Womens Studies International Forum最新文献

Sexual violence against women is one of the serious social concerns that still persist across the world in its various forms and manifestations. This study talks about the portrayal of the gang-rape of a woman in Pakistani English Print media who was travelling on the Lahore-Sialkot Motorway when her car ran out of petrol where two armed men came along and raped her. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Transitivity analysis from Halliday's systemic functional linguistics is utilized to explore the language used by leading Pakistani English newspapers to report the incident. Moreover, the study examines how print media affects the opinion of the people towards the incidents of sexual violence against women in Pakistan. These discursive features of a language enable us to see deep into the thought-processes of the people of a society. The paper concludes that reporting on violence against women shapes and is shaped by the approach of the people towards women and the forms of violence against them.

Humanised midwifery care is a fundamental human right and need. This exploratory online survey presents a collective perception of meaningful standards of humanised midwifery care for excellent daily practice obtained from an international multi-actor group of maternity service users and providers. After performing a literature review, 137 key elements of humanised midwifery were extracted, listed, and rephrased into criteria. The criteria were distributed, and participants added 38 criteria. The perceived level of humanised midwifery performance was scored from 1 (low/substandard) to 10 (excellent). The 9–10 scores benchmarked humanised midwifery care excellence. 312 care professionals benchmarked 42 criteria, and 277 pregnant and postpartum women benchmarked 23 criteria showing a 30 % overlap. A total set of 50 criteria emerged, promoting humanised midwifery excellence. The benchmarking criteria suggest a shared conceptual thinking of person-centeredness and meaningfulness and provide a practical paradigm for the provision and receipt of humanised midwifery care.

This article examines the political rhetoric and policy pursuits of a right-wing nationalist party in Israel (‘Noam’), showcasing how opposition to gender and sexual diversity is centered within an exclusionary vision of Jewish purity. Discursive analysis of political materials show how Noam frame gender and sexual diversity as potent proof of moral decline and as contaminating forces, which can only be saved by righteous (heterosexual) saviors. From billboards and election manifestos to policy, Noam's vision of a ‘Jewish state’ is underpinned by an idea of ‘normality’ that is ethno-nationalist, heteronormative and patriarchal. Their attempts to construct threats to the ‘normal’ Jewish nuclear family help to gain broader public support and forge alliances with hegemonic political parties. Situating this particular Jewish-Israeli exclusionary logic of reproductive righteousness is part of a broader feminist study of emerging alliances within right-wing movements in an increasingly globalized identity politics of opposition to gender and sexual diversity.

Through a gender-sensitive lens, this study explores the psychic and subjective meanings that Ukrainian women living in Southern Italy for economic reasons attribute to their long-distance motherhood and migration experience. Ten Ukrainian women were interviewed in the pre-war period, before 2022, through a semi-structured interview following the principles of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Our findings show that long-distance motherhood and the challenges of migration led to a redefinition of the respondents' identity as women and mothers. The complex affective configuration that developed from separation lacks adequate elaboration, leaving a gap that calls for supportive psychological interventions. Understanding these experiences has become urgent given that the war is affecting both Ukrainian women living in Italy and those who are arriving due to the war.

Drawing on studies of gendered mediation and women's political representation, this study explores the implications of using gender quotas to facilitate women's political representation on their portrayal in the media. Focused on the coverage of Egyptian female members of parliament in the daily newspaper al-Masry al-Yawm, the study employs feminist content analysis to examine more than two thousand news articles across three parliamentary terms (2012–2022). The article reveals a heightened visibility that challenges patriarchal stereotypes and legitimizes women as political actors. However, this coverage exists within an authoritarian setting, where the media's compliance with government narratives subtly upholds the regime's image. This, in turn, may limit the empowering effect of such visibility, especially among regime critics, highlighting the complex role the media plays in mirroring and molding power relations and in the negotiation of gender perceptions.

This paper offers the term unreproductive citizenship to characterise the social positionality of LGBTQ people in Poland. Unreproductive citizenship is brought about by means of social sterilisation: while queer and trans people are ‘tolerated,’ they are not treated as reproductive subjects with a potential to participate in social reproduction. Drawing on Polish and international literature on queer families, reproductive politics, and forced sterilisation, as well as research including interviews, political speeches and auto-ethnography, I argue that the discursive and political framing of LGBTQ people as unreproductive subjects is eugenic. Leading political figures representing Poland's robust political right-wing, as well as the majority of Poles, have expressed fears that LGBTQ reproduction could somehow ‘contaminate’ future generations and therefore poses a threat to the nation's moral order. The social sterilisation of queer Polish people as ‘unreproductive citizens’ illustrates how the logics of reproductive righteousness operate in contemporary Poland.

This article explores how the academic field of gender and feminist studies in England represents itself, by drawing on a discourse analysis of online descriptions from websites of all gender and feminist studies degree programmes and departments in English universities, all but one of which are graduate degrees. Foregrounding the context of the neoliberal university, in which feminist and gender knowledge is simultaneously marginalised and mainstreamed, the article asks how representations of the field are shaped by the marketisation of higher education. This analysis reveals a disjuncture between two representative logics: while most feminist, gender studies and queer scholarship relies on anti-essentialist epistemologies and ontologies, the dominant logic of representation in contemporary universities understands difference as static and representable. This representability enables and is in turn facilitated by marketisation.

This paper explores the gendered dynamics and impacts of online and offline sexual harassment based on fieldwork among young people in Denmark. The paper argues that harm related to sexual harassment relies on the embodied duality of agency and vulnerability as the foundation for humans' sense of dignity. This argument is developed first by exploring how unwanted ‘dick pics’ confront girls with a gendered vulnerability that impacts girls' sense of dignity. Second the paper shows that boys' solicitation of girls' ‘nudes’ is related to a gendered vulnerability for both girls and boys. Finally, unwanted sexual attention that moves between the online and the offline arena is enabled by gendered values, norms and meanings related to heterosexuality.

International aid to protect women and girls against religiously sanctioned violence in predominantly Muslim countries is prone to politicization and opposition by conservative religious actors. In Sudan religious leaders had varied responses to an internationally funded campaign to criminalize female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in 2009. In the capital Khartoum, this campaign provoked politicization of aid and counter- mobilization by national conservative religious leaders, while in the eastern town of Gedarif local religious leaders supported criminalization. Based on fieldwork conducted from 2008 to 2018, the study suggests that the power based of religious leaders and their inclusion in, or exclusion from, anti- FGM/C efforts accounted for this differential response. Even when successful, the inclusion of religious leaders as “agents of change” strengthened their power and the role of religion in state and society to levels that may endanger the rights of women and girls.