LGBTQ Women,Appearance Negotiations,and Workplace Dress Codes

The purpose of this study was to explore LGBTQ women’s experiences with unwritten or formal dress codes at work. I asked: What are LGBTQ women’s experiences in the workplace with appearance management, and what are LGBTQ women’s experiences navigating the written and unwritten dress codes in the workplace? To answer the research question, interviews were conducted with 24 self-identifying LGBTQ women. Six key themes emerged from the data. Themes included (1) expressed sexual identity in appearance, (2) unwritten dress codes in work environments did not always allow for expression of sexual identity in appearance, (3) motivations for pressure or desire to conceal expression of sexual identity in appearance at work, (4) negotiations of revealing or concealing sexual identity in appearance in the workplace impacted levels of comfort and confidence, (5) verbal and nonverbal negative experiences related to appearance at work, and (6) received compliments about appearance at work.     

Rewriting dominant narratives of the academy: women faculty of color and identity management

Drawing on Delgado and Yosso’s counterstory, Yosso’s community cultural wealth, and Alsup’s borderland discourses, the authors, who are women of color academics, use narratives from their lives to discuss the ways in which they draw on resources in managing and reconfiguring their multiple identities within the academy. These include identities of scholars, mentors, teachers, community members, mothers, and partners. They suggest that rather than merely being socialized into cultural reproduction, as much of the literature oriented toward women of color advises them to do in order to become successful, they seek to actually engage in transforming their roles and that of the academy by consciously and repeatedly making present and visible facets of identity that have previously been more-or-less absent in higher education. By presenting these counter-narratives the authors attempt to engage with ways of self-positioning that are, especially for women of color in academia, not frequently discussed or presented.     

Custom Epoch Estimation for Surveys

The paper provides a method for generating epoch estimates for time series survey data, allowing for different periods of time (or even point estimates) according to user demand. The method uses a modified kriging estimator, which suppresses the contribution of sampling error variability in order to guarantee that custom epoch estimates have an interpolation property. For the veteran population variable of the American Community Survey, we utilize a simple Brownian Motion model of the population process and derive the modified kriging estimator for this case. The tuning parameters of this population model can be calibrated to the data via simple formulas. We illustrate the application of this method to the generation of point estimates of veteran population, an important objective for Veterans Affairs.     

A Grounded Theory of Sexual Minority Women and Transgender Individuals’ Social Justice Activism

Psychosocial benefits of activism include increased empowerment, social connectedness, and resilience. Yet sexual minority women (SMW) and transgender individuals with multiple oppressed statuses and identities are especially prone to oppression-based experiences, even within minority activist communities. This study sought to develop an empirical model to explain the diverse meanings of social justice activism situated in SMW and transgender individuals’ social identities, values, and experiences of oppression and privilege. Using a grounded theory design, 20 SMW and transgender individuals participated in initial, follow-up, and feedback interviews. The most frequent demographic identities were queer or bisexual, White, middle-class women with advanced degrees. The results indicated that social justice activism was intensely relational, replete with multiple benefits, yet rife with experiences of oppression from within and outside of activist communities. The empirically derived model shows the complexity of SMW and transgender individuals’ experiences, meanings, and benefits of social justice activism.     

康区"三魔女",还是"康区三度母"——近代康区妇女精英研究

二十世纪上半叶康区三位著名妇女精英甘孜的孔萨?央金堪珠、德格的夏克? 泽旺志玛和瞻对的甲日?其美志玛在康区政治生活中扮演了重要的角色。她们之所以获得权力，是因为康区的传统习惯法以及清末和民国时期的法律都允许妇女在一个家族没有男性继承人的情况下继承名号和土司或头人的地位。为了获得和巩固政治地位，她们往往陷入多方势力的权力争斗中，这些势力包括其家族中的男性、来自其它家族的男性、地方军阀、中央政府，有时还有西藏地方政府。研究揭示了正是康区在夹缝中生存的各土司统治区域割裂、分权的性质为地方首领，特别是妇女领袖提供了较多的施展其政治才能的空间。     

Who cares? A lack of self‐care for women in the non‐profit/non‐governmental sector

In this article I examine the lack of self‐care regimes for women working in the non‐profit/non‐governmental sector. While I draw on ethnographic research conducted in the Malaysian context of women's organizations, the issue of self‐care for activists and feminist activists is a global one that crosses borders and boundaries. I explore the gendered nature of care and care professions to demonstrate how women are predominantly affected in these working environments. To date, there has been little scholarship on self‐care and care in non‐profit/non‐governmental working environments. Using interviews with women working in the sector, I argue that women's emotional, mental and physical health comes at a cost in these hectic workplaces. This article contributes to the literature on gender, work and care in women's organizations by taking seriously women's concerns working in these spaces, where they experience self‐neglect and institutional barriers in care regimes.     

Absent bodies and present memories: marking out the everyday and the future in Eastern Sri Lanka

Drawing from ethnographic work carried out between 2005 and 2007, this article considers the ways in which a women’s network has developed strategies to find meaning around the absences of loved ones, killed or ‘disappeared’ during the decades of conflict in Sri Lanka. For most of these women, the fate of their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers is not known and the lack of answers means that they are unable to fully grieve and find closure. In order to survive, they must find ways to deal with the absent bodies and present memories of those who may never be located and accounted for. These strategies include tree-planting ceremonies carried out as a way of not only remembering and mourning loved ones but also asking questions about how one makes sense of loss and what it means to carry the burden of unanswered absences through everyday life and into the future.     

Contextual identity experiencing facilitates resilience in Native American academics

This article discusses the socio-cultural dynamics that interact with ethno-racial identity experiencing in a previously under-researched group. A qualitative interdisciplinary study with 40 Native American academics from 28 mainstream universities across the U.S. served as a case example with findings that contrasted with historically influential theoretical frameworks postulating identity confusion and conflicts at the intersection of one’s mainstream education and profession versus one’s ethno-racial community grounding. Instead of feeling pressure to identify with only one worldview, the contextual, dynamic identities associated with the inclusive and flexible self-concept of tribal participants allowed them to in turn take advantage of two divergent cultural meaning systems pertaining to their distinct socio-cultural contexts. These shifts were experienced as not endogenous but rather exogenous variables, which did not cause the historically theorized issues. Participants felt their tribal identities instead facilitated meaningful integration of the existing incongruences, which resulted in unexpectedly resilient subjective experiencing.     

Tracing Differentiation in Gendered Leadership: An Analysis of Differences in Gender Composition in Top Management in Business,Politics and the Civil Service

The aim of this article is to discuss the relationship between the gendering of leadership positions and sector‐specific structures within politics, business and the civil service in Denmark in the context of differences between the Nordic countries and other western countries. The analysis is based on data from a survey of top male and female leaders within the three sectors. The theoretical point of departure of this article is constructivist. It looks at gender as constituted by actions in social space, orchestrated by structural processes and a symbolic order of gender. This constitutes a cultural discourse on gender reflected in gender conventions in society and in a range of possibilities of gender positioning. Expressions of this are discussed in the analysis of the patterns of difference in structural conditions for women and men in leadership positions to be found within the three sectors. The structural conditions encompass access conditions and conditions for gendered positioning and are analysed on the basis of data on social background, education, career course, family, children and distribution of housework. The analysis shows that there is a correlation between gender composition of leadership and possibilities of gendered positioning within a sector. The results are finally discussed as possible expressions of an egalitarian culture.