A New Kind of Monster, Cowboy, and Crusader?

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-63
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Al-Jbouri ◽  
Shauna Pomerantz
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
New Man ◽  
Gender Neutrality

Representations of boys and men in Disney films often escape notice due to presumed gender neutrality. Considering this omission, we explore masculinities in films from Disney’s lucrative subsidiary Pixar to determine how masculinities are represented and have and/or have not disrupted dominant gender norms as constructed for young boys’ viewership. Using Raewyn Connell’s theory of gender hegemony and related critiques, we suggest that while Pixar films strive to provide their male characters with a feminist spin, they also continue to reify hegemonic masculinities through sharp contrasts to femininities and by privileging heterosexuality. Using a feminist textual analysis that includes the Toy Story franchise, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Coco, we suggest that Pixar films, while offering audiences a “new man,” continue to reinforce hegemonic masculinities in subtle ways that require critical examination to move from presumed gender neutrality to an understanding of continued, though shifting, gender hegemony.

Discrimination and Oppression

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
Hilde Lindemann
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Discrimination And Oppression ◽  
Gender Neutrality

The chapter surveys the feminist ethicist’s tool kit, introducing and explaining such concepts as gender neutrality, androcentrism, and difference. Gender neutrality is broken down into a critical examination of androgyny and assimilation that is put to use in a reflection on affirmative action. This is followed by a consideration of oppression and how it operates.

Introspecting Gender Concerns in National Action Plan for Climate Change of India

2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-190
Author(s):  
Avantika Singh
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
National Action Plan ◽  
Developed Economies ◽  
Track Record ◽  
Related Stress ◽  
Gender Neutrality

The climate sceptics faltered at COP21 Paris summit after climate change was accepted as a real threat. An agreement across tables on historical ‘polluters pay’ principle shifted the burden of curbing the emissions on developed economies. However, gender concerns were conspicuous by their absence in all agreements. Mary Robinson, a UN envoy at the summit precisely pointed out that Paris climate summit’s gender imbalance with substantial male domination is inimical to taking appropriate action to save people from climate change risks. The research shows a poor track record with minimum or no presence of women representatives in any breakthrough deal and discussion. There is a tendency to avert their voices and concerns in any stamped deals done by governments and organisations at international, national, sub-national levels. Despite such gender omission, the policy discourse carries an inherent assumption of gender neutrality while designing adaptation and mitigation efforts in averting climate-related stress. This paper is an attempt to unravel such ungendered tendency, by a critical examination of the National Action Plan for Climate Change in India to bring out an apparent masculinisation of the policy discourse.

Engendering Suspicion: Homosexual Panic in the Post-Soviet Detektiv

Slavic Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
Brian James Baer
Keyword(s):  
Gender Norms ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Male Bonds ◽  
Homosexual Panic ◽  
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ◽  
Being And Becoming

This article examines the workings of the sexual closet within the enormously popular genre of the Russian detektiv, or detective story. Informed by the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and D. A. Miller, the article focuses on the dramatization of homosexual panic among various male characters in Aleksandra Marinina's Stilist (1996) and Boris Akunin's Koronatsiia (2001) in order to explore the experience of masculine subjectivity in post-Soviet culture. In both novels, a perceived crisis in patriarchal authority unleashes suspicions and anxieties regarding the experience of being and becoming a man, which is defined against the feminine and the homosexual. Figured both as an effect of and as a threat to male-male bonds, homosexual panic testifies to the interiorization of sexual and gender norms, which makes being male a highly self-conscious enterprise and fuels nostalgia for a mythic time before the appearance of homosexuality.

10. Here Comes Spiderman, the Arachnophobian: Halloween and Constructions of Gender

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Nemec
Keyword(s):  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Gender Stereotyping ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Fantasy World

Holidays are celebrations, symbolism, and cultural traditions combined. Halloween allows for individuals, for one night a year, to transform themselves and enter a fantasy world (Kugelmass, 1994). However, upon further critical examination, this rhetoric of Halloween as a harmless, imaginative, and liberating experience undermines the critical reflection of the negative impact of many of the Halloween traditions. The Halloween ritual perpetuates social constructions of gender, which reflects society’s gender inequality and heteronormativity. During Halloween celebration, exaggerated gender stereotyping is acceptable and is thus reinforcing these norms without critical examination. Themes, paraphernalia, rituals, and costumes, under labels such as ‘Halloween’, ‘tradition’, or ‘holiday’ are symbolic and hold much power. This research seeks to deconstruct these meanings in order to argue the effects they have on the reproduction of gender norms and stereotypes as well as heteronormativity. Halloween has a lot to do with visual representation. Often, this visual representation during Halloween celebration “…reproduces and reiterates more conventional messages about gender (Nelson, 2000). In the process of ‘celebration’, these messages about gender are given the opportunity to manifest themselves. Rarely do those partaking in these rituals critically examine the broader implications to gender stereotyping and inequality as well as heteronormativity and homophobia. Areas of study that will be discussed in the process of arguing these statements include gender (norms, roles, stereotypes, deviance, and sexuality), media, culture, consumerism, fashion, celebrations, and rituals.

scholarly journals “Please Baby, take me Back”: Homo-social Bonds in the Contemporary British Biopic

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
Dominant Male ◽  
Emotional Acceptance ◽  
Male Friendship ◽  
New Man ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Alternative Masculinities ◽  
Need For Support ◽  
Central Characters

Using textual analysis, this article offers a comparison between the homo-social bonds represented in "The Damned United" and those in "The King’s Speech". The article traces a pattern in which a powerful and dominant male suffers a professional crisis which is only overcome through the support of an intimate male friendship that is fixed as heterosexual though marginalised female figures. In both films, the central characters are rehabilitated into success only after a humbling and emotional acceptance of their need for support that positions them within the terms of ‘new man-ism’. However, because this is couched through homo-social couplings, rather than the heterosexual, the films mark the hybridisation of machismo and ‘new man-ism’ that were previously seen as alternative masculinities.

scholarly journals Wartime Propaganda and Gender in Ahmad Mahmoud’s The Scorched Earth: A Dissident Reading

Text Matters ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 460-476
Author(s):  
Ramin Farhadi
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
The State ◽  
Persian Literature ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Southwest Of Iran

The Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) has been the subject of many aesthetic productions in contemporary Persian literature. The Iranian mass media during the war with Iraq described the armed conflict as holy and masculine, and propagated the replacement of the word “war” with “sacred defense” to urge authors to write within this established framework and reflect the ideals of the State. Opposed to such an ideological view of the war, the prominent Iranian novelist Ahmad Mahmoud began to express dissent in his works of fiction such as The Scorched Earth (1982). This study, therefore, analyzes Mahmoud’s scope of dissidence toward wartime propaganda and gender in the above mentioned novel to articulate how Mahmoud raises important questions regarding the State’s view of war and the established gender norms in Iran at war. It uses cultural materialist dissident reading and textual analysis to study Mahmoud’s contempt for wartime propaganda through the text’s portrayal of desperate people in Khorramshahr in the southwest of Iran caught between Iraqi airstrikes and artillery fires, and domestic problems including inflation, looting and mismanagement.

scholarly journals A Game of Genders: Comparing Depictions of Empowered Women between A Game of Thrones novel and Television Series

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 14-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Jones
Keyword(s):  
Gender Norms ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Cultural Standards ◽  
American Society ◽  
Game Of Thrones

The main women in George R. R. Martin's novel Game of Thrones, first published in 1996, and the adapted television series in 2011, are empowered female figures in a world dominated by male characters. Analyzing shifts in the characters’ portrayals between the two mediums conveys certain valences of the cultures for which they are intended. While in the novel the characters adhere to a different set of standards for women, the television series portrays these women as more sympathetic, empowered, and realistic with respect to contemporary standards. Using literary archetypes of queen, hero, mother, child, maiden and warrior and applying them to Cersei Lannister, Catelyn Stark, Arya Stark, Sansa Stark, and Daenerys Targeryen, provides a measure for the differences in their presentations. Through the archetypical lens, the shifts in societal and cultural standards between the novel and series’ airing reveal changing pressures and expectations for women. By reading the novel and watching the series with the archetypes in mind, the changes in gender norms from 1996 to 2011 becomes clear. The resulting shift shows the story’s changes in the realm of fantasy in relation to the American society that consumes it.

Beyond Mere Presence: Gender Norms in Oral Arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 596-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shane A. Gleason
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Emotional Language ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Mere Presence ◽  
The U.S

Women are less successful than their male counterparts at Supreme Court oral arguments under certain circumstances. However, existing work relies on mere presence rather than on any action female attorneys take in their argument. Drawing on recent work that stresses gender is performative, I argue success for women at oral arguments is tied to conformance with gender norms, subtle and unconscious expectations of how men and women should communicate. Via a quantitative textual analysis of the 2004–2016 terms, I find attorneys are more successful when their oral arguments are more consistent with gender norms. Specifically, male attorneys are rewarded for using less emotional language whereas female attorneys are successful when using more emotional language. This study represents a more nuanced and performative understanding of gender at oral arguments. These results raise normative concerns about how effective women are at the Supreme Court.

scholarly journals The Bluest Eyes: Objectification of Women and Victimization of Male Sex-offenders

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-56
Author(s):  
Zenab Jahangir ◽  
Tayyaba Bashir ◽  
Rasib Mahmood
Keyword(s):  
Sex Offenders ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Male Sex ◽  
Objectification Of Women ◽  
Male Sex Offenders

The present study intends to study Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eyes with a Feminist approach. It shows how the sex-offenders oppress little black girls in a patriarchal society. The sex-offenders on the other hand are presented as victims of circumstances and their victimization of black girls is justified by portraying the girls to be the cause of the heinous acts committed to violate their innocence. All black girls, despite the claim of the novelist that it is written from their perspective, are presented in the novel to be reasonably oppressed by the male characters. The author through a series of incidents has tried to depict the objectification of the female sex on one side while the victimization of the sex-offenders on the other. It is a strange dichotomy of events and incidents which has been explored through Catherine Belsey’s Textual Analysis as tool of interpreting various scenes and dialogues.

scholarly journals Bid'a in the Perspective of Islamic Theology and Law

ULUMUNA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-219
Author(s):  
Musawar Musawar
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Human Actions ◽  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Critical Term ◽  
Muslim Scholars

Bid’a, literally translated as religious heresy and innovation, has become a topic of controversy amongst Muslims. There are Prophetic traditions that address bid’a  in the most critical term, declaring its perpetrators of misguided persons threatened by hellfire. This paper critically examines the notion of bid’a  and conceptually analyzes it from the perspectives of Islamic theology and law. Based on textual analysis of this term as this is found in some Prophetic traditions and their interpretation by Muslim scholars, this paper shows that the meaning of bid’a  covers various aspects of Islam, including theology and law. Muslims scholars understand the hadith on bid’a  literally and contend that all innovations are misleading. Other scholars, however, suggest that based on their critical examination of the term from linguistic, contextual and practical aspects, not all bid’a  are misguided. These scholars tend to comprehend bid’a  from the perspective of Islam law rather than theology. According to Islamic law, human actions fall into five legal categories: compulsory, recommended, neutral, reprehensible and forbidden. Bid’a must be put into this perspective. In other words, not all new things and innovation are forbidden because they can be categorised as neutral or recommended, depending on the relevant legal considerations.

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