Womens Studies International Forum最新文献

This study focuses on links between religion, political polarization, and support for gender equality, empirically studying Turkey, Indonesia, Tunisia, and Malaysia. These four Muslim-majority electoral democracies include different degrees of polarization between secularists and Islamists, whereby Islamists vilify secularists' supposed Western ideals as gender equality. We explore whether regional polarization between Islamist and secularist sentiments impacts common peoples' gender equality attitudes and the link between their religious and political positions and their gender equality support. Applying multilevel analyses to World Values Survey data, we find that the more strongly and politically religious and more right-wing people tend to support gender equality less, while regional polarization does not significantly affect gender equality in general. However, polarization does fuel support for women's political leadership (not educational and economic equality) among men, which might echo the strategical deployment of female candidates in polarized regions. Clearly, gender equality's dimensions have their own dynamics.

This article explores “Asian values” and conflicts purported by normative pluralism in Asia from an anthropological approach. Instead of a zero-sum narrative of culture wars, this article proposes a narrative of social order through public reasoning that takes value plurality into account. This article contextualizes the concept of value in a specific social and cultural context as a query to the abstract, homogenizing nature of the concept itself. What happens when religious and state civil laws prescribe certain family values and behaviors, but the same values and behaviors are nonetheless culturally unjustified? This article is based on an anthropological analysis of Muslim women's perspectives in Banda Aceh. The study of inheritance law aims to provide a forum for evaluating legal engagements in a culture characterized by competing and contradictory values, such as in Aceh. The Acehnese hold legal pluralism: Adat, Shari'a, and state civil laws. Acehnese's choices of Adat, Shari'a, or civil laws are influenced by her social relationships and belongings. From an Acehnese standpoint, no single law has complete control over what is good and improper about inheritance. What is clear from the Aceh context is that the state is not the sole provider and protector of rights and justice. Aceh people use the state law and Shari'a law as a last resort when parties with no mutual interest have conflicting claims regarding inheritance. Further, the Acehnese promote public reasoning in which the plurality of laws are valued equally and one's coercion is consistent with one's respect for others.

Anger has been a part of the public debate in Spain, especially since the 8 M feminist mobilization. This article analyzes whether the mediatized rage surrounding the discursive dispute on Twitter between supporters of the so-called Ley trans (Trans Law) and those that oppose the proposed legislation can open up cracks in the affective injustice suffered by the trans collective in Spain. To this end, we will address the discursive debate generated from a sample of 7734 tweets published on the Twitter account of the Spanish feminist podcast Estirando el chicle. We will analyze the tweets following an analytical model of operationalization of the concept of anger competence (Chemaly, 2018) structured across three dimensions utilized successfully in previous studies (Author, 2023): (1) the construction of the subject that enunciates the anger, (2) that which the mediatization of the anger allows to emerge, linked to the conception of affective injustice, and (3) the effects of affects. Our analysis of the discursive dispute on Twitter shows diverse discursive positions which inhibits the visualization of a reparation of the systemic violence suffered by the feminist movement, and within it, by trans people.

The Rohingya crisis has disrupted lives and changed gender norms among female refugees in Nepal. In contrast to the encampment strategy adopted by Bangladesh, Nepal's open integration policy has allowed for better assimilation of Rohingyas into local communities, offering them informal work opportunities. The interaction with Nepal's unique social and religious landscape has transformed the refugees' attitudes toward gender. This study explores how these attitudes align with other displacement-related factors, including migration routes and access to various NGO support among 152 Rohingya refugees residing in Kapan, Nepal. Results indicate a trend toward gender norm progression, with marked support for improvement in women's economic roles. However, progress has not extended to education and financial autonomy, where traditional views still hold sway. While displacement-induced economic urgencies have prompted a functional acceptance of women's labor, entrenched cultural norms continue to govern their role in education and decision-making, suggesting that such acceptance is perhaps a situational adaptation more than a fundamental change.

Hegemonic femininity has previously been defined as a static entity describing the behaviour of some women as they oppress other women for the sake of reinforcing hegemonic masculinity. In return, those women are paid limited and marginal benefits, alongside heavy “taxes” (Hamilton et al., 2019), including entrenching the subordination of all women as a group to men. This article makes a number of arguments. First, the benefits, or, “premiums” paid to women are proportional to their value to hegemonic masculinity. Second, hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic femininity are linked not only by dominance but also by resistance. There is the possibility for women to maximise their premiums, meaning the interests of hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic femininity may not always align. Third, we need to consider both the delivery and receptiveness of hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic femininity, that is, how people perceive them by accepting, rejecting or falsifying the payment system. Through the example of Egypt's first lady, Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak, the article applies what I introduce as the “hegemony tax” approach to contend that there is a tax on the benefits of hegemonic femininity for both the woman and her male partner.

The COVID-19 outbreak has prompted the growing recognition and reevaluation of vulnerability theory as proposed by Fineman (2008), which emphasizes the central role of the state in protecting citizens from their ‘vulnerability’ by providing their access to ‘resilience’. It challenges the traditional construction of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ in liberal discourse, which has typically emphasized individual capabilities over community roles. To investigate the impact of this recognition on the construction of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ in liberal feminism discourse during COVID-19, discourse analysis was conducted among nine COVID-19-related briefings from the Fawcett Society website. Two main changes in liberal feminism discourse were revealed in this research. First, there has been a shift from a focus on self-resilience among women's groups to an acknowledgement of their weakened resilience in front of COVID-19. Second, liberal feminists delve into the passive characteristic of ‘vulnerability’ during COVID-19, recognizing the susceptibility of women's groups to their inner mental issues. The discourse constructed by liberal feminists during COVID-19, as evidenced by the collected briefings from the Fawcett Society website, also reveals the ‘hidden social inequality’ that existed in the long-standing undervaluation of socially reproductive workers, which has been exposed by the pandemic and necessary the need for increased social recognition of their role in maintaining daily social functions.

Abuse in childhood and adolescence has negative long-term consequences, intensified among young women in Arab society in Israel. The aim of the current study was to better understand the meaning that Arab young women ascribe to abuse experiences in childhood and adolescence and their long-term consequences from a gender, social, and cultural perspective, and how the abuse and its implications affect them as young Arab women. Semi-structured interviews with 20 Arab young women abused in childhood and adolescence revealed two main themes: 1) The meaning ascribed to violence from a social and gender perspective; 2) Emotional, behavioral, and academic consequences enhanced by the gender, social, and cultural supervision and control mechanisms. This study provides a better understanding of the meaning the young women ascribe to abuse and its consequences in the gender, cultural, social, patriarchal, and patrilineal contexts, and can assist policymakers in the development of culturally adapted intervention programs.

This paper examines the controversies surrounding the “niangpao” (effeminate men or “sissy boys”) in the context of the debates surrounding Asian values, Confucianism and family values. These debates are ostensibly about what constitutes correct Chinese male behaviour. But the vehemence with which they are expressed betray their inherent patriarchal bent. Traditional masculinist mindsets cannot be practiced so easily now, partly because gender roles are changing and Chinese women and young activists are more assertive, and they have large followings on social media. For example, the resurrection of Confucian ideals saw the return of emphasis placed on educational achievements. But whereas traditionally successful examination candidates (always men) were guaranteed good careers, both male and female graduates now feel short-changed. It is in this environment that the niangpao polemics are carried out. I argue that despite sanctions from authorities, much of public opinion continues to uphold notions of gender diversity and respect.

Constitutional resilience has been tested by various crises worldwide, and the COVID-19 pandemic constituted another litmus test for global constitutionalism. In Turkey, the pandemic came three years after a constitutional revision introduced hyper-presidentialism in 2017, which undermined the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances. This article looks at the period that begins with the official announcement of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and ends with the assessment of the general elections of May 2023 to document three years of hyper-presidentialist constitutionalism and the counter-responses to it proposed by the Turkish feminist movement and the constitutional institutions that still remain autonomous from the executive. By combining conventional constitutional methods with the critical feminist positionality approach, this article diagnosed the impact of the pandemic on authoritarian regime-building. Based on feminist constitutionalism, this scholar activist approach shed light on some overlooked aspects of the pandemic in Turkey, such as persistent déconstitutionalisation and its link with anti-gender politics, to reveal the living essence of authoritarian constitutionalism and the evolution of hyper-presidentialism in Turkey.