This collection of essays explores contemporary reflections on interactions between gender and culture. The 11 contributions focus on varied dimensions of popular culture that define, interpret, validate, interrogate and rupture gender conventions. There are discussions on how children react to gender expectations and how this reaction is reflected in their activities like drawing and games. There are also investigations of films, female bodybuilding in the USA, transgender identity in Greek and Indian mythology, and women breaking glass ceilings and pioneering social movements in developing countries like India. Specific chapters are devoted to British TV series and Hindi films that address issues related to masculinity. Essays on challenges that women face in the corporate world and the real world of social inequalities, especially in developing countries, give this volume rich thematic diversity. The collection will be of interest to literary critics, film critics, gender studies scholars, and poets.
This volume deals with issues and problems of national and gender identity in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Turkey. Articles discuss experiences and position of women vis-à-vis state intervention, economic, political and cultural change, in both public and private spheres of life. In the book the real life conditions and experiences of women are analyzed on three complementary levels. The first of these is the economic and institutional circumstances shaped by structural adjustment policies, globalization and transnational policies. The second is realities of everyday life, particularly pertaining to family, religion, tradition and education. The third level is that of politics and ideology where national and nationalist discourses often build on the gender identity shaped by the economic and social levels. The book does not only present a cross cultural analysis of women's position in the region but also reflects the varied perspectives of female scholars from many different countries and disciplines.
In African American Girls and the Construction of Identity, Sheila Walker closely examines socioeconomic class and explores the way it shapes how African American girls experience race and gender in the process of their identity formation. While all the girls who participated in the two-year study are African American, their lives are racialized and gendered in significantly different ways, in both public and private spaces. Affluence is not a guaranteed protection against the identity-damaging effects of racism, and poverty is not necessarily a risk factor for an irresolute identity. By examining identity through the lens of class, Walker provides researchers, educators, and parents a more in-depth appreciation of what is a very complex, multi-layered phenomenon.
Karalina Matskevich examines the structures that map out the construction of gendered and national identities in Genesis 2–3 and 12–36. Matskevich shows how the dominant 'Subject' – the androcentric ha'adam and the ethnocentric Israel – is perceived in relation to and over against the 'Other', represented respectively as female and foreign. Using the tools of narratology, semiotics and psychoanalysis, Matskevich highlights the contradiction inherent in the project of dominance, through which the Subject seeks to suppress the transforming power of difference it relies on for its signification. Thus, in Genesis 2-3 ha'adam can only emerge as a complex Subject in possession of knowledge with the help of woman, the transforming Other to whom the narrator (and Yahweh) attributes both the agency and the blame. Similarly, the narratives of Genesis 12–36 show a conflicted attitude to places of alterity: Egypt, the fertile and seductive space that threatens annihilation, and Haran, the 'mother's land', a complex metaphor for the feminine. The construction of identity in these narratives largely relies on the symbolic fecundity of the Other.
In recent years researchers have begun to reflect on gender identity and how this impacts on the creation of successful qualitative research. In this volume contributors explore these issues by reflecting on their own studies and research careers and address how important or unimportant gender has been in building research relationships.
While currently identitarian ideologies and essentialist notions of identity that tend to simplify and reduce life experience to simple factors are globally regaining massive attention, it becomes inevitable to recollect the thorough discussions of identity concepts of the past three decades. It also calls for an ever keener awareness of and capacity to deal with the complexity and diversity of the world we live in. Artists play a major role in the potential reflection and transformation of perceptions and conceptions of the world – musicians, dancers, choreographers, spoken word artists, performance artists, actors, also fine art, installation, media artists or photographers alike. “Performing critical identity” points to performative practices of artists that bring to the fore a critical (self-)awareness and (self-)positioning concerning identification and belonging. Social identities such as gender, sexuality, race, class, dis/ability, age or non/religiosity are closely linked to the historical, social, regional and political dimensions of their formation. From this perspective, identities are hardly one-dimensional but complex and intersectional, and are rather to be thought of as a process of identification and belonging than as a consistent essence. As different, maybe contradictory among themselves, as they are, the performative works of artists such as Lerato Shadi, Liad Hussein Kantorowicz, Nora Chipaumire, Shu Lea Cheang, Zanele Muholi, Ohno Kazuo, Anohni Hegarty, Neo Hülcker, “We’re Muslim. Don’t Panic” or of theatre collectives such as RambaZamba and Thikwa Theater in Berlin or Theater Hora in Zurich, to name but a very small quite random selection of artists, share a critical approach towards hegemonic norms or stereotyping of identities and their representations, and empower diversity. This edition puts a specific focus on the performativity of the aesthetic practices, and wants to explore different artistic approaches, strategies, tactics and perspectives of artists when they address identity issues, when they target power relations and structures of oppression and inequality, when they empower concepts of diversity. This Call for Papers invites academic as well as artistic contributions that delve into case studies of artists performing critical identity or into more general theoretical reflections on the subject. Contributions can relate to, but are not limited to following topics: - intersectionality - subversion - (self-)empowerment - resistance - subalternity - exploitation - manipulation - (anti-)feminism - appropriation - cultural globalisation - transculturality - hybrid identities - collectives - body - stage - audience - de-/construction of the difference of aesthetic genres and of high/popular culture - capitalism - colonialism - (re-)production of exclusion Dr. Marie-Anne Kohl Editor
This book illuminates the complex and constantly shifting social and cultural dynamics that shape people's identity. Specifically, the volume focuses on the intersections of gender with, culture and identity, and at different historical epochs; on the way men and women define themselves and are defined by diverse peoples and cultures across time and space in sub-Saharan Africa. The discussions presented in this anthology primarily focus on 'being' as 'a state' or 'condition', defined by sex identity, and how this identity shifts, and hence 'becoming', assuming diverse meanings in disparate societies, contexts, and time. The discourse, therefore, moves from how the perception of the self in cultural and historical contexts has informed actions and at some other times shaped interpretations given to historical facts, to how changing economic realities also shape the definitions and constructions of social and relational issues in Sub-Saharan Africa. The historical trajectories of Islamic religion, colonialism and Christian missionary activities in sub-Saharan Africa have shaped the worlds of the peoples of the region and impacted on gender relations.
With intellectual reference points that include Foucault and Freud, Wittig, Kristeva and Irigaray, this is one of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years and is perhaps the essential work of contemporary feminist thought.
Now updated with groundbreaking research, this award-winning classic examines the construction of sexual identity in biology, society, and history. Why do some people prefer heterosexual love while others fancy the same sex? Is sexual identity biologically determined or a product of convention? In this brilliant and provocative book, the acclaimed author of Myths of Gender argues that even the most fundamental knowledge about sex is shaped by the culture in which scientific knowledge is produced. Drawing on astonishing real-life cases and a probing analysis of centuries of scientific research, Fausto-Sterling demonstrates how scientists have historically politicized the body. In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms -- sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed -- and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.
