The intersection of nation and gender in the Linguistic Landscape of Ireland’s Eighth Amendment referendum campaign

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Strange

Abstract In May 2018, voters in the Republic of Ireland passed a referendum proposal to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, lifting the Irish state’s near-total ban on abortion. Scholars have argued that Ireland’s abortion ban has historically played a key role in the construction of Irish national identity along Catholic, traditional, and heteronormative lines, meaning the lead-up to the vote allowed for key insights into the discursive construction of national identity and gender in Ireland. Drawing on theoretical discussions in both the nationalism and Linguistic Landscape (LL) literature and adopting a qualitative, multimodal approach to analyse the referendum campaign’s LL, I argue that there was a dominant understanding of the relationship between women and Irish national identity, predicated on a positive stance towards Irish identity, while any dissenting voices which questioned whether advancing gender equality was compatible with nationalist ideology were confined to the margins of the debate.

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Marianna Charitonidou

The article examines an ensemble of gender and migrant roles in post-war Neorealist and New Migrant Italian films. Its main objective is to analyze gender and placemaking practices in an ensemble of films, addressing these practices on a symbolic level. The main argument of the article is that the way gender and migrant roles were conceived in the Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema was based on the intention to challenge certain stereotypes characterizing the understanding of national identity and ‘otherness’. The article presents how the roles of borgatari and women function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain for problematizing the relationship between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Special attention is paid to how migrants are related to the reconceptualization of Italy’s national narrations. The Neorealist model is understood here as a precursor of the narrative strategies that one encounters in numerous films belonging to the New Migrant cinema in Italy. The article also explores how certain aspects of more contemporary studies of migrant cinema in Italy could illuminate our understanding of Neorealist cinema and its relation to national narratives. To connect gender representation and migrant roles in Italian cinema, the article focuses on the analysis of the status of certain roles of women, paying particular attention to Anna Magnagi’s roles.


1998 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronit Lentin

This paper argues that ‘Irishness’ has not been sufficiently problematised in relation to gender and ethnicity in discussions of Irish national identity, nor has the term ‘Irish women’ been ethnically problematised. Sociological and feminist analyses of the access by women to citizenship of the Republic of Ireland have been similarly unproblematised. This paper interrogates some discourses of Irish national identity, including the 1937 Constitution, in which difference is constructed in religious, not ethnic terms, and in which women are constructed as ‘naturally’ domestic. Ireland's bourgeois nationalism privileged property owning and denigrated nomadism, thus excluding Irish Travellers from definitions of ‘Irishness’. The paper then seeks to problematise T.H. Marshall's definition of citizenship as ‘membership in a community’ from a gender and ethnicity viewpoint and argues that sociological and feminist studies of the gendered nature of citizenship in Ireland do not address access to citizenship by Traveller and other racialized women which this paper examines in brief. It does so in the context of the intersection between racism and nationalism, and argues that the racism implied in the narrow definition of ‘Irishness’ is a central factor in the limited access by minority Irish women to aspects of citizenship. It also argues that racism not only interfaces with other forms of exclusion such as class and gender, but also broadens our understanding of the very nature of Irish national identity.


Author(s):  
Safak Oz Aktepe

In this chapter, the author aims to present, through a review of literature, that the gender equality assumption of the human resource management (HRM) approach is not taken for granted. It seems there exist two sides of the same coin, one representing the HRM approach and the other representing the gendered approach to HRM practices. This chapter reviews HRM practices in work organizations as the potential facilitator of gender inequalities in organizations. In addition, the contentious function of HRM practices in maintaining gender inequalities within work organizations is reviewed. In spite of knowing the implication of HRM practices on being a gender-diverse organization, there remain few studies on the relationship between HRM practices and gender inequality in work organizations. Such research will add a different perspective to HRM practices and contribute to the awareness related to the gendered nature of organizations and their organizational practices.


Author(s):  
Mark Tushnet

This article examines the evolution of the field of comparative constitutional law and its relationship to politics and international rights; constitutionalism; constitutional foundings and transformations; constitutional structures; structures of judicial review; generic constitutional law; and national identity. Innumerable comparative studies address the ways in which different constitutions and constitutional systems deal with specific topics, such as privacy, free expression, and gender equality. However valuable such studies have been in bringing information about other constitutional systems to the attention of scholars versed in their own systems, their analytic payoff is sometimes questionable. Scholarship in comparative constitutional law is perhaps too often insufficiently sensitive to national differences that generate differences in domestic constitutional law. Or, put another way, that scholarship may too often rest on an implicit but insufficiently defended preference for the universalist approach to comparative legal study over the particularist one.


Author(s):  
Mark Tushnet

This article examines the evolution of the field of comparative constitutional law and its relationship to politics and international rights; constitutionalism; constitutional foundings and transformations; constitutional structures; structures of judicial review; generic constitutional law; and national identity. Innumerable comparative studies address the ways in which different constitutions and constitutional systems deal with specific topics, such as privacy, free expression, and gender equality. However valuable such studies have been in bringing information about other constitutional systems to the attention of scholars versed in their own systems, their analytic payoff is sometimes questionable. Scholarship in comparative constitutional law is perhaps too often insufficiently sensitive to national differences that generate differences in domestic constitutional law. Or, put another way, that scholarship may too often rest on an implicit but insufficiently defended preference for the universalist approach to comparative legal study over the particularist one.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Lucie Novotna

The aim of this article is to look critically at the implications of gender equality concepts for individual freedom as conceptualised by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. The scientific literature addressing the problem of freedom and gender equality with regard to public policy is considerably fragmented. Based on contextual literature, this article will offer four concepts of freedom that serve as analytical categories. I will analyse work/family reconciliation policy tools as introduced at the level of the European Union and reconnect them to three traditions of gender equality. The article reflects on historically embedded dichotomy between positive and negative freedom visible in gendered distinction between public and private. The main findings show that the relationship between freedom and equality is mediated by the selected policy tools suggesting that some policy tools expand freedom of all individuals while others indicate a possible limit for freedom.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-98
Author(s):  
Simina Pîrvu

In a series of lectures in 1994, Nadine Gordimer remarks the different status of Africa which is no longer at the edge of the empire, but on the contrary, in the center of it. In this respect, post-apartheid Africa has rebuilt its national identity on the background of global events that write universal history, offering citizens the chance to escape their country's constraints and bring important key elements in the globalization process. Thus, replacing apartheid themes in a new country is an extreme task by the applicant. Some of the favourite subjects of the "old guard" are the following: the importance of multiculturalism in post-apartheid South Africa, the writer's status, vulgarisation of violence due to mass-media, reconciliation with a violent past and their economic and cultural implications, the fight against AIDS, sexual emancipation, globalization and loss of cultural and national identity, uprooting, migration and economic exile which replaced major pre-existing concerns about violence, racial and gender discrimination, the relationship between literature and politics, or the role of ethics in literature. The same situation can be applied to eastern countries. Even though they were not "postcolonial" in the classical sense of the term, applicable to the former British, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch colonies, the "post-communist transition" through which they passed included the disarmament of a certain political and economic "occupation". People had to adapt to the new order, to the new reality, which was a complex process, a difficult one, that implied, many times, exile. Therefore, the purpose of my argument is to present what consequences can occur at the psychological level because of the attempt of adaptation of the characters to the new social and political order, by imitation, postcolonial and post-communist context. And here comes the question: does imitation facilitate adaptation? Although the logical answer would be yes, we will notice, by discussing the two texts, exactly the opposite.


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