Italians with veils and Afros: gender,beauty, and the everyday anti-racism of the daughters of immigrants in Italy

This paper explores the everyday anti-racist practices of the female children of immigrants in Italy. We analyse two case studies: first, a group of Muslim young women in Italy who have publicly re-appropriated what is popularly known as ‘Islamic fashion’; and second, a group of young Afro-Italian women who meet both online and offline to share resources about the care of ‘natural’ Afro-textured hair. We argue that transnational feminist analysis can shed light on the complex ways that aesthetics and the female body are implicated in struggles for social and legal recognition in Italy among the so-called second generation.     

Exploring the Relationship between Secularity and Marital Behavior

The higher religiosity of women is a longstanding feature of the religious landscape in the Western World. With the recent vibrancy of secular movements, the greater religiosity of women is reflected in a gender imbalance within the secular groups. For instance, more than three quarters of American atheists are male. Given the effects of both religiosity and secularity on worldview and lifestyle, this gender imbalance is likely consequential for marital behavior and outcomes. Using the latest cycle of the Canadian General Social Survey focused on family, this paper examines how marital behavior of individuals without any tie with religion or spirituality compares with others. Secular males are found appreciably more likely to experience marital dissolution, whereas their female counterparts are shown no different from others. This result lends support to the theories that posit religiosity as a complementary marital trait, requiring the mating of the like. The analysis also indicates that union formation behavior of secular females manifests a larger shift away from the traditional conceptions of marriage compared with secular males. Various explanations are explored.     

Redoing Gender: How Women in the Funeral Industry Use Essentialism for Equality

Although some research considers women's participation in traditionally male‐dominated jobs as an ‘undoing’ of the gender system, other scholars argue that women's participation in non‐traditional roles can actually maintain hegemonic masculinity. Because women have recently entered the funeral industry in unprecedented numbers, the profession offers a unique context to study how women negotiate a sense of belonging in male‐dominated fields. I draw on 22 interviews with women in the funeral industry to reveal how gender is done and undone in an occupational context. In what Hughey ( 2010 . Social Problems, 57, 653–679) refers to as a ‘paradox of participation’, I argue that women in the funeral industry redefine the image of the ideal funeral director by using gender essentialist logic, which originally acted as a barrier to their entry to the field, to justify their participation. By showing how gender essentialism and egalitarianism can constitute reinforcing logics instead of an opposing binary, this research contributes to the literature concerning women in non‐traditional roles.     

Women and border policing at the edges of Europe

While states around the world have responded to mass mobility by increasing border policing, our knowledge of the daily reality of that form of policing remains limited. How migrant women are policed has been particularly neglected. The political and practical difficulty of examining the context, process and experience of border control practices appears often to be insurmountable. This article contributes to filling some of the gaps in our knowledge by drawing on ethnographic data collected over a 12-month period in Greek immigration detention centres from 2011 to 2012. In it we examine the experience of policing and irregular entry across the Greek Turkey border – an entry-point to Europe that is routinely regarded as being in crisis. As we will demonstrate, border policing at this site is capricious and unpredictable. It is also highly racialised and gendered.     

Assessing the Gender Invariance of the Modern Homonegativity Scale

The measurement invariance of the Modern Homonegativity Scale (MHS) was examined among heterosexual female (n = 449) and male (n = 329) university students who were predominantly Mexican American. The MHS demonstrated full invariance of factor loadings and partial invariance of latent intercepts. At the latent mean level, heterosexual men compared to heterosexual women held more negative attitudes toward both gay men and lesbian women. There were no latent mean differences in attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women when rated by either heterosexual men or heterosexual women. The MHS can be used by heterosexual men and heterosexual women to assess their homonegativity.     

Homing blogs as ambivalent spaces for feminine agency

This article discusses a form of lifestyle blogging where women blog about their homes and everyday lives. In these homing blogs, self-representations are characteristically spatially demarcated within the private sphere of the home. As these repeated representations of women in their homes take place in the public space of the internet, homing blogs work towards naturalizing the home as a women’s sphere. Written and commented on mostly by other women, homing blogs represent a feminine form of self-expression and communication that functions as a discursive expression of ongoing social, economic, and cultural changes in affluent Western societies. In this article, Finnish versions of these homing blogs are analysed in the cultural and political context of contemporary Finland, and discussed as a form of intimate publics that reverses the gender politics of other historical, semi-public spaces for the exercise of women’s agency, such as the salon.     

How many Australians have slept rough?

How many Australians have experienced homelessness during their lifetime and how many people have slept rough? This paper draws on evidence from a random sample of the Australian population to answer these questions (N=1349). First, we explain the methodology for the research. Then we focus on the number of people who have experienced homelessness and the different experiences of men and women. Next, we investigate how many people have slept rough. We conclude that about 2.35 million people have experienced homelessness during their lifetime, and that 59 per cent of them (about 1.4 million people) have slept rough.     

Feminists wrestle with testosterone: Hormones,socialization and cultural interactionism as predictors of women’s gendered selves

Sociology of gender has developed beyond a personality-centered idea of “sex-roles” to an approach that stresses interaction and social structure. At the same time, there has been a concurrent development in the psychological sex-differences and medical literatures toward including the biological bases of sex-typed behavior and gender identities. In this paper, while we conceptualize gender as a social structure, we focus only on the individual level of analysis: testing the relative strength of (maternal circulating) prenatal hormones, childhood socialization, and the power of expectations attached to adult social roles (cultural interactionist) as explanations for women’s self-reported feminine and masculine selves. Our findings are complex, and support some importance of each theory. Prenatal hormones, childhood socialization, and cultural interactionism were all influential factors for gendered selves. While cultural expectations predicted only feminine selves, prenatal hormones were more robust predictors of masculine sense of self. While personality may be a relatively stable characteristic influenced by the body and childhood socialization, our results reinforce the importance of studying how the social world responds to and reinforces gendered personality.     

‘Becoming’ a possible threat: masculinity,culture and questioning among unaccompanied young men in Sweden

A debate on masculinity and immigration rose across Europe in 2015 after an incident with sexual harassments taking place in Cologne, Germany. The incident refuelled a debate positioning unaccompanied young men as a possible threat. This article is based on a research project where we during this time ethnographically followed 20 young men, having arrived in Sweden as ‘unaccompanied’ minors. The aim is to examine how the young men themselves talk about, reflect on and negotiate masculinity and gender during this period. The article concludes that masculinity cannot be approached as something stable easily being inherited or transferred from one’s origins. One difference for ‘unaccompanied’ young men is how conflicts or tensions emerging in relation to issues of gender and masculinity tend to be interpreted differently, and publicly, putting the young men in a ‘gendered situation of questioning’.