Experiencing Gender Regimes: Accounts of Women Professors in Mexico, the UK and Sweden

This article investigates differences between statistics on gender equality in Mexico, the UK and Sweden, and similarities in women professors’ career experiences in these countries. We use Acker’s inequality regime framework, focusing on gender, to explore our data, and argue that similarities in women professors’ lived experiences are related to an image of the ideal academic. This ideal type is produced in the interplay of the university gender regime and other gender regimes, and reproduced through the process of structuration: signification, domination and legitimation. We suggest that the struggle over legitimation can also be a trigger for change.

Orbánistan and the Anti-gender Rhetoric in Hungary

This chapter introduces Hungary’s anti-liberal political rule and its gender regime. It traces policy changes in Hungary since 2010, discusses the legacies of the state socialist gender regimes and the formation of a new, anti-liberal one. I introduce the term “carefare” and discuss how the concept of “gender” has been deployed by Hungarian politicians to legitimate an increase in women’s unpaid care burden and their lack of attention to gender inequality in the labor market. I end the chapter with a description of my research methods and provide an outline for the rest of the book.

Muslim Fashionistas in Contemporary Turkey

Turkey’s Islamic fashion market transformed during the 2010s with the entry of young, bourgeois, fashion-conscious Muslim female entrepreneurs. As designers, manufacturers, and retailers, these “Muslim fashionistas” not only gained the attention of young Muslim women but also became lifestyle gurus, projecting images of the successful entrepreneur, the ideal mother, the benevolent philanthropist, and the leisure enthusiast. This combination of roles resonates with the notion of the “ideal Muslim woman” promoted by the government. But its performance entails moments of imperfection and moral dilemma, as the demands of capitalism and consumerism place Muslim fashionistas in opposition to the teachings of their faith and traditional gender regimes. Drawing on practice theory, and on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Istanbul, this article explores Muslim fashionistas’ everyday performances in the fields of family, charity, and leisure. The objective is to analyze how these agents negotiate and interpret quotidian inconsistencies between their religious and social ideals and those ideals’ manifestation.

Girl YouTubers in Peru as economic agents negotiating gender and class identities

The study examines the role of children as producers, distributors, and consumers in the digital realm. Additionally, it also explores class and gender identities they create and perform in this modality. We focus on young female YouTubers (8–11 years old) from Peru, a country that has experienced significant economic expansion in the first decades of the 21st century. The study analyzes 40 videos created by five girl YouTubers. The discussion addresses the economic role children perform in the digital economy as they produce value through content creation, distribute goods, and engage in globalized consumption. The paper also discusses the ways girls display gender and class identities in their products and their consumption patterns. Throughout the analysis, we use the key concept of children’s agency; the discussion reveals both the concept’s reach and limitations in the context of consumer culture, gender regimes, and neoliberal policies.

Self-Employed Women in Europe: Lack of Opportunity or Forced by Necessity?

The gender gap in self-employment is one of the most resilient in labour participation. While for some, this gap is the result of women’s lack of opportunities to become self-employed, for others, it reflects women’s preference to stay in paid employment. This article investigates the motivations behind women’s decision (either from opportunity or necessity) to start a business in 17 European countries. Results from the analysis suggest that individual resources are fundamental in explaining women’s motivations to become entrepreneurs. The type of gender regime and the economic situation in their country also play a role in women’s decisions to start a business. Women are more likely to be driven due to opportunity in dual-earner gender regimes than elsewhere, and high levels of unemployment produced by the economic crisis have boosted women’s self-employment from necessity. These findings are discussed in relation to the gender gap in self-employment.

Gender and Education in Postcolonial Contexts

Education has been a central institution in the installation and legitimation of gender binaries and racialized difference in colonial and postcolonial eras. While the term “postcolonial” can refer to the period after which colonized nations gained their independence, a postcolonial critique also engages with the afterlife of the metaphysics of Western modernity. Notably, the imperial project of Western modernity assumed the superiority of the colonizers and provided the legitimation for the deep injustices of colonization to be framed as a “civilizing mission.” In particular, the processes of colonization imposed a “modern/colonial gender system,” which reconstructed the gender norms of many societies around the world, and which subordinated women by binding them to the domestic sphere. Its “biologic” presumed a heterosexual matrix in ways that were also profoundly racialized. Importantly, education was a critical institution that not only legitimated Western knowledges and values, but also secured women’s regulation and subordination. In postcolonial eras, education was given central importance in ways that have tied it to modern imperatives. For the newly independent postcolonial nation, education was critical in the construction of a national imaginary but this framing has reproduced rather than disrupting colonial gender norms. Harnessing education in support of national development inserted the postcolonial nation in a hierarchy of “developed” and “developing” nations. The focus on development similarly permeated efforts at curricular reform, such that they often reproduced the gendered, racialized, and classed hierarchies of colonial education. What counted as legitimate knowledge remained framed by Western elite institutions and their technologies of power. Importantly, from the moment of their independence, the global reach of multilateral organizations has constantly framed the postcolonial trajectories of “developing” nations and their educational reforms. Although often contradictory, the discourses of such organizations intensified the imperatives of education for national development. This compounded pressures to increase educational access beyond elite groups and to include more females. However, the technologies of power that support these international policy agendas bind such reforms to modern imperatives, so that they have become a critical site for the reinscription of binary understandings of gender. This is also true for contemporary international concerns for “quality” education. This is prosecuted largely through promotion of learner-centered education, a concept that is also infused with Western democratic ideals and values. Interrogation of the “hidden curriculum” further shows that the education in postcolonial contexts remains a key institution through which gender is instantiated in essentialized and binary ways, infused by modern ideals of presumptive heteronormativity. Resisting such binaries requires an understanding of gender as something that we “do,” or that we “perform,” within the contingencies and exigencies of particular social and cultural contexts. In turn, these theoretical understandings call for in-depth qualitative studies that can attend to the particularities of the gender regimes in different educational contexts and other intersecting structures of difference (race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality) that are rendered invisible by education’s legitimation of difference as a question of disembodied individual merit and ability.

Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value

This article takes the presentation of mechanical and informatic models in Samuel Delany's Neveryóna as an occasion to examine the relations of force, abstraction, information, and differential valuation that constitute racial capitalism. In order to do this, the article considers the continuities and divergences between the principles those models demonstrate, the lessons on value and economic determination that precede them, and Delany's subsequent presentation of surplus populations, intricated “free” and slave labor, and the modes of racialized differentiation that shape and are shaped in the interstices of those social formations. In Delany's sword-and-sorcery bildungsroman, the models illustrate the abstract logic of value, show that logic to be informatic in character, and point toward a dialectical relationship between this informatic logic and the concrete practices of dispossession that produce and operate through ascriptive race and gender regimes. Value's abstract operations are too often understood to be incommensurable with such regimes, yet Delany's presentation deploys the language and processes associated with informatics to reveal an essential relationship between the abstract network that results from value's mediating function and the modes of ascription and concrete violence that, as a result of such mediation, tend to be associated with precapitalist or noncapitalist social formations.

A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Feminist Reflections on the EU’s Crisis Responses

As critics are quick to point out, the European Union (EU) has entered the crisis phase of its evolution. It could be argued that crisis management is now the EU’s new normal. Dealing with both endogenous (e.g., economic crisis and Brexit) and exogenous crises (e.g., the migrant crisis and COVID-19), the EU is facing a whole new set of challenges that has the potential to destabilize the complex institutional balance that has maintained the process of European integration over the last 70 years. In this environment of rapid responses, gender+ equality has frequently been compromised. As we argue in this article, the implications of this backsliding are grave not only for equality but also for the European Union as a whole. Drawing on Walby’s concept of gender regimes and social transformation, we consider current crises and the EU’s responses to those crises to highlight potentially dangerous shifts in the European gender regime. With crisis response increasingly supporting a neo-liberal gender regime, the current state of perpetual crisis in the European institutions does not bode well for the future of equality.