Miscegenated Whiteness: Rebecca Harding Davis, the "Civil-izing" War, and Female Racism

2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Knadler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
White Women ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
White Female ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
The Public ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender

This essay examines Rebecca Harding Davis's resistance to the Civil War discourse in the Atlantic Monthly in order to complicate the relation between nineteenth-century racism and sentimental fiction. While much revisionary work has been done on nineteenth-century women'sfiction and how it reinforced racial ideologies, the misleading question often asked is whether white women did or did not participate in the public arena of race. Yet this initial framing of the question denies the alternative possibility: that white women might have engaged in their own gendered forms of racial activity, or in a "female racism" (to use Vron Ware's term), that did not correspond to or act in complicity with a racism that is by default seen as public and masculine. By imagining her heroine as a "woman from the border" inWaiting for the Verdict (1868), Davis works to oppose and overturn a particular regional and gender-based inscription of whiteness that was being disseminated amid the war crises as an emergent New England-based national identity. In contrast, Davis creates a particular feminine and liminal version of white racial power, or a "miscegenated whiteness." But this fantasy of an imagined national community based on the "white mulatto" finally undoes itself in the novel's moments of narrative crises about a free and open female sexuality, and Davis'snovel seeks to restore the white female body to its "purity."

scholarly journals Gender Inequalities and the Effects of Feminine Artworks on Public Spaces: A Dialogue

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 158-167
Author(s):  
Hooshmand Alizadeh ◽  
Josef Kohlbacher ◽  
Rozhen Kamal Mohammed-Amin ◽  
Tabin Latif Raouf
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Social Barriers ◽  
The Public ◽  
Kurdish Women ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Feminist street art aims to transform patriarchal spaces into places of gendered resistance by asserting a feminist presence in the city. Considering this, as well as women’s social life, their struggle against lingering forces of patriarchy, and relating features of inequality (domestic violence), there was a feminist installation artwork by the young Kurdish artist Tara Abdulla that shook the city of Sulaimani in Iraqi Kurdistan on 26 October 2020. She had prepared a 4,800‐meter‐long washing line covered with the clothes of 99,678 Kurdish women who were survivors of sexual and gender‐based violence. They installed it along the busiest street of the city (Salim Street). She used this piece of feminine to express her reaction to the Kurdish society regarding, the abuse that goes on silently, behind closed doors. She also aimed towards normalizing women’s bodies. After the installation, she received many controversial reactions. As her artwork was a pioneering project in line with feminist issues in Kurdistan which preoccupied the city for quite a while, the aim of this article is to investigate the diverse effects of her work on the current dialogue regarding gender inequality in the Kurdish society. To do this, we used the research method of content analysis on big data (Facebook comments) to investigate the public reactions of a larger number of locals. The Feminine effectively exposed some of the deep‐rooted cultural, religious, and social barriers in addressing gender inequalities and silent sexual violence issues in the modern Kurdish patriarchal society.

ICTs and Gender-Based Rights

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-49
Author(s):  
Ana-Cristina Ionescu
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Network Of Networks

In this new age, the Internet, the network of networks connected by a complex array of electronic, wireless, and optical technologies extending from the private to the public sector, and from academic to business and governmental organizations, is starting to have increasingly broad social implications, besides the technical ones. Nevertheless, as women and men enter and progress differently into employment and occupations, not all humankind benefits equally from Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). In this paper, the author addresses the question of whether women have equal rights and opportunities to access and use ICTs. In this article, the author strengthens the idea that in this changing era, new ICTs represent a cardinal instrument for social transformation, enabling and empowering women to become controllers of information.

ICTs and Gender-Based Rights

2014 ◽  
pp. 214-234
Author(s):  
Ana-Cristina Ionescu
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Network Of Networks

In this new age, the Internet, the network of networks connected by a complex array of electronic, wireless, and optical technologies extending from the private to the public sector, and from academic to business and governmental organizations, is starting to have increasingly broad social implications, besides the technical ones. Nevertheless, as women and men enter and progress differently into employment and occupations, not all humankind benefits equally from information and communication technologies (ICTs). The question that this chapter addresses is whether women have equal rights and opportunities to access and use ICTs. In this chapter, the author aims to strengthen the idea that in this changing era, new ICTs represent a cardinal instrument for social transformation, enabling and empowering women to become controllers of information.

A Feminist Peep into Public Art in India’s Northeast

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-115
Author(s):  
Samhita Barooah
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Northeast India ◽  
Feminist Analysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender

Based on participant observation, symbolic interactionism and feminist analysis of diverse art forms available in the public domain, the article focuses on the stereotyped notion of masculinity, which gets projected into the urban landscape of modern cities in Northeast India. It takes a critical stance on some of the prominent mascots, symbols and identities which are attached to products, services and ideologies predominantly rooted in patriarchy and gender-based discrimination. The observations shared in the article are drawn from the researcher’s field experiences and do not hold any offence to any particular agency, group, denomination or individual. It attempts to bring forth a subaltern narrative which is gradually getting erased from public memory from a queer feminist lens of locating oneself in a public space. It also questions the gender-normative imagination of modern India, which is rapidly engulfing all forms of diversity into its monoculture of development.

scholarly journals Domestic violence: Evidence-based policies before and during the pandemic in Greece

Temida ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-23
Author(s):  
Vasiliki Artinopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Critical Aspects

Domestic violence and gender-based violence has been studied and recognised for many years in Greece. Adequate legislation on the criminalization of domestic violence has been implemented since 2006 (Law 3500/2006 on the Confrontation of Domestic Violence). A network of support services has also operated across the country for many years, staffed with professionals trained in the gender-sensitive perspective. However, Greece still faces the impact of the economic crisis that started in 2010 and the critical aspects of the crisis from the reduction of the public budget imposed by the European institutions in the lives of the individuals, the victims and the providers of the social services have not been fully assessed yet. The COVID-19 pandemic created problems in the victims? access to social services and not only. The shadow pandemic describes the alarm on the increase of domestic violence during the pandemic and the isolation of the victims from the providers of social and psychological support. Addressing both the issue of domestic violence through a victim-centered approach before and during the pandemic in Greece and the need for the implementation of evidence-based policies are the general aims of the paper. To this, we present few findings from an original victimological online research on domestic violence during the first lockdown in the country (March to May 2020) and we justify the need for the implementation of evidence-based policies in the criminal justice system in Greece.

Race, Gender, and the Rape-Lynching Nexus in the U.S. South, 1881-1930

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 616-636
Author(s):  
Mattias Smångs
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
School Attendance ◽  
African American Men ◽  
White Male ◽  
White Female ◽  
Social Force ◽  
Gender Status ◽  
Interracial Sex ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The U.S

Abstract Scholarship has long recognized the centrality of white racial sexual fears in the rhetoric and practice surrounding the lynching of African Americans in the U.S. South in the decades around 1900. The topic has not previously been taken up for systematic study beyond event-level analyses. This article presents theoretical and empirical evidence that whites’ intersecting racial and gender concerns converging in racial sexual fears were conducive to lynching related to interracial sex, but not to those unrelated to interracial sex, under certain conditions. The empirical findings, based on lynchings in 11 southern states from 1881–1930, demonstrate that lynchings related to interracial sex were more likely to occur in contexts characterized by higher levels of white female dependents residing with white male householders, higher levels of white female school attendance, and higher levels of adult black male literacy. These findings suggest that interracial sex-related lynching served to recover and retain white men’s racial and gender status, which postbellum developments had undermined, by oppressing not only African American men and women but disempowering white women as well. White racial sexual fears during the lynching era should, therefore, be seen as constituting a social force in their own right with long-term consequences for race and gender relations and inequalities.

Racial minorities’ attitudes toward interracial couples: An intersection of race and gender

2020 ◽  
pp. 136843021989948
Author(s):  
Roxie Chuang ◽  
Clara Wilkins ◽  
Mingxuan Tan ◽  
Caroline Mead
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Black Male ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Male ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
White Female ◽  
Interracial Couples ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender

Four studies examined racial minorities’ attitudes toward interracial couples. Overall, Asian and Black Americans indicated lower warmth towards interracial than same-race couples. We hypothesized that perceived competition for same-race partners would predict attitudes toward particular pairings. Consistent with predictions, attitudes towards interracial couples varied based on the societal prevalence of particular types of couples. Black American women (but not men) indicated more negative attitudes toward the more common Black male–White female pairing than toward White male–Black female couples. Asian American men (but not women) reported more negative attitudes toward White male–Asian female couples than toward Asian male–White female couples. Furthermore, perceived competition with White men predicted Asian American men’s attitudes toward White male–Asian female couples. Perceived competition with White women drove Black women’s attitudes toward Black male–White female couples. This research highlights the importance of adopting an intersectional approach (examining both race and gender) to understand attitudes toward interracial couples.

Writing and “Righting”

2020 ◽  
pp. 78-97
Author(s):  
Robin Mazyck Sundaramoorthy ◽  
Jinx Coleman Broussard
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Public ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Public Lives ◽  
And Gender

While the suffrage movement has largely been viewed through the lens of white women fighting for the vote, African American women were very much a part of the movement. Some of these women were suffrage advocates and journalists; others were activists in other arenas. Many black suffragists viewed the vote as a way of elevating their race, and the black press helped these women spread their message. Although it provided lackluster support for the suffrage movement, the black press gave considerable attention to the topic. It gave voice to those who supported the cause and those who were adamantly against it. This chapter focuses on the contributions and writings of prosuffrage journalists such as Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Bettiola Fortson, and others covered by the black press. It assesses the public lives and work of these women who had to consider both race and gender as they spoke up and out for those who could not speak for themselves.

Racial and Gender Biases in Magazine Advertising

1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 627-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Plous ◽  
Dominique Neptune
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Female Body ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Men ◽  
White Female ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Black Females ◽  
Gender Biases ◽  
Predatory Animal ◽  
And Gender

Recent evidence suggests that racial and gender biases in magazine advertisements may be increasing. To explore this possibility, a content analysis was performed on 10 years of fashion advertisements drawn from magazines geared toward White women, Black women, or White men ( N = 1,800 advertisements from 1985–1994). The results indicated that (a) except for Black females in White women's magazines, African Americans were underrepresented in White magazines; (b) female body exposure was greater than male body exposure, and White female body exposure rose significantly during the 10 years; (c) White women were shown in low-status positions nearly twice as often as were other models; and (d) Black women wore the majority of animal prints, most of which were patterned after a predatory animal. These findings suggest that racial and gender biases in magazine advertising persisted, and in some cases increased, between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.

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