Marriage, Honor, Agency, and Trials by Ordeal: Women's Gender Roles in Candimangal

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-348
Author(s):  
DAVID L. CURLEY

This essay discusses women's gender roles as they were imagined and debated in a Bengali text written towards the end of the sixteenth century. Efforts to reexamine precolonial gender roles and debates about them are important for three reasons. First, that large body of research on gender which begins with the colonial period often has obscured elements of continuity between colonial and precolonial discourse on gender in South Asia, and often exaggerates or misstates both the degree of consensus about gender in the precolonial period, and the nature of change in the colonial period.

Author(s):  
Matthew D. O'Hara

This chapter discusses the conceptual and practical tools of Catholicism that many colonial subjects used to shape their futures. Christianity came with a host of ideas and practices that influenced one's relationship to the future, even the future of eternity in the form of salvation or damnation. Introduced through European missionaries in the sixteenth century, such concepts as free will and sin demanded new ways not only of thinking about religion and spirituality but also of living and relating to time. The chapter draws on a rich body of scholarship related to these themes but also delves into a unique set of primary sources, especially the intriguing genre of confession manuals. When examined over the arc of the colonial period, these sources reveal an evolving sense of individual futuremaking through the tools of Catholicism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Judith Irene Nagasha ◽  
Lawrence Mugisha ◽  
Elizabeth Kaase-Bwanga ◽  
Howard Onyuth ◽  
Michael Ocaido

Background: Climate change has been increasingly recognized as a global crisis with effects on gender roles. Recently, communities surrounding Lake Mburo national park, Uganda have been experiencing frequent severe droughts. It was against this background that  the study was designed to understand the effect of climate change on gender roles. Methods: This cross sectional study reviewed the effect of climate change on men and women’s gender roles using a pragmatic research paradigm based on a thematic review model using participatory methods and a structured questionnaire. Results: The study found that men and women’s gender roles were altered during extreme dryness. Men played their roles sequentially focusing on one single productive role, while women played their roles simultaneously, balancing the demands of each role with their limited available time. Effect of climate change affected productive roles more in Kiruhura district than Isingiro district. There was migration of both men and women in search of water and pasture for livestock in Kiruhura district which distorted gender roles of women. Consequently, women and girl children had a heavier load and were the most people affected by climate change effects in these districts. Conclusion: Gender roles of communities surrounding Lake Mburo National Park were affected and altered by the effects of climate change. Therefore, institutions offering climate services to local communities should consider gender in decision making, access to resources, information and knowledge during participation in climate change mitigation and adaptation.


Author(s):  
Mediha Sarı ◽  
Buket Turhan Türkkan ◽  
Ece Yolcu

Engaging in business life actively with industrialization, modernism movements and making a significant improvement in getting higher education degrees, the women’s getting postgraduate degrees –especially seen as a very challenging and demanding pathway by many people- has various effects on their social lives. The aim of this study was to analyze the interaction between doctoral process and women’s gender roles in daily life. The design of the study was qualitative interview-based and to collect the data semi-structured interviews were conducted. Participants were chosen among the volunteer women doctoral students in Cukurova University. The data collected was analyzed with content analysis. The findings revealed there are many advantages and disadvantages reflected on the women doctoral students’ lives through their doctorate regarding gender roles and they had a lot of difficulties through this process. They put forward recommendations related to various points such as providing equality of women and men and having support mechanisms in order to overcome these inequality related problems. Although they got both support and criticism regarding doing doctorate, women doctoral students have many reasons for doing doctorate which engage them into a devoted endeavor in a sense to get higher education and join more actively in business life.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026272802110348
Author(s):  
Dickens Leonard

Responding to the history of Dalit invisibility in print public sphere, this article explores one of the earliest Dalit articulations in print in South Asia during the colonial period. Extending studies on anti-caste thought by foregrounding the Tamil cosmopolis, this conceptualises how the most oppressed by caste engaged with print in the early twentieth century, through studying the works on and of Pandit Iyothee Thass and his movement. The article proposes that these experiments with print opened the chance of a political to emerge, which was otherwise foreclosed, towards wording a caste-less community at this earlier time in Indian history.


Author(s):  
Flavio Versiani

The chapter deals with characteristics of the Brazilian colonial period (from 1500 to independence from Portugal in 1822) that have exercised a significant influence on later developments. Three aspects of the institutional framework of Portuguese colonization are emphasized: the relations between the colonial government and the private sector; the pattern of access to land by colonists; and the widespread use of slave labor. It is argued that colonial policies were detrimental to private initiative, hampering access to productivity gains from industrialization in the eighteenth century. Distribution of land, in large tracts, to privileged individuals was instrumental in establishing a pattern of inequality in wealth, power, and political influence; the landless majority helped to bring about an elastic supply of labor in later periods. Slavery, which dominated the labor market from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, was an element of the inequality in income distribution that persists to the present.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (Supplement_4) ◽  
Author(s):  
M Boeckmann ◽  
M Noor ◽  
R Zahid ◽  
F Firoze ◽  
P Shresthra ◽  
...  

Abstract Background In South Asia, dual epidemics of smoking and tuberculosis (TB) have contributed to a high burden of lung disease. To address these health risks, the TB & Tobacco study uses the TB diagnosis as a teachable moment and implements a behaviour support counselling intervention, conducted by TB health workers, for patients in Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan. In this region, smoking tobacco is perceived as problematic for women, and being confronted with questions on smoking from a health professional may be uncomfortable for men and women. Anticipating these challenges, we incorporated gender sensitivity into training of health workers. Methods During implementation of the cessation support in routine TB care, a process evaluation assessed interactions between participants and the intervention through interviews with health workers and patients with TB participating in the cessation program. This presentation focusses on a retrospective self-reflection on how we conceptualized gender roles based on prior research, and how research findings partially challenged these assumptions. Findings While parts of our interview findings point towards smoking as a stigmatized practice for women and some men in South Asia as expected, several male and female respondents across socio-economic and geographical spheres contradicted this assumption. We discovered that health workers’ self-efficacy and perceived smoking stigma among health workers influenced whether they discussed smoking with women or minors. Many patients, on the other hand, told us that they were interested in receiving help to cure their TB and were willing to talk to about smoking with their health workers and their family members. Conclusions Patients in this study were more open to talking about smoking than anticipated. When including gender sensitivity into the standard training for health workers, we should be careful not to increase doubts in health workers about addressing smoking with women.


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Ryan

Hybrid literature has flourished in the Russian diaspora in the last decade and much of it is semi-autobiographical, concerned with the reconfiguration of identity in emigration. It dwells productively on the translation of the self and (more broadly) on the relationship between center and margin in the post-Soviet, transnational world. Gender roles are subject to contestation, as writers interrogate and reconsider expectations inherited from traditional Russian culture. This article situates Russian hybrid literature vis-à-vis Western feminism, taking into account Russian women’s particular experience of feminism. Four female writers of contemporary Russian-American literature – Lara Vapnyar, Sana Krasikov, Anya Ulinich, and Irina Reyn – inscribe failures of domesticity into their prose. Their female characters who cannot or do not cook or clean problematize woman’s role as nurturer. Home (geographic or imaginary) carries a semantic load of limitation and restriction, so failure as a homemaker may be paradoxically liberating. For female characters working in the West to support their families in Russia, domesticity is sometimes even more darkly cast as servitude. Rejection of traditional Russian definitions of women’s gender roles may signal successful renogotiation of identity in the diaspora. Although these writers may express nostalgia for the Russian culture of their early childhood, their critique of the tyranny of home is a powerful narrative gesture. Failures of domesticity represent successful steps in the redefinition of the self and they support these writers’ claim to transnational status.


2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 182-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Arber ◽  
Jenny Hislop ◽  
Marcos Bote ◽  
Robert Meadows

Women in mid and later life report particularly poor quality sleep. This article suggests a sociologically-informed quantitative approach to teasing out the impact of women's roles and relationships on their sleep, while also taking into account women's socio-economic characteristics and health status. This was accomplished through analysis of the UK Women's Sleep Survey 2003, based on self-completion questionnaires from a national sample of 1445 women aged over 40. The article assesses the ways in which three central aspects of women's gender roles: the night-time behaviours of their partners, night-time behaviours of their children, and night-time worries – impact on women's sleep, while also considering how disadvantaged socio-economic circumstances and poor health may compromise women's sleep. Using bivariate analysis followed by hierarchical multiple regression models, we examine the relative importance of different aspects of women's gender roles. The key factors implicated in the poor sleep quality of midlife and older women are their partner's snoring, night-time worries and concerns, poor health status (especially experiencing pain at night), disadvantaged socio-economic status (especially having lower educational qualifications) and for women with children, their children coming home late at night.


2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-219
Author(s):  
Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury

The partition of the Indian subcontinent forced millions of people to flee to the other side of the borders, freshly demarcated by the British colonial rulers just on the eve of their departure from South Asia. Almost a decade-long migration of people could not, however, settle the boundaries and lives of the people once and for all. The postcolonial rulers retained many of the draconian laws of the late colonial period, like the Foreigners’ Act in India, and laced them with new laws and regulations, thus leading to greater dispossession of people of homes, generating widespread situations of un-freedom, and creating countless refugees and stateless persons, mostly forced to survive in sites of precarious life, without any right to have rights. The concern of this contribution is this politics of dispossession in postcolonial South Asia and its relation with citizenship laws of the region.


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