Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Professional Night for Youths

Extracurricular science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) activities are an engaging way to introduce historically minoritized youths to STEM. In this article, I describe one such event, a Women in STEM Professional Night, designed to connect eighth-grade girls with women in STEM careers. This interactive event provides a personalized connection to STEM, helps combat gendered stereotypes, and builds girls’ self-identification with STEM. Best practices include a carefully structured event, inviting a diverse group of women STEM professionals, and intentional preparation of all participants to set expectations. These insights serve as a guide for Extension professionals interested in creating a similar event.

GENDER INEQUALITY REPRESENTED IN ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Ideologies are contested through discourses; thus, textbooks can be a fertile ground for implanting the prevalence of women's marginalization in society, or they can also be used for deconstructing the ideology. The present study aims to provide a general map of how English as a foreign language reflects gendered stereotypes. The study was library research that used the results of previous studies to answer the research questions. Using George's method, the study chose thirty articles published in 2010 - 2021, then critically reviewed. The critical reading was continued with mapping the results of the studies, and their arguments on gender stereotypes included English as Foreign Language textbooks worldwide. The review revealed that there had been prevalent marginalization of women in English textbooks reflected through the depiction of women as less dominant, inferior than men, primarily domestic, generally weak, powerless, voiceless, and passive. Such male prevalence was also found in Indonesian EFL textbooks. Many previous studies admit that male prevalence and women marginalization in EFL textbooks reflect reality in society. Nevertheless, the present study takes the standpoint that calls for the utilization of textbooks to deconstruct gendered binary oppositions that marginalize women by deliberately designing textbooks that impart awareness about gender equity.

After the madhouses: the emotional politics of psychiatry and community care in the UK tabloid press 1980–1995

The deinstitutionalisation of mental hospital patients made its way into UK statutory law in 1990 in the form of the NHS and the Community Care Act. The Act ushered in the final stage of asylum closures moving the responsibility for the long-term care of mentally ill individuals out of the NHS and into the hands of local authorities. This article examines the reaction to the passing of the Act in two major tabloid presses, The Sun and The Daily Mirror, in order to reveal how community care changed the emotional terrain of tabloid storytelling on mental health. Reviewing an archive of 15 years of tabloid reporting on mental illness, I argue that the generation of ‘objects of feeling’ in the tabloid media is dependent on the availability of recognisable and stable symbols. Tabloid reporting of mental illness before 1990 reveals the dominance of the image of the asylum in popular understandings of mental illness. Here the asylum is used to generate objects of hatred and disgust for the reader, even as it performs a straightforward othering and distancing function. In these articles, the image of the asylum and its implicit separation of different types of madness into categories also do normative gender work as mental illness is represented along predictable gendered stereotypes. By performing the abolition of asylums, the 1990 Act appears to have triggered a dislodging of these narrative norms in the tabloid press. After 1990, ‘asylum stories’ are replaced with ‘community care stories’ which contain more contradictory and confusing clusters of feeling. These stories rest less heavily on gendered binaries while also demonstrating a near-frantic desire on the part of the mass media for a return of institutional containment. Here, clusters of feeling becoming briefly ‘unstuck’ from their previous organisations, creating a moment of affective flux.

The Visual Construction of the Romanian Militarized Masculinity on Romanian Army’s Facebook Pages

Because nowadays’ world is visually saturated, many social re- searchers are using visual methods to understand how images contribute to the shaping and perpetuation of social constructs, norms, and behaviors. Gender is such a construct, and the beliefs and principles that contributed to the social and visual construction of gender have been broadly argued in the last decades. However, in today’s digitalized world, there is a space poorly explored by gender and visual researchers, namely how the army as a media actor contributes to the construction of masculinity through the images it promotes online. Thus, with the purpose to explore this gap, the present paper examines how the Romanian armed forces visually construct the militarized masculinity on their official Facebook pages, highlighting how those images contribute to the consolidation of the existing gendered stereotypes. Through the photos it disseminates, the Romanian Army le- gitimizes the main role of men in defending the country by revealing de- sirable male characteristics and the high degree of connectivity with the military theatre.

Marie Spartali-Stillman’s feminism against Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood gender stereotypes art

In the middle of the 19th century Great Britain, Queen Victoria had been imposing her new ethical code system on social and cultural conditions, sharpening evidently the already abyssal differences of the gendered stereotypes. The Pre-Raphaelite painters reacted to the sterile way of painting dictated by the art academies, both in terms of thematology and technique, by suggesting a new, revolutionary way of painting, but were unable to escape their monolithic gender stereotypes culture. Using female models for their heroines who were often identified with the degraded position of the Victorian woman, they could not overcome their socially systemic views, despite their innovative art ideas and achievements. However, art, in several forms, executed mainly by women, played a particularly important role in projecting several types of feminism, in a desperate attempt to help the Victorian woman claim her rights both in domestic and public sphere. This article aims at exploring and commenting on the role of Marie Spartali-Stillman, one of the most charismatic Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood models and later famous painter herself, in the painting scene of the time. Through the research of her personal and professional relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites, and mainly through an in depth analysis of selected paintings, the authors try to shed light on the way in which M. Spartali-Stillman managed to introduce her subversive feminist views through her work, following in a way the feministic path of other female artists of her time. The ways and the conditions, under which the painter managed to project women as dominant, self-sufficient and empowered, opposing their predetermined social roles, have also been revised.

The Marketing of Female Escorts: A Gendered Perspective of Online Companionship Advertisements

Advancement of technology has broadened possibilities for people working in the sex industry. Specifically, sex workers’ use of online classified advertisement websites to market companionship and escort services has increased in recent years, yet research has lagged behind these developments. This study addresses the gap in research by examining female companionship advertisements on one of the most popular websites: Backpage.com . The lead author qualitatively analyzed over 1,500 advertisements to identify common themes and patterns in how escort companions were described. This study explores the type of identity claims escort companions make and how they formulate advertisements to appeal to a broad client base. Research on gendered stereotypes is used to interpret escort companions’ use of language, symbols, and photography, through covert and overt messaging. Study results revealed that women offering companion services promoted and reinforced traditional gendered stereotypes through their online advertisements. Findings may be used to understand the context of sex work.

“Be Soft”: Irony, Postfeminism, and Masculine Positions in Swedish Sport Betting Commercials

Gambling advertising usually draws heavily on gendered stereotypes, including portrayals of male gamblers as tough and successful. Meanwhile, representations of men in advertising have grown increasingly diverse, with emotional and sexualized men accompanying heroic, muscular portrayals. In this article, both these bodies of research are drawn upon to discuss a series of Swedish sports betting commercials which encourage the viewer to “bet hard” while also “being soft.” The celebration of “softness” is ambiguous but can be seen as referencing gendered, political discussions about men and masculinity. Engaging with hybrid masculinities theory, postfeminism, and discourses about gambling and betting, the article demonstrates that meanings around “softness” are ambiguous, ironic, and serve to normalize gambling by distancing it from discourses about addiction. The commercials represent a shift in gambling advertising, but the linking of men’s politics to gambling also represents a new complexity in narratives about “new,” or “soft,” men.

“I’m Wise to the Game”: How Inner-City Women Experience and Navigate Police Raids

Despite the plethora of research on inner-city policing, little is known about how women experience and make sense of involuntary police encounters. Based upon interviews with women who had their homes raided by police in Toronto’s inner-city, this paper explores how these marginalized women perceive, navigate, and resist normative gender expectations in their interactions with police officers during raids. Our findings demonstrate that women believed officers treated them according to gendered stereotypes, and in response, women strategically deployed gendered presentations in an effort to resist, negotiate, and temper anticipated raid related harms. However, participants’ positionality constrained their efforts.

Race, Femininity, and School Suspension

Research has suggested that the disproportionate number of Black girls subject to school discipline is not due entirely to their higher levels of misbehavior, but racial and gendered stereotypes surrounding Black girls’ femininity. This study uses student-level data from two national longitudinal multi-site program evaluations, Teens, Crime and the Community/Community Works and the second evaluation of the Gang Resistance Educational and Training program to assess whether the relationship between self-report delinquent behavior and subsequent suspension differs for Black girls relative to other racial/gender groups. In doing so, I find some support for racial and gendered disciplinary experiences of Black girls.