Middle-class Women and Domestic Work in India and the United States: Caste, Race and Patriarchy

This study compares middle-class women’s experience of domestic work in India and the United States(US), highlighting similarities in how domestic work is organised in its paid and unpaid forms across both sites. The focus on middle-class women’s experience as unpaid workers and employers of domestic workers provides an insight into how the social and economic values of domestic work are determined. Despite social and political differences, the political economies of India and the US and interlocking systems of oppression including patriarchy, neoliberalism, caste and race have produced similarities in the undervaluation of domestic work at both sites.

Druze Women and Gender in Druze Society: A Systematic Literature Review

This systematic literature review on Druze women and gender in Druze society reviews central conceptual themes from existing publications to chart future research trajectories. Using a meta-ethnographic methodology, this literature review covers Druze women’s experience of gendered realities in higher education, economic participation, marriage, family life, and health. Our systematic literature review allows us to offer two propositions on existing published knowledge pertaining to Druze women and gender in Druze society. First, we propose that scholarship on Druze women and gender in Druze society constructs Druze women’s experience of gender as not only discursive but material. We incorporate the process of women’s relationship with prohibitive mechanisms of gendered space and men’s experience of masculinist subjectification into an existing term: the spatialization of everyday life. Second, quantitative analysis reveals a disparity in publications between Israel and other countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. We propose that this disparity relates to the concept of “Druze particularism” while emphasizing their difference vis-à-vis Islamic religion and Arab culture. We suggest that future research thoroughly covers other national contexts and inter-national comparisons of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the diaspora, especially in education, economy, and health. Future research trajectories could include examining contemporary sociolegal research on the legal regime that governs family life, research on Druze men from an explicitly feminist perspective, or publications of influential Druze women.

«SILENT ALL THESE YEARS» OR BECOMING IN EVERYDAYNESS: TORI AMOS AND HER POETICS OF THE QUOTIDIAN

Created by the American singer-songwriter Tori Amos «Silent All These Years» is a prominent cultural product of the 1990s in the domain of western popular music. Released in the beginning of the decade it has actualized the current sensibilities, ethically and aesthetically. Deploying the efficient mutual engagement of feminist and postmodernist strategies the author mobilizes the quotidian and performs its intellectual aestheticization. The study focuses on the ways the everyday operates in the song lyrically and musically, as well as on the author’s intention of aestheticizing the mundane. There is an important interdependence between the material circumstances in which the song was created and its genre form of an indie ballad — an ironic gesture that subverts the «heroic» becomes definitive of the piece. The embodied «women’s» experience of the mundane comes as grotesque, «women’s» time threatens to devour the time of «progress», elements of western eschatological mythology undergo domestication and the archetypal image of the Mermaid receives a re-reading, urban everyday vocabulary ruptures the «high» register. An intensification of sameness, repetition and monotony, however, accentuates a non-ironic potentiality of emancipation and insight. The poetics of the quotidian in Amos, thus, presents itself politically by locating the invisibly heroic becoming in everydayness as opposed to a one-time extraordinary action. One of the singular possibilities of such a becoming is a possibility of a continuing, and always risky, dialogic exchange.

Becoming a Homebirther, Smooth Sailing or Rocky Road? An Exploration of Pakeha Women's Experience on the Path to Homebirth

<p>This study explores the experiences of primiparous women on the path to planning the homebirth of their first child. There are many challenges along the way and although there are many supports, society does not generally view homebirth as a safe option. This study highlights the themes emerging about the relative ease or disease of the journey. Was the experience smooth sailing on an undulating ocean or a testing trek along a rocky road? There is a vast body of evidence about homebirth, with much of the quantitative literature being outcome focussed and most of the qualitative literature exploring women's experience of the homebirth-day. Birthing at home has been linked with increased maternal satisfaction compared with other birth venues and correlates with a feeling of maintaining power and control during the birth process. Homebirth has also been shown to have similar rates of intrapartum and neonatal mortality, as well as lower maternal intervention rates, in low risk populations. This study principally investigates the experience of Pakeha New Zealand women on their way to planning a homebirth for their first baby. The findings of this narrative inquiry include that women make the journey to becoming a homebirther both before pregnancy and during pregnancy, and that they need good support and information. Hearing positive homebirth stories, having a midwife who professes a preference for homebirth, and having access to homebirth resources play integral roles in becoming a homebirther.</p>

A Global Silence: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis of Aboriginal Mothering Through Domestic and Family Violence

Aboriginal women globally face extreme risk of violence and their exposure to domestic and family violence (DFV) and state sanctioned violence is increasing. Attention to the impact on Aboriginal mothering is lacking and is underpinned by issues of social justice. This study employs Critical Interpretive Synthesis to examine the evidence on Aboriginal mothering through DFV. Serrant-Green’s Silences Framework was used to structure the critique, understand its problematics and generate an argument to counter the evidential silence. From 6,117 search results, ten publications were reviewed, only four of which substantially addressed Aboriginal mothering in the context of family and domestic violence; a conspicuous absence from the literature about Aboriginal women, children, and mothering. Studies addressing Aboriginal women’s experience of DFV did not credit the issue of mothering. Equally, studies that did address mothering through violence were generally not inclusive of Aboriginal women. Silence, therefore, sits at the nexus of DFV, Aboriginal women, and mothering. While violence against Aboriginal women is acknowledged as a social ill, inattention to mothering in research represents a disregard for Aboriginal women’s mothering identities and roles. Aboriginal women’s voice and citizenship are critical to addressing this issue.

Becoming a Homebirther, Smooth Sailing or Rocky Road? An Exploration of Pakeha Women's Experience on the Path to Homebirth

<p>This study explores the experiences of primiparous women on the path to planning the homebirth of their first child. There are many challenges along the way and although there are many supports, society does not generally view homebirth as a safe option. This study highlights the themes emerging about the relative ease or disease of the journey. Was the experience smooth sailing on an undulating ocean or a testing trek along a rocky road? There is a vast body of evidence about homebirth, with much of the quantitative literature being outcome focussed and most of the qualitative literature exploring women's experience of the homebirth-day. Birthing at home has been linked with increased maternal satisfaction compared with other birth venues and correlates with a feeling of maintaining power and control during the birth process. Homebirth has also been shown to have similar rates of intrapartum and neonatal mortality, as well as lower maternal intervention rates, in low risk populations. This study principally investigates the experience of Pakeha New Zealand women on their way to planning a homebirth for their first baby. The findings of this narrative inquiry include that women make the journey to becoming a homebirther both before pregnancy and during pregnancy, and that they need good support and information. Hearing positive homebirth stories, having a midwife who professes a preference for homebirth, and having access to homebirth resources play integral roles in becoming a homebirther.</p>