Women and Men Municipal Managers Doing and Undoing Gender

Drawing on the literature from critical gender studies and feminist critiques of bureaucracy, we explore the demands for gender work created when women occupy traditionally masculine roles in municipal government management. The article traces the work performed when municipal managers and municipalities respond to gendered demands, maintain gender perceptions, and negotiate gendered expectations, collectively referred to as gender work. To examine this process, we apply inductive qualitative method to analyze 21 semistructured interviews with men and women municipal managers in southeast United States. Our study reveals gender work at different levels of organizational hierarchies and in multiple ways. We find that women CAOs perform masculine gender work to negotiate a place in municipal leadership. We also find that municipal governments and men CAOs do feminine gender work to cultivate an environment for women to occupy counterstereotypical roles. This study suggests that jobs, institutional rules and policies, informal arrangements, work structures, and individuals’ private lives interplay to require gender work from women that is more complex and more demanding than that required of men in the same roles.

Legacies of Violence: Examining the Relationship Between Gender and Ethnic Cleansing

Traditional examinations of genocidal violence tend to focus on ethnic divisions and often fail to consider the impact of gender with respect to conflict. Building from the work that critical gender studies has made in post-conflict peacebuilding, this paper will look at cases that illustrate how targeting women within specific ethnic groups is an effective means of achieving genocidal goals. It will pay particular attention to the well-known events of the Rwandan genocide and draw comparisons to the legacies of the Indigenous genocide in Canada. Moreover, it will argue that the current crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada is related to a project of genocide fuelled by settler colonialism.

Violencia de (L) género: “Hacia una sofística de la materialidad de los cuerpos” / Violent gender: “To a sophistry of the materiality of bodies”

Los estudios críticos de género sustancialistas desconocen su posición teórico-política en el momento de explayar algunas de sus hipótesis fundamentales. El presente estudio intenta dar cuenta de las consecuencias éticas que asume llevar hasta el final algunas de estas posiciones teóricas. Advertimos así que obras fundamentales de estos estudios se apropian con claridad, y sin saberlo, de una lógica aristotélica para tratar la asunción material del cuerpo, el sujeto y el género ¿Qué encontramos específicamente en esta lógica? Esta última se caracteriza por tener su raíz en una ontología inamovible, en donde cualquier intento de desbaratar el “ser” tiene como respuesta inmediata la exclusión violenta de la diferencia: concretamente observamos esto, dialogando tanto con colegas como legos, en la “violencia académica” pero también en la “violencia cotidiana” ¿Cómo salir del cierre metafísico que ha mantenido durante décadas la violencia y exclusión de aquello que se generó en primera instancia, paradójicamente, como argumentación de tolerancia y emancipación? Pensamos que deconstruyendo el discurso de género aristotélico podremos vislumbrar nuevas hipótesis y posiciones ético-políticas que no recurran, para validarse, a la exclusión violenta de nuevos cuerpos-sujetos-géneros. Some critical gender studies do not know their theoretical and political position at the time to developing some of their basic assumptions. This study attempts to explain the ethical consequences that lead to the end some of these theoretical positions. We realize that fundamental works of these studies clearly appropriating, and without knowing it, an aristotelian logic to justify the assumption of material body, the subject and gender. What specifically found in this logic? It is characterized to found on an immovable ontology, where any attempt to disrupt the “being” has as an immediate violent response to exclude the difference: specifically we observe this, dialoguing with colleagues and laymen, in the “academic violence” but also “everyday violence”. How to get out of the metaphysical closure that maintained for decades the violence and exclusion of what is generated in the first place, paradoxically, as argument of tolerance and emancipation? We think deconstructing the aristotelian discourse of gender can warn new hypotheses and ethical positions that not based, to validate, on a violent exclusion of new bodies-subject-genres positions.