Older Women and Leisure in Singapore

1997 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 649-672 ◽  
Author(s):  
PEGGY TEO

The leisure of older women is subject to prejudices of both ageism and sexism. Gender roles and identities lock women into leisure which is experienced mostly within the confines of the home. The lack of material resources also limits their ability to undertake a wider range, as well as a greater number, of leisure activities within the public sphere outside the home. These conditions become emphasised in the more mature years of a woman's life, such that leisure expectations that are assumed for the Third Age seldom materialise. In the study of older women in Singapore, it was found that many engaged in home-bound activities and where these extended into public spaces, the activities conformed to gender and age expectations and according to material resources. The paper argues that leisure, especially for older women, must be contextualised; it requires an understanding of how social ideologies construct gender and age identities and roles, and therefore shape the leisure outcomes and spaces in which they are carried out.

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Lipin Ram

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 5-37
Author(s):  
Ana Iriarte Díez

Speakers’ individual and collective identities are socially constructed through their linguistic and social behavior, and inevitably shaped by the socio-political and cultural situation of a region and its observers. It stands to reason, therefore, that significant changes in a community’s linguistic practices are often catalyzed by noteworthy socio-political developments within the same community. In this light, the present study aims to explore recent linguistic developments regarding speakers’ use of Arabic and their perception of its status in Lebanon in the midst of a time of profound social and political change: The October Revolution. The present study opens with an introduction that reviews Lebanon’s linguistic panorama before October 17th, 2019, and provides a brief synopsis of the succession of events now widely known as ‘The October Revolution’. The second section explains the study’s theoretical approach and the nature of the data. The third and last section focuses on how the events of the October Revolution have, at least temporarily, affected the use and status of Arabic in Lebanon and reshaped this language’s place in the public sphere.


2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olufunke Adeboye

AbstractOver the past two decades Nigeria has become a hotbed of Pentecostal activity. It is the view of this study that Pentecostal visibility in Nigeria has been enhanced not just by Pentecostals’ aggressive utilization of media technology for proselytization as claimed by previous scholars, but also by their appropriation of public spaces for worship. This study not only focuses on the church in the cinema hall, but also on churches in nightclubs, hotels, and other such places previously demonized as ‘abode[s] of sin’ by classical Pentecostals. This paper argues that users’ perception of public spaces having rigid meanings and unchanging usage was responsible for much of the tensions experienced. It would be more useful for academic analysts and various ‘publics’ to construe such spaces as dynamic sites, at once reflecting mutations in the public sphere, responsive to local and global socio-economic processes, and amenable to periodic reinventions and negotiations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026732312110614
Author(s):  
Slavko Splichal

The article discusses the reasons and conditions for the rise and fall of the popularity of the public sphere concept in scholarly discourse in four parts. The first part examines the peculiar circumstances of the emergence of the concept of the public sphere, and its rapid and widespread adoption in the social sciences. The second part discusses the complexity of the concept “Öffentlichkeit” and its English proxy “the public sphere,” and the contemporary critique of its ideological predispositions. The third part focuses on the liberalization and (operational) banalization of the concept. The final part suggests ways in which social scientists could respond critically to the challenges outlined earlier and reintegrate publicness, the public, and the public sphere into the analysis.


2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-355
Author(s):  
Elke Weesjes

Abstract This article explores communists’ attitudes towards gender roles and sexuality in Britain and the Netherlands during the Cold War (ca. 1948‐1970). It looks at the changing roles of women in the communist movement in the public sphere, as well as the changes in practices of gender relations in the communist home—that is, the private sphere. This article, which is based on interviews with Dutch and British individuals raised in communist families, argues that communist children who were taught progressive theories while simultaneously witnessing traditional practices in the home were spurred to feminist thinking and so joined the movement in its early stages. In light of these findings, this article makes the case for the inclusion of communists in the vanguard of feminism in Britain and the Netherlands.


1996 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 601-619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn A Stacheli

Interpretations of women's activism depend on the ways in which analysts conceptualize the relations between privacy, publicity, and politics, in this paper the relationship between women's standing in the public sphere and their activism is problematized. Women's activism is shaped by strategic, and sometimes opportunistic, choices to locate their activism either in public or in private spaces. These choices point to the importance of reconceptualizing publicity and privacy in ways that separate the content of actions from the spaces in which action is taken. Such a distinction creates the possibility of taking private actions into public spaces and of taking public actions in private spaces. When the content of action is separated from the spaces of action, women's activism is evaluated in terms of the efficacy of various actions in either public or private spaces, rather than in terms of women's presumed lack of access to the public sphere.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102098322
Author(s):  
Patrick O’Mahony

The challenge of realizing the democratic power of publics through public sphere remains acute but not hopeless. While claiming that Habermas communicative social theory offers a way forward in spite of a productive but constraining turn towards a modified social liberal frame, nonetheless three limitations of the theory are identified. The first bears on the insufficiency of the sociological evolutionist description of society relevant to the public sphere drawn from classical sociological accounts of differentiation and integration. The second identifies learning theoretical limitations of the normative interactionist, proceduralist account of democracy and democratization potentials. And the third observes on the disconnection between the theory of communicative reasoning from, on the one hand, the critique of pathologies of reasoning, and, on the other, from its implications for lifeworld rationalization. These identified limitations are intended to provide new impetus to radically rethink the public sphere as intrinsic to solving contemporary problems of democracy that Habermas’s more recent account of deliberative theory, with the public sphere merely supplementary, cannot fully do. Yet, with Habermas, this should be on the basis of advancing the communication theory of democracy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 161
Author(s):  
Yuliatin Yuliatin

Kajian ini hendak melihat fenomena ajaran Salafi tentang kesetaraan gender. Sebagaimana diketahui, secara umum pemahaman ajaran Salafi cenderung memandang peran perempuan secara terbatas, baik di ruang domestik dan ruang publik. Fenomena tersebut mengakar kuat hingga dipraktekkan dalam basis pendidikan pesantren Salafiyyah. Namun demikian, terjadi pergeseran paham di kalangan elit pesantren Salafiyyah di Jambi, di mana, mereka mulai memberikan ruang kepada perempuan untuk berinteraksi di ruang publik. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif, dengan pengumpulan data melalui observasi, wawancara dan dokumentasi. Fokus penelitian dilaksanakan di dua Pesantren Salafi, al Baqiyatush Shalihat di Kabupaten Tanjung Jabung Barat dan Sa’adatuddarain di Seberang Kota Jambi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan: Pertama, secara umum kaum Salafi di kedua Pesantren memahami adanya kesetaraan antara laki-laki dan perempuan. Mereka mengartikulasikan ayat-ayat al- Qur’an lebih luwes. Namun, dalam persoalan kepemimpinan perempuan, mereka masih “membatasi” dengan berasumsi bahwa Qs. An-Nisa: 34 sudah final. Kedua, terjadi perubahan dalam memahami isu gender terutama di Pesantren al Baqiyatush-Shalihat, di mana, mereka lebih moderat dengan memberikan akses kepada perempuan untuk beraktivitas di ruang publik, seperti untuk sekolah, kuliah hingga bekerja. Hal yang berbeda ditemukan di Pesantren Sa’adatuddarain. Kalangan elit pesentren belum memberikan kebebasan kepada perempuan untuk melakukan aktivitas di luar pesantren. Ketiga, pemahaman elit pesantren Salafi tidak berpengaruh di lingkungan sekitar pesantren, terbukti para perempuan di sekitar pesantren tetap aktif berkegiatan di ruang publik sebagaimana pemahaman moderasi Islam selama ini.[This study wants to look at the phenomenon of Salafi teachings on gender equality. In general, the Salafis see the role of women is limited, both in the domestic and public sphere. This phenomenon is so deeply rooted that it is practiced on the basis of the Salafiyyah Islamic boarding school. However, there was a shift in understanding among the Salafiyyah pesantren elite in Jambi, in which they began to provide space for women to interact in the public sphere. This study uses a qualitative approach and collects the data through observation, interviews and documentation. The focus of the study was conducted at two Salafi Pesantren, al Baqiyatush Shalihat in Tanjung Jabung Barat District and Sa’adatuddarain in Seberang, Jambi City. The results show that : First, in general, the Salafis in both Pesantren understand the existence of equality between men and women. They articulate verses of the Qur’an more flexible. However, in the case of women’s leadership, they still “limit” women, by assuming that the interpretation of Qs. An-Nisa: 34 is final. Secondly, there has been a change in understanding gender issues especially in al Baqiyatush-Shalihat Islamic Boarding School, where they are more moderate by giving access to women to do activities in public spaces, such as for schools, going to university and working. Different thing is found in the Sa’adatuddarain Islamic Boarding School. The elite Pesantren have not given freedom to women to carry out activities outside the Pesantren. Third, the understanding of the Salafi Pesantren elite does not affect the environment around the Pesantren. Itt is a fact that the women around the Pesantren remain active in public spaces as it is found in moderate Islam.]


Author(s):  
Yulia Rohmawati ◽  
Moses Glorino Rumambo Pandin

The issue of being pro-gender is still a controversial topic to be debated in Indonesian society. However, in the 21st Century, many women have been able to break through barriers and participate in the public sphere. It is a form of self-existence as proposed by Simone de Beauvoir on existentialist feminism. Based on these problems, this study aims to find out and answer questions about how Indonesian women exist in the public sphere in the 21st Century and find out how Indonesian women exist in the public sphere through Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminism paradigm. The research method used is descriptive-qualitative through a literature review of 23 journal articles, websites, and data reports with a range of 2019-2021. This study found that based on Simone de Beauvoir's feminist paradigm, Indonesian women in the 21st Century are no longer a figure other than complete. Furthermore, the data collected by the researcher shows that several gender indicators have shown that Indonesian women have been able to occupy public spaces in various aspects. Based on these results, it is hoped that it can provide information about Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminism thought and its relevance to the existence of Indonesian women in the public sphere in the 21st Century. However, this research has limitations, those are only about women in Indonesia, and the paradigm of feminism is limited to Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 459-492
Author(s):  
Umi Chaidaroh

Many women in modern times take part in public spaces. Moreover, women are also involved with Islamic movements which are often associated as fundamentalist movements such as Hizbut Tahrir (HT). In Indonesia, HT has a wing of women’s organization called the Muslimah Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (MHTI). Women’s activists play pivotal role in the public space to help HT achieve its goals. Fundamentalist women who work in the public sphere seem to contradict with the growing assumption asserting that Islamic fundamentalist movements are often associated with the magnitude of oppression against women. It has been, however, seems to be a paradox. Considering the aforement-ioned argument, it is important to examine the thoughts concerning women’s jurisprudence of HT. Using compara-tive approach this study focuses on written literature as the main source. The results of the study prove that the thought concerning women’s jurisprudence of HT tends to be rigid. Interestingly, however, the study also finds that within particular cases the jurisprudence shows its flexibility, but it is even can be called liberal.


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