scholarly journals Metropolitan Feminisms of Middle-Class India: Multiple Sites, Conflicted Voices

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-140
Author(s):  
Sharada Nair

Across Indian metropolises, large demonstrations protesting violence against women have become very frequent, marking the present as a significant moment for feminism. I use the term feminism metonymically, to signify the force activated in the name of justice, when women foreground their gender identity. This clarification is prompted by the resistance to these terms seen as Western, culturally different from the milieu here constituted by an active meld of economic and socio-political features. However, in the immense heterogeneity of the cities, markers such as region, caste, religion, etc, get marginalized, though definitely not erased. Impediments to any neat, progressive reading of the public assertions are many. Gender gets displaced when other contexts, which have produced us as women through differentiations, come into play unexpectedly. Breaking the hegemony of cultural imaginaries remains a work in process.

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.


Author(s):  
Lee Iskander

People who are nonbinary—one of many kinds of trans identity that do not fit neatly within a man/woman binary—face particular challenges when seeking employment in P–12 schools, which have historically been places where rigid gender norms are strictly enforced. This paper draws on semistructured interviews conducted in 2018 to explore how 16 nonbinary educators navigated the process of finding, securing, and keeping jobs in Canadian and American schools. I found that most participants were concerned about securing a job or potentially losing their job or their safety at work because others might be inhospitable to their gender identity or expression. At the same time, participants had strategies to ensure that they found and kept jobs they were comfortable with, such as investigating a school’s support for queer and trans people, forging positive relationships with administrators and staff, and presenting their gender in particular ways during the hiring process. This study illustrates the limitations of individualistic, tokenizing forms of trans inclusion and reveals the continued prevalence of gender normativity in schools, despite a rapidly shifting gender landscape. While trans inclusion, at least on the surface, may be a selling point for some schools, trans people continue to face barriers when the underlying structures that privilege White, middle-class, cisgender, and heteronormative gender expression remain intact. I argue that, if trans people are to be fully supported in the education workplace, an intersectional and broadly transformative approach to gender justice is necessary.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Carroll

Who counts as a gay father? The answer to this question reaches beyond demographics, encompassing histories of family inequality, LGBTQ identity, and social movements. Presentations of gay fathers in the media and scholarship are often skewed toward white, middle-class, coupled men who became parents via adoption or surrogacy. Yet the demographic majority of gay parents continue to have children in heterosexual unions. My dissertation research uses ethnographic and interview data to argue that contemporary narratives of gay fatherhood have prematurely dismissed gay parents who have children in heterosexual unions. The choice to exclude gay fathers via heterosexual unions can be attributed to emerging narratives of LGBTQ identity and political strategies of the marriage equality movement. The consequences of gay fathers’ disproportionate visibility have led to a stratified system of access to gay parenting resources. By identifying the mechanisms that undermine gay fathers’ diversity in the public imagination and in gay parenting community settings, my dissertation amplifies the voices of marginalized gay fathers and offers an intersectional approach to the study of LGBTQ families through a social movements framework.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-43
Author(s):  
Dendy Kurniawan ◽  
Dwi Setiawan

Perum Perumnas is a State-Owned Enterprise (BUMN) in the form of a Public Company (Perum). Perum Perumnas has 7 regional business areas and 1 rusunawa regional area. Perum Perumnas Regional V which is located at Jl. Wilis No. 23 Semarang is engaged in providing housing and settlements for the middle class community. In its business activities, Perumnas sells houses to the public with cash payment methods or through Home Ownership Credit (KPR). The Perumnas Branch can serve every consumer who comes to Perumnas Branch to seek information about the amount of monthly installment payments if the consumer applies the mortgage system with the down payment that the consumer has and the shortfall that must be paid. In carrying out this activity, the Perumnas Branch still uses the Microsoft Excel application.The problem that often arises at this time is the calculation of KPR between Perumnas Semarang Branch I and Perumnas Semarang Branch II which is quite different, making it less effective for companies. Based on this description, the author tries to provide a solution that is able to overcome these problems by designing a website-based mortgage calculation simulation system at Perum Perumnas Regional V with the aim of making it easier for consumers and marketing or sales parties to find information about mortgage calculations.Making this simulation system, the author uses the HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and MySQL programming languages ​​as the database. In its manufacture, this application is adapted to the needs of Perumnas in general.The conclusion that can be drawn is the dissimilarity or difference in filling out the mortgage calculation where the Semarang Branch I and Semarang Branch II when the marketing staff does the mortgage calculation even though they use the same bank Suggestions that can be put forward is to create a mortgage calculation simulation system that can make it easier for consumers to get information about mortgage calculations quickly, efficiently and accurately and can be accessed anywhere and anytime.


Worldview ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 38-41
Author(s):  
Kai Bird ◽  
Sue Goldmark

The American electorate has acquired an ingrained prejudice against foreign aid. The public suspects that foreign aid is something the government takes from the poor in a rich country and gives to the wealthy in a poor country. This suspicion— like many of America's populist wisdoms—is the tragic truth in one of the world's poorest nations, Bangladesh.Only a pittance of international food aid to Bangladesh feeds the starving or destitute. Even in this bumper crop year an estimated 368,000 babies and young children will die due to malnutrition or related diseases. Food aid generally does not reach the poor; 90 per cent of the 1.6 million tons of foreign food aid shipped to Bangladesh this year was used to subsidize a ration system for the middle class.


2002 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan McKee

This paper argues that much writing about media and citizenship tends to rely on a set of realist or structuralist assumptions about what constitutes a state, a citizen and politics. Because of these assumptions, other forms of social organisation that could reasonably be described as nations, and other forms of social engagement that could be called citizenship are excluded from consideration. One effect of this blindness is that certain identities, and the cultural formations associated with them, continue to be overvalued as more real and important than others. Areas of culture that are traditionally while, masculine, middle-class and heterosexual remain central in debates, while the political processes of citizens of, for example, a Queer nation, continue to be either ignored or devalued as being somehow trivial, unimportant or less real. The paper demonstrates that this need not be the case — that the language of nation and citizenship can reasonably be expanded to include these other forms of social organisation, and that when such a conceptual move is made, we can find ways of describing contemporary culture that attempt to understand the public-sphere functions of the media without falling back into traditional prejudices against feminised, Queer, working class or non-white forms of culture.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-32
Author(s):  
Amit Kumar Gupta

Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar is one of the greatest figures of Bengal Renaissance, celebrated for his learning, promotion of education and pursuit of social reform. A number of anecdotes about him circulated among the middle class (Bhadralok) as well as the poorer sections of people. The article examines, through a selection of such anecdotes, what kinds of stories about Vidyasagar particularly caught the public eye, without delving into the accuracy of the specific pieces of public memory. What is significant here is that his personality, rather than his causes, forms the prominent theme in these anecdotes.


2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 258-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Duhaime

While certain aspects of women's rights had been addressed in earlier OAS instruments and more generally in the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man and in the American Convention on Human Rights, many consider that the issue of women's rights was first incorporated in the normative corpus of the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) with the 1994 adoption of the Belém do Pará Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence Against Women. This treaty obliges states to prevent, punish, and eradicate violence against women, taking special account of vulnerabilities due to race, ethnic background, migrant status, age, pregnancy, socioeconomic situation, etc. It defines the concept of violence against women and forces states to ensure that women live free of violence in the public and private sphere. It also grants the Commission and the Court the ability to process individual complaints regarding alleged violations of the treaty. Since 1994, the Commission has also established a Rapporteurship on the rights of women, which assists the IACHR in its thematic or country reports and visits, as well as in the processing of women's rights–related petitions. In recent years, the jurisprudence of the Commission and the Court has addressed several fundamental issues related to women's rights, in particular regarding violence against women, women's right to equality, and reproductive health.


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