scholarly journals Silencing the single woman: Negotiating the ‘failed’ feminine subject in contemporary UK society

Sexualities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 136346072110411
Author(s):  
Kate R Gilchrist

Despite a growth in single women in UK society over the past two decades, single femininity continues to be highly stigmatised. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of the heterosexual matrix and applying this to qualitative interview data with 25 single women, I argue that single femininity is produced as abject through processes of silencing which render the single female a ‘failed’ subject and reinscribe heteronormative coupled femininity. Yet while deeply painful, such ‘failures’ may also be productive, offering moments where the boundaries of heteronormative feminine subjectivity and hierarchies of intimate life are troubled and transformed. This article complicates understandings of stigma and resistance through a nuanced analysis of processes of abjectification and ambivalence.

2020 ◽  
pp. 152747642096987
Author(s):  
Kate R. Gilchrist

As the number of single women has grown within Anglo-American society, there has been a proliferation of discourses around single women within popular culture. At the same time, there has been a resurgence in female-centered media representations of detectives. This article asks what cultural work the convergence of the single woman with the unconventional figure of the detective performs, and what this means for contemporary feminine subjectivities, exploring how she is constructed in three primetime TV crime dramas: The Bridge, The Good Wife and Fargo. I argue that while the single female detective foregrounds discourses of professionalism, rationality, and sexual autonomy, she simultaneously reinscribes patriarchal discourses of heteronormative coupledom and normative femininity through her social dysfunction, vulnerability and deviance, rendering the single woman a threat to femininity. Yet, at times, her liminal positioning allows her to occupy a more transgressive feminine subjectivity and subversively trouble the gender binary.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 713-737
Author(s):  
Charmaine Carvalho

Although chick lit, epitomized by novels such as Bridget Jones’s Diary, has been analyzed by feminist critics as an example of postfeminist culture, the transnational spread of the genre has resulted in transformations that invite fresh consideration. In the Indian context, chick lit emerged in the aftermath of economic liberalization, contributing to the configuration of a new feminine subjectivity—“the single woman in the city.” This article argues that the discourse of singleness in Indian chick lit is deployed not so much to solve the problem of singleness through marriage but to resolve the tension between the demands of “Indian tradition” on middle-class young women and their desire for a selfhood inflected by neoliberal discourses of autonomy. This dichotomy is symbolized in the novels in the tension between mothers and daughters and plays out primarily across the domains of choice of spouse, food, and dress. While tradition and modernity are conceptualized as binaries, the single women in these novels seem to be wrestling with a way of articulating a selfhood without having to pick a side. In their refusal to conform to ideas of Indian selfhood wherein individualism is circumscribed by autonomy, the “single woman” presents, if not ideally represents, the idea of synthesis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-87
Author(s):  
I Putu Andre Warsita ◽  
I Made Suwitra ◽  
I Ketut Sukadana

Inheritance customary law is a customary law that regulates how inheritance or inheritance is forwarded or divided from heirs to inheritors from generation to generation. Balinese indigenous people with the patrilineal family system, cause only descendants of kapurusa status are considered to be able to take care and carry on family responsibilities. The formulation of the problem in this study is how inheritance rights for women in Balinese customary law, what is the procedure for granting inheritance rights for single women to family inheritance. This research is a normative legal research. The problem approach used is the case approach, conceptual and legislative approach. Legal material used by primary and secondary legal materials. The results of the study and discussion show that inheritance rights for women in Balinese customary law are essentially women who are not heirs according to the Bali Customary Law, but women are entitled to a share of inheritance from their parents, which in practice is used with various terms including property and, provision of life, the soul of the soul and also called the soul of the fund. The procedure for granting inheritance rights for a single woman to the family's inheritance of a Single Female child can be an heir by changing the status, from predana status to purusa status. Hukum adat waris adalah aturan hukum adat yang mengatur tentang bagaimana harta peninggalan atau harta warisan diteruskan atau dibagi dari pewaris kepada para waris dari generasi ke generasi. Masyarakat adat Bali dengan sistem kekeluargaan patrilineal, menyebabkan hanya keturunan yang berstatus kapurusa dianggap dapat mengurus dan meneruskan tanggung jawab keluarga. Rumusan masalah dalam penelitian ini adalah bagaimanakah hak waris bagi wanita dalam hukum adat Bali, Bagaimana prosedur pemberian hak waris bagi wanita tunggal terhadap harta warisan keluarga. Penelitian ini adalah penelitian hukum normatif. Pendekatan masalah yang digunakan adalah pendekatan kasus,konseptual dan pendekatan perundang-undangan. Bahan hukum yang digunakan bahan hukum primer dan sekunder. Hasil penelitian dan pembahasan menunjukkan bahwa Hak waris bagi wanita dalam hukum adat Bali pada dasarnya Wanita bukan ahli waris menurut Hukum Adat Waris Bali, namun wanita berhak mendapat bagian harta warisan dari orang tuanya, dimana dalam praktek pemberian tersebut dipergunakan dengan berbagai macam istilah diantaranya harta tetatadan, bekal hidup, pengupa jiwa dan juga disebut jiwa dana.Prosedur pemberian hak waris bagi wanita tunggal terhadap harta waris keluarga anak Wanita Tunggal bisa menjadi ahli waris dengan jalan perubahan status yaitu dari status predana menjadi status purusa.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Antonis A. Ellinas

Abstract Interviews have been the basis for some of the greatest insights in many disciplines but have largely been on the backstage of comparative political inquiry. I first rely on bibliometric data to show the limited use of interviews in research published by major journals in the past 30 years. I then focus on how interviews are used to study a hard-to-reach population: far-right actors. Using the extant literature and reflecting on my field experience with far-right leaders and functionaries, I examine in detail how interviews help investigate this phenomenon; I analyse challenges related to interview access, rapport, analysis and ethics and offer remedies. I argue that comparativists using interviews need to address these challenges by explicating and reflecting on the process through which they collect interview data rather than solely focusing on the data itself.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Bates

This article is a personal reflection about being a single woman in academia during the COVID-19 pandemic. I describe how the pandemic has influenced my mental health and well-being and my feelings of connectedness to my institution, colleagues, and students. I discuss how gender, relationship status, and singlism may have influenced the social support and workload of single female faculty during the pandemic, and the need to explore these phenomena more intentionally to support and retain diverse women in the academy. By tying research examples to my personal experience, I hope to inform a conversation about how institutions can be more inclusive and intentional about challenging inequities associated with gender, relationship status, and singlism, along with combating social isolation and supporting better work-life balance for female faculty members who are not partnered and do not have children.


Author(s):  
Jie BAI

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.近年來得益於女性地位的提升與名人效應,單身女性凍卵問題日趨成為社會輿論關注的焦點,由此也引發了法學界對單身女性生育權的討論。然而,單身女性凍卵不僅僅是一個法律議題,更是一個倫理問題。不僅法律和法規的制定和修訂中多有涉及對倫理的關照,凍卵的臨床實踐中也廣泛存在對倫理的考量。在結婚率和生育率持續走低當下社會,相當一部分單身 女性選擇凍卵的動機是希望脱離婚姻而進行自主的生育行 為。值得深思的是,東亞的儒教國家對輔助生殖的使用限制最為嚴格、政策最為保守。本文試圖通過分析儒家會如何看待脱離婚姻的生育行為,來探討儒學倫理對單身女性凍卵抱有怎麽樣的態度、能夠帶來怎麽的啟示。本文認為,儘管在法律維度上應該肯定單身女性擁有生育權,但在倫理層面上,脱離婚姻的生育行為應該極為審慎,因為其有違儒家倫理中對家庭秩序的看重,同時也讓“雙親撫育”難以得到實現。In recent years, thanks to the promotion of the status of women and the celebrity effect, the issue of the frozen eggs of single women has become a focus of public opinion, leading to discussion of the reproductive rights of single women in the legal arena. However, single women's frozen eggs are also an ethical issue. The laws and regulations not only involve ethics, but also ethical considerations in the clinical practice of frozen eggs. In today's society, in which the marriage rate and fertility rate continue to decline, many single women choose to freeze their eggs to distinguish between reproductive activities and marriage. It is worth thinking about the fact that Confucian East Asia has the strictest restrictions and most conservative policy on the use of assisted reproduction. This paper explores how Confucian ethics have a different position on single women’s frozen eggs by analyzing how Confucianism views fertility behaviors that are separated from marriage. It argues that although it is certain that a single woman has the right to give birth in the legal dimension, ethically, the procreative behavior of marriage should be taken with caution, as it violates the Confucian ethic of the family order by making parental care more difficult.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 45 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.


1995 ◽  
Vol 76 (10) ◽  
pp. 596-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Walzer

The author presents pregnant daughters’ reports about how their mothers influenced their own identities as mothers. Analysis of qualitative interview data suggested that mother–daughter relationships served as reference points for daughters’ ideologies about motherhood and were more varied than is often assumed. Daughters’ mixed feelings about their mothers and the role of this ambivalence in their own conceptions of motherhood may reflect the difficulties that mothers have in conforming to idealized images and expectations of motherhood. Clinical implications are discussed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 237802311879423
Author(s):  
David Schieber

What if certain types of work allow workers to earn higher incomes when bundled together? Using qualitative interview data on the careers of sex workers in California, the author argues that workers can attempt to increase overall earnings by taking part in promotional labor: a specific type of labor in which workers strategically bundle complementary forms of work with differing status and income levels to increase overall income. Because of a sharp decline in adult film production beginning in 2007, adult film performers relied on escorting to make up for lower wages and fewer filming opportunities. However, these sex workers still performed in adult films, despite filming being more time intensive and less financially lucrative, to promote themselves as high-end escorts. The author concludes that promotional labor is a mechanism by which workers and firms in general mitigate labor uncertainty by using the cross-promotional benefits of different types of complementary work.


Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Christine Junker

Mary Wilkins Freeman and Shirley Jackson, though writing in different time periods, are both invested in recuperating domesticity and using their work to imagine what domesticity removed from the context of marriage and children can offer single women. Both authors assert that emplacement within domestic enclosure is essential to securing feminine subjectivity, but their haunted house narratives undermine that very emplacement. Freeman’s stories, “The Southwest Chamber” and “The Hall Bedroom” anticipate Jackson’s more well-known The Haunting of Hill House in the way that unruly domesticity threatens the female character’s emplacement. Their haunted house narratives show that neither Freeman nor Jackson, for all that they are subversive in some ways, wants to dissolve the traditional ideological constructs of domesticity; instead, they want these ideologies to work in the culturally promised patriarchal fashion. Reading their haunted house narratives together reveals the dynamics and tensions of a domesticity that is fluid, entangled, and vibrant and the feminist potential such sites engender, even if the characters and texts in question cannot fully realize that potential.


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