Gender across family generations: change in Mexican American masculinities and femininities

How do conceptions of gender – attitudes, expectations, and behaviours – change from generation to generation in Mexican American families? The notion of gender as socially constructed allows for the possibility of change, yet existing studies documenting change provide insight into why gender changes occur but do not sufficiently describe how this process happens. Based on interviews with three-generation Mexican American families in California, this article finds that reflection on natal family experiences and intergenerational family communication – autobiographical stories, lessons, and advice – are mechanisms that shift masculinity, femininity, and gender relations. Men use their natal family dynamics to rethink male dominance in favour of improved familial and romantic relationships whereas women consider their biographies and cross-generational advice to challenge patriarchy and become more educated and assertive. Families are crucibles of social change: reflection on natal family experiences and communication that crosscuts family generations actualise and initiate paradigm shifts about gender.     

Fragile goddesses: moral subjectivity and militarized agencies in female guerrilla diaries and memoirs

Kurdish female guerrillas in the armed political organization Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) established death as the ultimate form of agentive transcendence in the early periods of their participation. This article focuses on the uneasy relation between death and empowerment in female militancy. It explores how female militancy both unsettles and reinforces gendered binaries of militarism. In parallel, it looks at empowerment as a fragile and complex process connected to lived experiences and subject-making mechanisms within insurgent organizations. It analyzes Kurdish female guerrillas’ diaries, memoirs and author’s interview with an ex-guerrilla on the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state in the 1990s. The autobiographical narratives reveal the formation of a transcendental ethos on female empowerment culminated in the goddess image. Yet, the narratives also reveal the dilemmas, contradictions and pain inherent in becoming ideal militant-subjects, particularly for female guerrillas. Through this exploration, I argue that such model of a posthumous empowerment dominates the ways in which women’s militancies are recognized and understood.     

20世纪90年代女性"三态"的显示和阐释——以《女性生命潮汐》(《选读》和《研究》)为例

20世纪90年代,女性的生存状态从整体上看是改善了,但从局部看却又有倒退;话语状态多元、复杂;文化状态得到全面提升.女性"三态"的矛盾与变化,是社会转型时期诸多矛盾与变化的,反映.     

谋婚·谋生·谋爱——苏青长篇小说中女性的爱情失落

在苏青的长篇小说文本中,无论苏怀青还是符小眉,在她们的谋婚和谋生过程中,世俗化的谋爱始终贯穿其中。最终她们的爱情追求失落在沦陷区这片时间、文化、历史断裂的空间中,展示了挣扎于新旧观念之间的中国女性浮出地表之初的艰难。     

“Sexy” And “Laddish” Girls

Unpacking ideologies at work within contemporary popular media discourses about young womanhood can be challenging when the terrain of their representation is often presented in a kind of binary-oppositional fashion. There is concern that in contemporary popular culture traditional gender roles are becoming even more entrenched, with femininity increasingly defined around notions of (hyper, hetero-normative) “sexiness.” At the same time, it seems that certain aspects of masculinity, namely sexual hedonism and social, drinking-centred hedonism, have conditionally opened up to young women. The panics that exist around both the figures of the “sexy girl” and the “laddish girl” lead me to unpack here how it is that concerns about women's excessive “sexiness,” and the gendered reinforcement of the sex-object role, relate to discourses of gender “transgression” that often circulate around the figure of the “ladette,” and the supposedly new-found freedoms she is exercising. I suggest that while the figures of the “sexy girl” and the “laddish girl” are both to some extent deplored and constructed as “excessive” and “transgressive” in recent media discourses, they are also both normalised and publicly imag(in)ed through such discourses as central post-feminist paradigms of young womanhood. I go on to explore a possible ideological function of the co-existence of “sexy” and “laddish” girls as normative figures within contemporary media culture.     

Lesbians’ Negative Affect Toward Sexual Minority People with Stereotypical Masculine and Feminine Characteristics

Abstract

We investigated lesbians’ negative affect toward gay and lesbian scenarios with feminine/negative characteristics. Seventy-one Italian lesbians responded to self-report questionnaires. Analyses tested that feminine gay man scenario (GF) would elicit negative affect more than the other three scenarios (feminine/masculine lesbian woman and masculine gay man) and that participants’ internalized sexual stigma would be a moderator of the relation between their self-perceived femininity and negative affect. When lesbians reported low self-perceived femininity, stigma levels did not affect the evaluation of the GF. Instead, when self-perceived femininity were higher, lesbians with high stigma reported more negative emotions than lesbians with low stigma.     

Gender,family negotiations and academic success of young Moroccan women in Spain

This article examines the lives of pioneering young women from Morocco, the first to enjoy educational and social success in Catalonia, by analyzing the family negotiations entered into during this process. The study is based on the life stories of these young Moroccan women and on ideas that emerge from discussion groups involving the women themselves and experts in education and other fields. We report that the young women perceive a certain degree of flexibility on the part of their families in their intra-family relations and the model of woman they are prepared to accept. However, our study also provides evidence of the fact that their success is associated with a constant process of negotiation, the women having to exercise their agency above and beyond their parental expectations and control, leaving them in a position of solitude.     

Exaggerated femininity and tortured masculinity: embodying gender in the horseracing industry

Most of the young people enrolling on modern apprenticeships in the horse racing industry are women and many hope to become jockeys. The majority of those who realise these ambitions are, however, men. This paper explores this process of attrition, focussing on gendered embodiment and its relation to the development of the bodily hexis and habitus characteristic of the racing field. We argue that women engage in the bodily labour of engenderment in a context of hostility and harassment and that they develop a contradictorily gendered habitus which brings together attributes which are culturally associated with both masculinity and femininity. In order to achieve this they subject themselves to a disciplining and punishing of the body which creates a ‘tortured’ masculinity. Female bodies are, however, ‘imprisoned’ by the workings of the habitus and, within the racing field, their bodies are read as weak, not fit for hard work and as more suited to an office (or home) than a race horse. These embodied processes and practices place them at a severe disadvantage and result in women being a very small minority of jockeys.     

Gender‐based violence and young homeless women: femininity,embodiment and vicarious physical capital

This article discusses how the gender‐based violence of homelessness contributes to young women engaging in bodily alliances with men as a strategy for physical protection. The embedding of individualized and postfeminist discourses through the conditions of neoliberalism and the structural disadvantage of homelessness have meant that young women are required to adopt self‐regulatory practices and take personal responsibility for their physical safety. Drawing on Bourdieu's social capital theory and its development by Skeggs and Shilling, and based on qualitative research undertaken with fifteen young women who had experienced homelessness in Australia, I suggest that feminine capital is mobilized through necessity by young homeless women through the formation and maintenance of intimate relationships with men to access a sense of safety in an environment that is hostile to the female body. However, as the narratives presented here demonstrate, the value and privilege ascribed to (certain) male bodies is only accessible vicariously to young women, it is inherently precarious, it can undermine access to other types of capital and these intimate relationships can also be a source of gender‐based violence.     

Invisible golden girls? Post-feminist discourses and female ageing bodies in contemporary television fiction

Abstract

The popular television series The Golden Girls (1985–1992) seems to be an exception in the history of the representation of third-age women femininities and bodies in television fiction. This series about four mature women living in the same house in Miami made ageing women visible in television representations. Older women are generally invisible in popular television fiction. Despite this absence, a discourse on ageing and femininities is present in all sorts of popular media texts. We will question post-feminist discourses on ageing bodies and femininities. Are the post-feminist claims regarding ageing bodies present in popular television fiction? Moreover, are these discourses represented by the portrayal of ageing bodies? We will analyse the representations of ageing femininities in television fiction labelled as “post-feminist television fiction.” The series Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, and Girls will be studied using a textual analysis to look for discourses on ageing female bodies and their particularities in relation to post-feminism. We distinguished a limited set of three sets of discourses (losing femininity, masking of ageing, and the wisdom of ageing) on ageing femininities. Although ageing feminine bodies are absent, a discourse on ageing, “good” ageing, and acceptance of ageing is present in the narration in all three series. The discourse on the masking of ageing, however, is predominant.