The Iron Girls

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wang Zheng
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Class Inequality ◽  
Cultural Symbol ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Social Advancement

The meanings of “Iron Girls” changed drastically from a socialist cultural symbol of laboring women’s double liberation from gender and class oppressions to apost-socialist symbol of women’s “masculinization” in the socialist period. This chapter locates an ideological rupture in the 1980s and demonstrates discursive maneuvers by urban educated elite that succeededin dismantling socialist ideologies and institutional mechanisms for gender and class equality. A masculinist backlash against women’s social advancement in the socialist period operated in a politics of erasure that obliterated socialist feminists’ endeavors of transforming gender and class hierarchies and that legitimized restoration of pre-socialist “normalcy”based on gender and class inequality. It enabled class reconfiguration in neo-liberalist restructuring of China and solidified “women’s masculinization” as a truth in knowledge production about socialism. The life stories of the Iron Girls in Dazhai are analyzed in contrast with the urban elite’s discursive construction.

Capturing life histories about movements into and out of poverty: A road with pits and bumps

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tineke Schiettecat ◽  
Griet Roets ◽  
Michel Vandenbroeck
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Dynamic Interaction ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Social Work Interventions ◽  
A Current

In order to take into account the power imbalances typically implicated in knowledge production about the complex social problem of poverty, social work researchers have increasingly acknowledged the importance of grasping the viewpoints and perspectives of people in poverty situations. In this contribution, we accordingly reflect on a current life history research project that retrospectively explores the life stories of parents with young children with regard to their mobility into and out of poverty that is examined in dynamic interaction with social work interventions. In this article, we discuss methodological and ethical challenges and complexities that we unexpectedly encountered in our research venture, as illustrated by three exemplary vignettes. These examples demonstrate issues of power between the researcher and the research participants that are not only inevitable, but also generate dilemmas, struggles and ambiguities that often remain underexposed in the ways scientific insights are reported. Rather than disguising these pits and bumps, we argue for a reflexive research stance which makes these issues of power in knowledge production susceptible to contemplation and scrutiny.

Beyond the “Helpless Nepali Woman” versus the “Fierce Maoist Fighter”: Challenging the Artificial Security/Economy Divide

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (04) ◽  
pp. 733-739 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahel Kunz
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Global Political Economy ◽  
Holistic Analysis ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Nepali Women

Recent discussions over similarities and differences between feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist global political economy (FGPE) approaches invite us to reflect on the underlying assumptions about knowledge production within feminist international relations (IR) more broadly (Allison 2015; Enloe 2015; see also the introduction to this forum). I use Nepali women ex-combatants’ life stories to make two specific points relating to these discussions. First, I illustrate how the separation of security and political economy issues cannot fully account for their life experiences. Second, and by way of overcoming this separation, I show how by beginning with life stories, we can develop a holistic analysis that challenges the broader Eurocentric politics of feminist IR knowledge production.

Gender and social class in India: Muslim perspectives in the fiction of Attia Hosain and Shama Futehally

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-139
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Class Inequality ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Ambiguous Position

This article investigates representations of gender and class inequality in Attia Hosain’s classic novel Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and her short story collection Phoenix Fled and Other Stories (1953). It compares her work with that of Shama Futehally, another elite Muslim Indian woman writing in English several decades later. Born 40 years after Attia Hosain, the postcolonial world of Shama Futehally is very different, but the issues she explores in her fiction are remarkably similar: social and economic inequality, exploitation of the poor, and the ambiguous position of women privileged by their social class and disempowered by their gender. Both authors write carefully crafted realist fiction focusing predominantly on the experiences and perspectives of female characters. Shama Futehally’s novel Tara Lane (1993), like Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, is a coming-of-age novel whose protagonist is a young Muslim woman in an affluent family, coming to terms with the uneasy combination of class privilege, gender disadvantage, and a strong social conscience. Both authors explore the perspectives of working-class Indian women in their short stories, emphasizing their vulnerability to exploitation (including sexual exploitation), as well as the deeply problematic nature of “noblesse oblige”. Aware of the interconnections between gender and class inequality, Attia Hosain and Shama Futehally have written powerful fictional works which effectively dramatize not only the complex relationship between gender and social class hierarchies, but also the ways in which all privilege is predicated on inequality.

scholarly journals Beyond Moral Coupling: Analysing Politics of Privacy in the Era of Surveillance

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heikki Heikkilä
Keyword(s):  
Life Stories ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Digital Environment ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
Five Dimensions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Binary Approach ◽  
Political Cost ◽  
History Of

The article calls into question the prevailing discursive construction in contemporary debate on privacy and surveillance. At the core of this discourse is a moral coupling wherein surveillance is perceived as enemy and privacy as friend. Even if this binary approach renders arguments for democratising data more persuasive, a political cost accompanies it. As this discourse situates political struggle at the level of digital infrastructure and political structures, the moral coupling largely overlooks the ambiguities of how people in their various activities in a digital environment experience surveillance and privacy. Such a framing may discourage users at large from engagement with politics of privacy. Edward Snowden’s autobiography is taken as a prominent example of the prevailing discourse. While analysing Snowden’s descriptions of privacy and surveillance critically, the author points out the specific value of life stories in describing what privacy means and why it matters. While we cannot assume all people to be equally capable of considering how their own life intersects with the history of their society, we can presume that varying life stories should contribute to the public knowledge of privacy. To provide the framework necessary for appropriately contextualising empirical evidence, the author presents a model wherein privacy is composed of five dimensions: solitude, anonymity, secrecy, intimacy, and dignity.

Finding Women in the State

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wang Zheng
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
Socialist Revolution ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
State Feminism ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Party State

This first book engendering the PRC high politics narrates a hidden history of socialist state formation in which feminists in the CCP operated in a politics of concealment in order to enact their feminist visions of a socialist stateand to launch a feminist revolutiontransforming a patriarchal culture. Analyzing archival sourcesand interviews with a double-lens of gender and class, the book illuminates a gender line of struggle in the CCP, debunks a conceptualization of a monolithic patriarchal party/state that paradoxically supported gender equality, and demonstrates state feminists’ contentions in diverse fields and fierce opposition from a male-dominated CCP leadership from the Party Central to the local government. Socialist cultural production is also examined to demonstrate how feminist leaders consciously created a new paradigm of visual representation of heroines and continued a New Culture anti-patriarchy heritage in socialist film production. The feminist endeavors in the cultural realm aiming to transform gender and class hierarchies are discussedin conjunction with an examination of the dense entanglements among those in the top echelon of the Party and an analysis of how the politicalbeing saturated withthe personal dynamics. Discussing the causes for failure of China’s socialist revolution, the book raises fundamental questions about male dominance in social movements and political revolutions that aim to pursue social justice and equality. The book also scrutinizes post-socialist knowledge production that has operated in a politics of erasure of a history of socialist state feminism.

Cigarette Smoking: A Light on Gender and Class Inequality in Britain?

1995 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 509-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Graham
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Cigarette Smoking ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Smoking Prevalence ◽  
Smoking Behaviour ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Class Inequality ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Alternative Measures

ABSTRACTThe decline in smoking prevalence in Britain has been associated with a narrowing of gender differences and a widening of class differences in cigarette smoking. The shrinking population of smokers is increasingly drawn from those occupying subordinate positions in the gender and class hierarchies. The article reviews the evidence linking social inequality and women's smoking, drawing on conventional measures of gender and socio-economic position and on alternative measures which tap more directly into the processes that sustain gender and class inequality. The article deepens its analysis of the links between social inequality and smoking behaviour through a survey of women caring for young children in manual households. The survey uncovered pronounced intra-group differences in the smoking behaviour of women occupying broadly similar gender and socio-economic positions. These differences were associated, in clear and systematic ways, with differences in the mothers' social and material circumstances. High rates of prevalence and consumption and low rates of cessation were related to heavier caring responsibilities and to greater material disadvantage.

Life Stories That Teach

1987 ◽  
Vol 32 (7) ◽  
pp. 634-635
Author(s):  
Sandra L. Harris ◽  
Mary Jane Gill
Keyword(s):  
Life Stories

Rewriting Life Stories: Narrative Career Counseling With Clients of Color

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicia Tripp ◽  
Julie Salzman ◽  
Jill Schontag
Keyword(s):  
Career Counseling ◽  
Life Stories
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