““The Days of Old, the Days of Gold, the Days of '49””: Identity, History, and Memory at the California Midwinter International Exposition, 1894

2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
BARBARA BERGLUND
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
White Male ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
International Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Following on the heels of Chicago's Columbian Exposition, San Francisco's Midwinter Fair generated representations of identities, histories, and memories that promoted a vision of social order that spoke to the hopes and fears of both the city and the nation. The version of history articulated at the Fair's '49 Mining Camp exhibit looked back to the past with nostalgia to construct meaningful identities for the present. Through that gauzy lens, it fashioned masculine historical identities that sought to assuage race, class, and gender-based anxieties in the present by emphasizing white male dominance and downplaying the economic dislocations associated with the expansion of industrial capitalism.

Re-membering Syria’s Traumatic Past: Gender, Poetics, and Loss in Manhal al-Sarrāj’s As a River Should

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 202-227
Author(s):  
Linda Istanbulli
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Abstract In a system where the state maintains a monopoly over historical interpretation, aesthetic investigations of denied traumatic memory become a space where the past is confronted, articulated, and deemed usable both for understanding the present and imagining the future. This article focuses on Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a river should) by Manhal al-Sarrāj, one of the first Syrian novels to openly break the silence on the “1982 Hama massacre.” Engaging the politics and poetics of trauma remembrance, al-Sarrāj places the traumatic history of the city of Hama within a longer tradition of loss and nostalgia, most notably the poetic genre of rithāʾ (elegy) and the subgenre of rithāʾ al-mudun (city elegy). In doing so, Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr functions as a literary counter-site to official histories of the events of 1982, where threatened memory can be preserved. By investigating the intricate relationship between armed conflict and gender, the novel mourns Hama’s loss while condemning the violence that engendered it. The novel also makes new historical interpretations possible by reproducing the intricate relationship between mourning, violence, and gender, dislocating the binary lines around which official narratives of armed conflicts are typically constructed.

scholarly journals Organisational Characteristics That Facilitate Gender-Based Violence and Harassment in Higher Education?

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 138
Author(s):  
Pat O’Connor ◽  
Margaret Hodgins ◽  
Dorian R. Woods ◽  
Elisa Wallwaey ◽  
Rachel Palmen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
Related Phenomenon ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Organizational Responses ◽  
Academic Environments ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Organisational Level

Gender-based violence and sexual harassment (GBVH) by and towards academics and students has been under-theorised at an organisational level in higher education institutions (HEIs). The methodology involves a critical review of the literature on GBVH and organizational responses to it, locating it in the context of an analysis of organizational power. The theoretical perspective involves a focus on power and workplace bullying. It identifies three power-related characteristics of academic environments which it is suggested facilitate GBVH: their male-dominant hierarchical character; their neoliberal managerialist ethos and gender/intersectional incompetent leadership which perpetuates male entitlement and toxic masculinities. These characteristics also inhibit tackling GBVH by depicting it as an individual problem, encouraging informal coping and militating against the prosecution of perpetrators. Initiating a discussion and action at organizational and state levels about GBVH as a power-related phenomenon, challenging the dominant neo-liberal ethos and the hierarchical character of HEIs, as well as reducing their male dominance and increasing the gender competence of those in positions of power are seen as initial steps in tackling the problem.

New Bodies in Cities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachana Johri
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Contested Spaces ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Globalizing cities in India offer the promise of escape from caste- and gender-based identities, but those who make the journey often encounter difficulties, including the fragmentation of their home experience, and even violence once they get to the city. Lower-middle-class girls are seen as a challenge to ideals of chaste Indian womanhood, while Dalit boys and girls are challenging dominant ideals in Brahmanical India by questioning the nation state and its inherited ideals, including the caste system. This paper draws on cinematic and lived narratives to argue that cities in India are characterized by highly contested spaces, bodily practices, and technologies of the self, where the body of the city, and bodies in the city, are the lived realities of these tense negotiations.

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.

scholarly journals Flânerie in Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-18
Author(s):  
Magdalena Pfalzgraf
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The City

Valerie Tagwira’s debut novel The Uncertainty of Hope, set in Harare in 2005, depicts the city on the brink of collapse, characterized by the effects of economic crisis and political violence against the urban poor. Political marginalization of the working classes and gender-based violence intersect and diminish the prospects for the social and spatial mobility of the urban poor. In this article I apply the lens of flânerie to the pedestrian movements of Tagwira’s protagonist Onai Moyo, an impoverished woman who makes a living by selling vegetables on Harare’s streets. In order to make a case for Onai’s ‘flânerie against all odds’, I revisit Walter Benjamin’s theorization as well as recent scholarly engagements with flânerie in non-European settings. By giving her protagonist a gaze traditionally associated with a European middle-class urbanity of the 19th century, Tagwira expands a tradition of city writing/walking and, like other contemporary engagements with flânerie, also breathes new life into a concept often pronounced inappropriate or unproductive for readings of non-European literature. 

Resistance in the New Harem Era: Gendered Violence and the Power of Media in the Time of Covid-19 in Morocco

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-41
Author(s):  
Sara El Ouedrhiri ◽  
Hafsa El Mesbahi
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Movement Restriction ◽  
Gendered Violence ◽  
Fatima Mernissi ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

In a time of great uncertainties, the world witnesses, for the very first instance in its modern history a global lockdown spanning over all the vital spheres of economic and social life. At this point, when neither leaving home nor staying is an option, the surge to exponentially study the manner in which human life has evolved and been shaped under such circumstances gained valuable interest, especially within the circles of feminist and human rights-based academia. Respectively, researchers argue that the weight of the lockdown and movement restriction policies fall discriminately on men and women as they are interestingly leading such novel experiences in different ways. Men, by having no concern mounting to the priority of protecting themselves from being inflicted by this global pandemic and maintaining their economic roles as the traditional family providers, and women on the margin side of the picture, having to deal with the burden of surviving the dangers that the outside and the inside worlds akin dispose. Henceforth, this article is an attempt to probe the dynamics of the private sphere considering the intersections between oppression, seclusion and violence and the development of new dynamics of resistance by transposing from the early 20th century’s feminine experience of confinement and the 21st century’s global lockdown in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. This research considers the stories presented by the renowned Moroccan sociologist and author “Fatima Mernissi”, who herself lived a different kind of seclusion behind the colossal and skillfully ostentatious walls of the harem of the city of Fez in the forties of the previous century and this shall be done mainly by reviewing the stories of resistance presented in her memoir Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood; and by considering the stories of five respondents who have shared with us their accounts through various social media outlets upon the surge of the pandemic in Morocco. The purpose here is to unravel the convergences between women’s experiences of gender-based violence (GBV) in both confinements and to foreground the value, significance and challenges these feminine insights being in them simple acts of everyday life constitute in establishing a discourse of resistance and feminine empowerment vis-à-vis patriarchy, seclusion and gender-based violence.

scholarly journals Racialized Rescue Narratives in Public Discourses on Youth Prostitution and Sex Trafficking in the United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 773-800
Author(s):  
Carrie N. Baker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
White Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Sex Trade ◽  
Neoliberal Governance ◽  
The Media ◽  
And Gender

This article presents an analysis of how activists, politicians, and the media framed youth involvement in the sex trade during the 1970s, the 1990s, and the 2000s in the United States. Across these periods of public concern about the issue, similar framing has recurred that has drawn upon gendered and racialized notions of victimization and perpetration. This frame has successfully brought attention to this issue by exploiting public anxieties at historical moments when social change was threatening white male dominance. Using intersectional feminist theory, I argue that mainstream rhetoric opposing the youth sex trade worked largely within neoliberal logics, ignoring histories of dispossession and structural violence and reinforcing individualistic notions of personhood and normative ideas about subjectivity and agency. As part of the ongoing project of racial and gender formation in US society, this discourse has shored up neoliberal governance, particularly the build-up of the prison industrial complex, and it has obscured the state's failure to address the myriad social problems that make youth vulnerable to the sex trade.

scholarly journals Acceptable femininity? Gay male misogyny and the policing of queer femininities

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 310-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sadie E Hale ◽  
Tomás Ojeda
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Gay Male ◽  
The Status ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
Gender Trouble

While it represents a common form of gender-based violence, misogyny is an often-overlooked concept within academia and the queer community. Drawing on queer and feminist scholarship on gay male misogyny, this article presents a theoretical challenge to the myth that the oppressed cannot oppress, arguing that specific forms of gay male subjectivities can be proponents of misogyny in ways that are unrecognised because of their sexually marginalised status. The authors’ interest in the doing of misogyny, and its effects on specific bodies and subjectivities, leads them to discuss the extent to which white gay male misogyny can function to reinforce a particular gender and racial hierarchy that continually confines queer femininities to the status of the abject other, for failing to exhibit their feminine credentials and for making gender trouble. The study also addresses how specific markers of femininity are depoliticised through the workings of this misogyny, exploring what femininity does when it is conceptualised outside a heteronormative framework. To address these ideas, the authors firstly propose a theoretical account of misogyny in order to understand its analytical status as a cultural mechanism within the psychic economy of patriarchy. Secondly, they use queer approaches to effeminacy and subject formation for making the case for gay male misogyny and its connections to femininity within white gay cultures, asking how misogyny might become an essential component of the performance of hegemonic masculinity. The article concludes with a discussion of the ways in which gay male misogyny reinforces white male dominance over women and queer femininities specifically, advocating for resistance to the reproduction of such patriarchal arrangements.

scholarly journals Navigating the City and the Workplace: Migrant Female Construction Workers and Urban (Im)Mobilities

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Bowers
Keyword(s):  
Construction Workers ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Circular Migration ◽  
Female Workers ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Employment Conditions ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

While their labour shapes the growing cityscape, migrant construction workers often remain invisible – not only to property developers and consumers but also to the state. For female workers, this is compounded by gender-based discrimination within the industry. Utilising ethnographic data, this article explores how women working in construction in Bengaluru, India, both experience and strive for mobility. It provides a multi-sited analysis to establish the ways in which intersectionality between employment conditions, the urban environment and gender norms may inhibit or facilitate urban mobility for migrant female workers. Few ethnographic studies have attended to women’s experiences of intermingled work/accommodation sites within the industry, although the practices and outcomes produced by the blurring of such boundaries provides fertile ground for analysis. While the article confirms the enduring nature of discrimination experienced by women in the construction industry, it also attends to the ways in which female workers were able to utilise spaces of exploitation. I conclude that precarious livelihoods may not at first glance yield enduring or substantive beneficial outcomes for those compelled to undertake them, but they are nevertheless productive – allowing for the maintenance and fulfilment of aspirations which may not reside within the urban domain. KEYWORDS circular migration; labour; gender; women; construction work

scholarly journals Tussle for Existence: An Inquisitive Exploration on the Role of Women in Sangati (Events)

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (8) ◽  
pp. 16-18
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Women's Power ◽  
Dalit Women ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Patriarchal Social Structure

Indian society is quite a complex one, because of its construction of hierarchal social order grounded on the premise of sophistication, stratum and sex. Historically, women are placed at the margins that prevented them from having opportunities and denied them the flexibility to enter the general public sphere. This paper entitled “Tussle for Existence: An Inquisitive Exploration on the Role of Women in Sangati (Events)” which is a close to the accurate attempt to discern the penetrating expertise of lower-class women who passed through many unconditional subjugations from varied norms of the society, as well as Dalit women’s power of resilience to subdue these existing curtailments in the patriarchal social structure. Through the work, Sangati, Bama explores the lives of women, wherever caste and gender-based rights and rituals executed women’s life as sacrificial fire. In her work Sangati, Bama, one among the predominant Dalit women writers, constitutes the themes of Dalit feminism and the celebrations of self-assurance within the community of subaltern women.

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