Women, law, and collective action

This chapter makes significant headway in advancing our current thinking on gender rights in BRICS countries. It examines the strategic decisions made by women’s organizations to further their goal of advancing gender equality. Analysing gender negotiation using the lens of a second order collective action problem, the first part evaluates the costs and benefits for women’s organizations in negotiating how to overcome dominant social norms. Tracing how women’s organizations in China and India undertake strategic negotiations to overcome discrimination indicates that what is deemed to be appropriate behaviour for women, both as participants in the labour force as well as contributors to the household, provides a promising way to engage the economics of identity. The latter part of the chapter goes on to examine the role played by public interest litigation in ensuring gender equality in spheres of the household/community as well as the labour market.

Defining mGender

The authors coin the term mGender to refer to the strand of mobile communication research concerning the role of mobile phone use in gender construction processes. From a gender lens, they map out the landscape of extant scholarship, categorizing its historical progression into four phases. In general, the research focus has evolved from mobile phone use for doing gender to undoing gender to being without guarantees, culminating in contextualized interpretations of the part played by the phone. The authors suggest that future mGender research broaden the investigation, shifting from solely examining mobile mediated individual gender negotiation to understanding the transformation of gendered social power structures. Additionally, more inclusive constructions of mGender would allow for scholarly exploration of the possible social meanings embodied by mobile phone use of underrepresented social groups, such as LGBTQ communities, in their largely ignored gender construction processes.

Cuteness, friendship, and identity in the brony community

I examine the practices of fan productivity and gender negotiation in brony fandom, the community of primarily college-age men who are fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (2010–). I examine the contours of brony textual and material practices, noting how productivity within the fandom plays a role in the negotiation of identity and community ethos. I also consider the implications of cuteness in the fandom and discuss how this aesthetic and its corresponding narrative have led to the development of a unique discursive mode among bronies, which I term the discourse of friendship. Drawing on Matthew Gutmann's theory of contradictory consciousness, I argue that the discourse of friendship is an innovative framework that encourages new ways of taking part in existing social institutions that destabilize hegemonic masculinity.