysis from a feminist perspective, enabling study of the group under examination families of Palestinian women –separately from its surrounding society and also revealing the various subgroups comprising this social category.     

‘There is always this feeling of otherness’: exploring the lived experiences of visually impaired immigrant women in Canada

This paper explores the experiences of immigrant women with visual impairment in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) of Canada. Conceptually, the paper draws from feminist disability theory and critical scholarship on blindness to consider the discursive and material processes shaping women’s experiences across different socio-cultural contexts. Empirically, the paper draws from in-depth interviews with seven women. The analysis is organized around three themes. The first explores women’s understandings of visual impairment. The second examines the ways in which women’s experiences of visual impairment are shaped by meanings and attitudes that circulate within their cultural communities, and the extent to which immigration might challenge or reinforce these meanings. The third examines the shifting barriers and opportunities women face with respect to social and economic participation. We close by identifying the conceptual implications of our research.     

Staff Perceptions of Same-Gender Sexual Contacts in Long-Term Care Facilities

An ongoing fear in the gay and lesbian community is that long-term care (LTC) facilities may not be sensitive to their needs. In the present study, 218 LTC staff members responded to one of three vignettes in which resident sexual contact was observed, with only the gender of the characters changing, to create different gender pairings. Results suggested that staff rated male-male and female-female pairings more negatively than heterosexual intimacy. Knowledge about older adult sexuality made little difference in staff ratings. However, staff attitudes were directly related to ratings of negative reaction and level of acceptability of same-gender sexuality.     

Predictors of employment among sheltered homeless women

The effect of homelessness on the psychological and physical health of women is damaging and long lasting. Understanding of the personal factors that enable homeless women to secure employment and re-enter mainstream society is of utmost importance. A sample of homeless women residing in a US Midwestern nonprofit treatment and transitional living shelter for homeless women and their children were surveyed regarding the extent to which life satisfaction, social self-efficacy, and hopeful thinking predicted women's expected capabilities to obtain employment above and beyond social support provisions, while controlling for participants' age, ethnicity, and education level. Findings failed to reveal that social psychological (i.e., life satisfaction and social self-efficacy) and intrapersonal (i.e., hope) variables predicted homeless women's job procurement self-efficacy above and beyond perceived social support. The social support provision of social integration and younger age significantly predicted women's self-efficacy to secure employment. Implications of results for social justice initiatives and interventions are discussed.     

The unemployment of women with physical disabilities in Ghana: issues and recommendations

Unemployment among persons with disabilities is high. The situation is worse for women with disabilities as they experience multiple disadvantages on account of gender and disability. The condition for women with disabilities in Ghana could be more complicated, given the intersection of disability, gender, poverty, cultural beliefs and practices. As employment provides not only income for women with disabilities but opportunities for social participation and increases psychological well-being as well as self-esteem, it is imperative to remove barriers that hinder their employment. The current study examines issues associted with the unemployment of women with physical disabilities in Tamale, Ghana, and makes recommendations to policy-makers and practitioners in order to improve the condition of persons with disabilities in general, and particularly women with disabilities.     

Women's Access to Property: A Comparative Study on Islamic and Kemalist Women in Turkey

This article uses a comparative approach to discuss women's access to property using evidence collected from field research conducted on two distinct communities of Istanbul: one secular and one Islamic. The two groups of women possess distinctly different views of the world and how it is organized. This is particularly the case concerning gender where secular women put forth a view rooted in the sameness of the genders where the Islamic women were clear in their commitment to the idea of difference. These attitudes toward the equality and difference of the genders structures the relations of these women to property and the process of inheritance.     

Inheritance,poverty, and disability

Inheritance is a significant means of transferring wealth from one generation to the next, and therefore increasingly attracts attention from researchers and policy-makers working on intergenerational and multidimensional poverty. However, until now disabled persons have been overlooked in these discussions. This oversight is particularly unfortunate because, as a group, the estimated one billion people with disabilities (some 15% of the world’s population) are among the poorest and most marginalized of the global population. Over the past decade, a small but growing literature has examined the recursive connections between poverty and disability throughout the developing world. In this paper, we argue that disabled individuals are routinely denied inheritance rights in many low-income and middle-income countries, and that this is a significant and largely unrecognized contributor to their indigence. The denial of inheritance is both a social justice issue and a practice that can no longer be overlooked if disabled persons are to be brought into the development mainstream.     

Understanding the High Rates of Employment among Low‐educated Women in Portugal: A Comparatively Oriented Case Study

This article addresses the question of why Portugal is an exception among southern European countries in having a high rate of female employment. Cross‐national data show an even greater gap between Portugal and its southern European neighbours in the employment rates for low‐educated women. This article presents case‐based evidence on the work orientations, gender relations and reconciliation strategies of low‐educated women working in the clothing industry in Portugal. The analysis reveals that while economic need plays an important role in their attachment to employment, their work decisions are forged by a complex set of attitudes regarding employment and the family. Traditional values regarding the role of women in the family co‐exist with more modern values regarding their employment participation. Moreover, the institutional arrangements of childcare and reconciliation also appear to be more supportive than might be expected in a southern Europe welfare state. By focusing on a particular group of low‐educated women, the findings suggest that the same welfare policies may have different impacts on the reconciliation strategies of women of different socioeconomic groups.     

“We wouldn’t say it to their faces”: online harassment,women sports journalists,and feminism

In April 2016, a US-based independent sport media organization Just Not Sports launched #MoreThanMean, a digital media campaign to raise awareness about online harassment of women in sports journalism. The video quickly reached 3.7 million views and generated widespread coverage in mainstream news media, sports media, and online-only outlets. Using the #MoreThanMean campaign as a case study, this study assesses how discourses circulate in the sports media environment and, in particular, how feminist messages travel as the content moves from social media to mass media. This study engages with post-feminism in order to examine how various producers of media content position online harassment and sexism in sport and society. While the campaign positioned online harassment as gendered workplace discrimination, the mainstream and sports media coverage typically centralized men in the discussion. Feminist perspectives were constrained to platforms with a progressive, women-centered, and/or explicitly feminist take. Implications for digital feminist activism in the context of sport are discussed.