Victims, Gender and Jouissance
Victims, Gender and Jouissance

Author: Victoria Grace

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-04-27

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1136310681

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Victimization has a long, cross-cultural history. The status of the victim has been the source of active and stirring controversy in cultural theory, criminology and legal theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis; it is of particular interest within feminist theory. Can the victim relation be refused? Are we all victims? The aim of this book is to analyze the intersection of gender and the victim, and the role of a libidinal enjoyment (jouissance) in knotting this relation. The enduring link between the construct of the victim and the sacrificial processes at its heart reveals something ultimately compelling about sacrifice. Legislating victimization out of existence will fail because the victim relation is central to the very formation of human subjectivity and implicated in the reproduction of social life. Lacanian psychoanalysis is used to interrogate the limits to arguments for resolving the problem of sacrificial violence: from Girard to Bataille, from Butler to Kristeva, from de Sade to Nietzsche. However, without denying the inevitable structuring power of the signifier, only its relentless reversion, or undoing, will expose the myths that sustain it, and create an opening within the social beyond this impasse. Such a break is theorized through a confrontation of Lacan with Baudrillard.

Theorizing Sexual Violence
Theorizing Sexual Violence

Author: Renée J. Heberle

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-09-11

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1135218846

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Examining sexual violence, the authors of this volume take up questions about the relationship between sex, sexuality and violence to better understand the terms on which women’s sexual suffering is perpetuated, thereby undermining their capacity for personhood and autonomy.

Ageing, Gender and Sexuality
Ageing, Gender and Sexuality

Author: Sue Westwood

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-10

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1317431707

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Ageing, Gender and Sexuality focuses on the experiences of older lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) individuals, in order to analyse how ageing, gender and sexuality intersect to produce particular inequalities relating to resources, recognition and representation in later life. The book adopts a feminist socio-legal perspective to propose that these inequalities are informed by and play out in relation to temporal, spatial and regulatory contexts. Discussing topics such as ageing sexual subjectivities, ageing kinship formations, classed trajectories and anticipated care futures, this book provides a new perspective on older individuals in same-sex relationships, including those who choose not to label their sexualities. Drawing upon recent empirical data, the book offers new theoretical approaches for understanding the intersectionality of ageing, gender and sexuality, as well as analysing the social policy implications of these findings. With an emphasis on the accounts of individuals who have experienced the dramatically changing socio-legal landscape for LGB people first-hand, this book is essential reading for students, scholars and policymakers working in the areas of: gender and sexuality studies; ageing studies and gerontology; gender, sexuality and law; equality and human rights; sociology; socio-legal studies; and social policy. Ageing, Gender and Sexuality won the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Hart Prize for Early Career Academics for 2017.

Gender and Neoliberalism
Gender and Neoliberalism

Author: Elisabeth Armstrong

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-07

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1317911415

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This book describes the changing landscape of women’s politics for equality and liberation during the rise of neoliberalism in India. Between 1991 and 2006, the doctrine of liberalization guided Indian politics and economic policy. These neoliberal measures vastly reduced poverty alleviation schemes, price supports for poor farmers, and opened India’s economy to the unpredictability of global financial fluctuations. During this same period, the All India Democratic Women’s Association, which directly opposed the ascendance of neoliberal economics and policies, as well as the simultaneous rise of violent casteism and anti-Muslim communalism, grew from roughly three million members to over ten million. Beginning in the late 1980s, AIDWA turned its attention to women’s lives in rural India. Using a method that began with activist research, the organization developed a sectoral analysis of groups of women who were hardest hit in the new neoliberal order, including Muslim women, and Dalit (oppressed caste) women. AIDWA developed what leaders called inter-sectoral organizing, that centered the demands of the most vulnerable women into the heart of its campaigns and its ideology for social change. Through long-term ethnographic research, predominantly in the northern state of Haryana and the southern state of Tamil Nadu, this book shows how a socialist women’s organization built its oppositional strength by organizing the women most marginalized by neoliberal policies and economics.

Gender and Rural Migration
Gender and Rural Migration

Author: Glenda Tibe Bonifacio

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-20

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1136656146

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Gender and Rural Migration: Realities, Conflict and Change explores the intersection of gender, migration, and rurality in 21st-century Western and non-Western contexts. In a world where heightened globalization is making borders increasingly porous, rural communities form part of the migration nexus. While rural out-migration is well-documented, the gendered dynamics of rural in-migration - including return rural migration and the connectivity of rural-urban/global-local spaces - are often overlooked. In this collection, well-grounded case studies involving diverse groups of people in rural communities in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Norway, the United States, and Uzbekistan are organized into three themes: contesting rurality and belonging, women’s empowerment and social relations, and sexualities and mobilities. As demonstrated in this anthology, rural areas are contested sites among queer youth, same-sex couples, working women, young mothers, migrant farm workers, temporary foreign workers, in-migrants, and return migrants. The rich expositions of various narratives and statistical data in multidisciplinary perspectives by emerging and established scholars claim gender and rurality as nodal points in contemporary migration discourse.

Gender, Ethnicity and Political Agency
Gender, Ethnicity and Political Agency

Author: Shaminder Takhar

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-07-18

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1135009619

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This book examines how South Asian women’s collective agency is operationalized through civic organizations in the UK. Drawing on black feminist theory and third world feminism, it shows the complexity of political agency and its relationship to identity and subjectivity, and uses empirical research to demonstrate how women are empowered to resist domination. The historically racialized image of the South Asian woman as lacking in political agency is challenged through their long history of activism on the Indian subcontinent. The creation of "critical spaces" by South Asian women in the diaspora places them as active agents who have successfully influenced social policy on important issues such as forced marriage, domestic violence and sexuality. The engagement with the empirical data demonstrates the significance and impact of race, racism, sexism and religion on the lives of the women. The book brings to the fore the pursuit of equality, rights and justice, including multiculturalism and the often debated emancipatory role of religion.

The Embodied Performance of Gender
The Embodied Performance of Gender

Author: Jack Migdalek

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-10-24

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1317610199

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Norms of embodied behaviour for males and females, as promoted in mainstream Western public arenas of popular culture and the everyday, continue to work, overtly and covertly, as definitive and restrictive barriers to the realm of possibilities of embodied gender expression and appreciation. They serve to disempower and marginalize those not inclined to embody according to such dichotomous models. This book explores the ramifications of the way our gendered, sexed and culturally constructed bodies are situated toward notions of difference and highlights the need to safeguard the social and emotional well-being of those who do not fit comfortably with dominant norms of masculine/feminine behaviour, as deemed appropriate to biological sex. The book interrogates gender inequitable machinations of education and performance arts disciplines by which educators and arts practitioners train, teach, choreograph, and direct those with whom they work, and theorizes ways of broadening personal and social notions of possible, aesthetic, and acceptable embodiment for all persons, regardless of biological sex or sexual orientation. The author’s own struggles as a performance artist, educator, and person in the everyday, as well as the findings of empirical fieldwork with educators, performance arts practitioners, and high school students, are employed to illustrate and advocate the need for self reflexive scrutiny of existing and hidden inequities regarding the embodiment of gender within one’s own habitual perspectives, taste, and practices.

Gender, Development and Environmental Governance
Gender, Development and Environmental Governance

Author: Seema Arora-Jonsson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0415890373

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This book questions the conventional belief that development brings about greater gender equality and better environmental management. Based on participatory research and in-depth fieldwork, Arora-Jonsson studies struggles for local forest management, the making of women's groups within them and how the women's groups became a threat to mainstream institutions. Engaging seriously with academic debates on gender, environment and development, this volume contributes to a much-needed dialogue among these fields.

Gender, Nutrition, and the Human Right to Adequate Food
Gender, Nutrition, and the Human Right to Adequate Food

Author: Anne C. Bellows

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-12-07

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 1134738668

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This book introduces the human right to adequate food and nutrition as evolving concept and identifies two structural "disconnects" fueling food insecurity for a billion people, and disproportionally affecting women, children, and rural food producers: the separation of women’s rights from their right to adequate food and nutrition, and the fragmented attention to food as commodity and the medicalization of nutritional health. Three conditions arising from these disconnects are discussed: structural violence and discrimination frustrating the realization of women’s human rights, as well as their private and public contributions to food and nutrition security for all; many women’s experience of their and their children’s simultaneously independent and intertwined subjectivities during pregnancy and breastfeeding being poorly understood in human rights law and abused by poorly-regulated food and nutrition industry marketing practices; and the neoliberal economic system’s interference both with the autonomy and self-determination of women and their communities and with the strengthening of sustainable diets based on democratically governed local food systems. The book calls for a social movement-led reconceptualization of the right to adequate food toward incorporating gender, women’s rights, and nutrition, based on the food sovereignty framework.

Street Sex Workers' Discourse
Street Sex Workers' Discourse

Author: Jill McCracken

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-17

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1135944989

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Incorporating the voices and insights of street sex workers through personal interviews, this monograph argues that the material conditions of many street workers — the physical environments they live in and their effects on the workers’ bodies, identities, and spirits — are represented, reproduced, and entrenched in the language surrounding their work. As an ethnographic case study of a local system that can be extrapolated to other subcultures and the construction of identities, this book disrupts some of the more prevalent academic and lay understandings about street prostitution by providing a thorough analysis of the material conditions surrounding street work and their connection to discourse. McCracken offers an explanation of how constructions can be made differently in order to achieve representations that are generated by the marginalized populations themselves, while placing responsibility for this marginalization on the society in which these people live.