“The Way That I Look at Things [Is] Different Because It's Me”: Constructing and Deconstructing Narratives About Racialized Sexual Selves

Many gender scholars have abandoned the notion that we can explore women's experiences without attention to other identities such as race, class, and/or sexual orientation. Until now, the ways race influences the development of sexual selves has been underexplored. In this paper, I focus on heterosexual women's accounts of the interplay of race, gender, and sexualities. Based on in‐depth interviews with sixty‐two white and African American heterosexual women between the ages of twenty and sixty‐eight, I examine the ways in which narrative work tells a story about the presentation of public sexual selves. I also explore how women's personal narratives are impacted by larger cultural narratives about race. Specifically, through a study of sexuality, I focus on the social construction of “postracialism.”     

Gender inequality and inter-household economic inequality in emerging economies: exploring the relationship

While most emerging economies have been characterised by persistence/growth of inter-household economic inequality in recent decades, and simultaneous poor performance on gender equality, the intersecting relationship between these two trends so far has not received much attention. This article is an initial attempt look at this relationship, showing how gender inequality has both contributed to, and been affected by, growing economic inequality. It focuses on eight emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Mexico, Indonesia, and Turkey (dubbed the BRICSAMIT countries). The article analyses Gini coefficient trends and Global Gender Gap Index trends, and draws in addition on insights gained from seven exploratory interviews with Oxfam colleagues and partners working on women's rights in the considered countries. It concludes with a reflection on the possible future policy agenda that would allow one to simultaneously address the issues of gender inequality and economic inequality in the analysed countries.     

Constructing Humanitarian Selves and Refugee Others

Contributing to ongoing debates about what happens when feminism is institutionalized in global governance, this article examines how gender equality is given meaning and applied in humanitarian aid to refugees, and what the implications are with regard to the production of subjectivities and their positioning in relations of power. Drawing on Foucauldian and postcolonial feminist perspectives, the analysis identifies two main representations of what it means to promote gender equality in refugee situations. Gender equality is represented as a means to aid effectiveness through the strategic mobilization of refugee women's participation, and as a project of development, involving the transformation of “traditional” or “backward” refugee cultures into modern societies. The subject positions that are produced categorically cast refugees as either passive or problematic subjects who need to be rescued, protected, assisted, activated, controlled and reformed through humanitarian interventions, while humanitarian workers are positioned as rational administrators and progressive agents of social transformation. In effect, gender equality is used to sustain power asymmetries in refugee situations and to reproduce global hierarchies.     

Violence,rape, and sexual coercion: everyday love in a South African township

This paper presents findings of an anthropological study among pregnant adolescents in Cape Town, South Africa. The inquiry focuses on the sexual dynamics within adolescent relationships. The study reveals widespread male coercion and violence within sexual relationships. Informants describe assault as a regular feature of their relationships. In South Africa, power relations between men and women are commonly manifested as and imposed through sexual violence and assault. Men use physical assault to force sexual contact, beating their female partners if they refuse to have sex, are suspected of sexual infidelity, or are found to be using contraceptives. Moreover, women experience abuse such as gang rape. Yet, health promotion interventions fail to acknowledge sexual encounters as instances in which unequal power relations between men and women are expressed. It is these power relations which determine women's ability or inability to protect themselves against sexually transmitted disease, pregnancy, and unwelcome sexual acts. This study underlines the need to consider gender power issues in the design and impact assessment of HIV/AIDS and reproductive health interventions and in challenging male violence.     

“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.     

Dairy Livestock Interventions for Food Security in Uganda: What are the Implications for Women's Empowerment?*

Women are increasingly the target of agricultural development programs aimed at reducing poverty and food insecurity, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Some feminist scholars argue that such efforts are driven more by concerns about the efficient use of resources than the rights of women and do little to transform gendered power relations. We examine how development interventions that target women affect household well-being, especially food insecurity, empower women, and transform gendered power relations. Our study uses the case of the Gates Foundation funded East Africa Dairy Development (EADD) program in Uganda. Our methods include the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index survey and in-depth interviews of women farmers and key informants, within the EADD program. We argue that the livestock sector provides critical insights into women's empowerment because livestock are not “socially neutral” in their gendered effects. Our study found that: (1) ownership of dairy cows enhanced important dimensions of women's empowerment and gender equity that benefited women and households; (2) women's labor responsibilities for dairy cows disempowered some women by increasing their time poverty and; (3) ownership of dairy cows provided a means for women to disrupt entrenched social norms related to gender roles within the household and agriculture.     

Young Adult Relationship Values at the Intersection of Gender and Sexuality

Recent decades have brought significant social changes in the industrialized West that may influence young adults' attitudes about intimate relationships, including changes in gender expectations and behaviors and changes in sexual attitudes and practices. We used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 14,121) to compare men to women and sexual minorities to heterosexuals on ratings of the importance of love, faithfulness, commitment, financial security, and racial homogamy for successful relationships. We found that nearly all young adults adhere to dominant relationship values inherent in the romantic love ideology; we found, however, modest but significant differences by gender and sexual identity in relationship values. Significant interactions demonstrated that gender and sexual identity intersect to uniquely influence relationship views.     

Ready Rhetorics: Political Homophobia and Activist Discourses in Malawi,Nigeria, and Uganda

Since the late 1990s political leaders in several African countries have pursued legislation to expand criminal penalties for same-sex sex. Yet, much of the research on efforts to expand criminalization of same-sex sexualities in Africa has focused on individual country cases, neglecting the role of national and transnational sociopolitical contexts and economic flows. Focusing on discourses present in news media data from 2000 to 2014 in three African countries pursuing regressive policies targeting homosexuality—Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda—we examine: 1) the different antihomosexual discourses and constellations of actors that emerge over time; 2) the linkages among antihomosexual discourses and other social or cultural logics that allow individuals and collective actors to make sense of antihomosexual discourses in a particular historical moment; and 3) the relationships among discourses vying for power in a given discursive field. In these data we observe episodic public debates around homosexuality that engage different arguments and constellations of actors over time. The intensity of public debates has increased since the mid-2000s in each country, and debates reflect strong linkages among transnational and national actors. Ultimately, we contend that the particular debates occurring around the regulation of same-sex sex in Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda reflect larger conflicts over social change, political power, and global status hierarchies. We conclude with implications for the study of homophobia and LGBT movements in sub-Saharan Africa.     

Dynamics of Domestic Labor Across Short‐ and Long‐Distance Family Relocations

Family relocations within developed countries are argued to have gendered consequences for paid employment, with men's careers improving and women's careers deteriorating. However, little is known about their potential relationships with outcomes in other life domains, including partnered men's and women's relative shares of domestic labor. The authors addressed this gap in knowledge by theorizing and examining how within‐couple gender gaps in domestic work evolve across short‐ and long‐distance family relocations over the life course, paying attention to the over‐time dynamics before and after event occurrence. To accomplish this, they used 12 years of panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey and panel regression models. The results indicated that family relocations widen the within‐couple gender gap in weekly housework hours, largely because of shifts in women's employment situation and fertility episodes that accompany residential relocations.     

Addressing multiple dimensions of gender inequality: the experience of the BRAC Gender Quality Action Learning (GQAL) programme in Bangladesh

Recent analyses have highlighted that poverty reduction in Bangladesh has been accompanied by growing inequality in society, measured by household income. This article considers what the implications are for development actors who are concerned with empowering the poor in society, and who understand poverty from a gender and women's rights perspective. We draw on experience from BRAC's work to address these issues, focusing on the Gender Quality Action Learning (GQAL) programme. A focus on women's self-employment alone does not result in challenging the structures of patriarchal inequalities. Gender inequality and its link to economic inequality needs to be much more centrally positioned than it currently is in development discourse. Currently economic empowerment is widely seen as a potential route to gender equality, but the GQAL programme shows work to challenge gender inequality is necessary as an entry-point to ensure effective economic empowerment.     

Shattering the Myth of Invulnerability: Exploring the Prevention Needs of Sexual Minority Women Living with HIV/AIDS

Developing effective safer-sex programs for women living with HIV/AIDS (WLH/A) is a national HIV prevention priority. Existing programs focus predominantly on heterosexual women's experiences and ignore the needs of sexual minority women (SMW). Thus, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 sexual minority WLH/A to better understand their sexual risk behaviors and corresponding HIV prevention needs. Most of the interviewees were African American (75%) and poor (75%). We used strategies of Grounded Theory to code the interviews for key themes, which included the following: differences between relationships, risk, and protective behaviors in male and female relationships; links between substance abuse and unsafe sex; need for safer-sex or prevention programs to address SMW-specific skills and topics; and the importance of addressing women's resiliency and the social context of women's risk in prevention programs. Conclusions include concrete suggestions to make safer-sex programs more responsive to the needs of SMW.     

Moving Beyond Agency: A Review of Gender and Intimate Relationships in Conservative Religions

Studies of gender regimes within conservative religion have often focused on the dynamics of intimate relationships to separately analyze women's agency and men's authority. By bridging studies of men and women in a variety of intimate relationships, this article provides a relational analysis of how gender and religion intersect in daily life. Given the importance of marriage within conservative religions, I first review studies of married women and married men to illustrate the varied ways these institutions intersect. Next, I present findings from the limited but burgeoning scholarship on those who have not yet or cannot live up to the religious goal of heterosexual marriage: unmarried heterosexuals and gay and lesbian relationships.     

Trending Trousers: Debating Kastom,Clothing and Gender in the Vanuatu Mediascape

This paper presents an ethnography of contemporary media practices in Vanuatu, with a particular focus on media narratives and debates around gender equality and women's clothing, exploring how the discourses of kastom, Christianity and ‘modernity’ are being employed and communicated across various media platforms. The use of community media to promote awareness of gender equality through participatory and entertaining content, and the use of mainstream media to communicate a narrative that reinforces existing gendered power structures are each explored. In addition, social media platforms are identified as an emerging communication tool through which users can straddle the line between producers and consumers of media content and narratives, and engage in frank debate around the issue of gender equality.     

Relational resources, gender consciousness and possibilities of change in marital relationships

Investigating the possibilities of change in marital relationships, we argue, involves examining the interplay of gender consciousness, relational resources and material circumstances in their concrete, interactional manifestations. The attempt to address this interface is grounded in the idea that understanding gender relations necessarily involves both institutional and interactional dimensions. While much research has been devoted to the influence of material or structural resources on indicators such as the domestic division of labour, relatively little direct attention has been given to the issue of differing ‘relational’ or interpersonal resources. We use a multi-method approach based on interviews with women in different occupations to analyse possibilities of change in marital communication and the domestic division of labour in relation both to women's material and to their relational resources. We conclude that a combination of increased gender consciousness and the development of particular inter-personal skills facilitates negotiation and change in the boundaries regulating both communication and the domestic division of labour within the marital relationship.     

The Incomplete Revolution

South Africa's negotiated transition promised significant gains for gender equality, as women acquired one-third of the seats in the national parliament, secured constitutional protection, and began a process of legislative and institutional reform. Once apartheid was dismantled, the programs of racial and gender empowerment theoretically should have proceeded at the same rates, given the rhetorical commitments of the liberation parties. Life for the majority of South African women, however, continues to be marked by socio-economic hardships, patriarchal domination, and gender violence. This article asserts that the roots of women's continued inequality are found within the western reform models utilized by the anti-apartheid movement that reproduced public/private, male/female dichotomies in state institutions, thereby entrenching male discourse and power. The data suggest that in order to disrupt the power of the patriarchy women need to challenge male domination within the domestic sphere as well as challenging gender discrimination in public political spaces.     

More Than Just Sex

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to identify behaviors in addition to those of an explicitly sexual or romantic nature that men and women define as unfaithful acts in the context of committed dating relationships. We also sought to identify possible gender differences in the proportions of men and women who have engaged in these unfaithful behaviors while in dating relationships. We examined 219 college men's and women's reported involvement in sexual behaviors, romantic attachments, sexual and nonsexual fantasies, sexual attraction, romantic attraction, flirting, and social participation in dyads and groups with someone other than their current or past dating partner. A sizable proportion of both men and women reported engaging in one or more of the behaviors at some point in their dating history. Proportionately more men than women indicated having engaged in sexual fantasies of various types about someone other than their primary partner and reported “hitting on” someone else while in a dating relationship. No other gender differences emerged. A unique aspect of this study is that we asked young men and women to determine what kinds of behaviors they considered to be unfaithful rather than only examining sexual and emotional behaviors as has been the case in past research. Further, the few significant gender differences we found indicates that the convergence of men's and women's attitudes about sexuality may now be show in their behavior.     

Collective Bargaining and the Gender Pay Gap in the Printing Industry

This paper considers the effect of collective bargaining on the gender pay gap in the printing industry. This sector was subject to multi‐employer bargaining for around 90 years, until 2010. The article analyses gendered collective bargaining processes through the mechanism of symbolic power, that is, the power of interpretation and definition, and utilizes Walton and McKersie's seminal work on bargaining behaviour to understand the processes that have prevented the closing of the pay gap. It finds that symbolic power operates within the sub‐processes of attitudinal structuring and intra‐organizational bargaining to de‐legitimize women's role in equal pay bargaining, alongside distributive bargaining tactics that preclude equal pay bargaining, thereby creating the impression that women are irrelevant to bargaining processes and ensuring relative invisibility for issues of importance to equality bargaining.     

From intergovernmental negotiations to (sub)national change

In the last thirty years, a process of global norm creation in the field of gender equality has taken place. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women marks a milestone in this process: it emerged as the first legally binding international instrument for the protection of women's rights. The 180 states that have ratified the Convention have interpreted their treaty obligations in diverse ways, ranging from reluctance to active incorporation. Beyond its original mandate, CEDAW has increased attention on gender issues within the UN human rights framework. Further, it has motivated transnational NGO activism that uses the Convention to connect local understandings of women's rights with global standards to influence national policy developments. Taking these global, national and transnational dynamics together, the article argues that CEDAW has been transformed from a ‘classical’ intergovernmental regime to a transnational network enforcing women's rights. Based on these findings, a theoretical view on global norm creation and enforcement is developed that stresses the reciprocal interrelation between global, national and local spheres. Instead of assuming a ‘trickle-down’ dynamic as a consequence of global agreements, it is argued that the legitimacy and authority of global norms depends on their active interpretation and appropriation within national and local contexts all over the world.     

We Did Not Realize about the Gender Issues. So,We Thought It Was a Good Idea

This article explores the link between nationalism, as expressed by the Burman state and ethnic and student opposition movements, and the emergence of a multiethnic women's movement engaged in resistance activities. In focusing on women's involvement in oppositional nation-making projects, this article aims to broaden our understanding of gender and conflict by highlighting women's agency in war. Drawing on interviews carried out with founding members of the women's movement, non-state armed groups and others active in civil society, the article investigates how a gendered political consciousness arose out of dissatisfaction with women's secondary position in armed opposition groups, leading to women forming a movement, not in opposition to conflict per se but in opposition to the rejection of their militarism, in the process redefining notions of political involvement and agency. By invoking solidarity based on a gendered positioning, rather than on an ethnic identity, the women's movement resisted the dominant nation-making projects, and created a nationalism inclusive of multiethnic differences. Burmese women's multiple wartime roles thus serve to upset supposed dichotomies between militancy and peace and victim and combatant, in the process redefining the relationship between gender, nationalism and militancy.     

Women in Movement Transformations in African Political Landscapes

Since the mid-1980s and especially after the early 1990s, women's organizations have increased exponentially throughout Africa as have the arenas in which women have been able to assert their varied concerns. Women are organizing locally and nationally and are networking across the continent on an unprecedented scale. They have in many countries been aggressively using the media to demand their rights in a way not evident in the early 1980s. In some countries they are taking their claims to land, inheritance and associational autonomy to court in ways not seen in the past. Women are challenging laws and constitutions that do not uphold gender equality. In addition, they are increasingly moving into government, legislative, party, NGO and other leadership positions previously the nearly exclusive domain of men. In these and other ways women have taken advantage of the new political openings that occurred in the 1990s, even if the openings were limited and precarious. This second generation of activism is markedly different from the earlier post-independence generation of women's mobilization. The reasons for these shifts are varied: the rise of multi-partyism and demise of military rule; the growing influence of the international women's movement; shifting donor strategies; the expansion of the use of the cell phone and the Internet in the late 1990s; coupled with a significant increase in secondary and university educated women. The article explores the major changes in women's mobilization in Africa by contrasting the current women's movements with those that emerged after independence.