Measuring Gender Role Attitudes in Japan

What explains gender discrimination in Japan? While Japan ranks near the worst among advanced democracies in nearly all cross-national gender equality rankings, we know little about the attitudes that drive disparate outcomes between men and women. To address this need, the authors develop, introduce, and validate the first measure of gender role attitudes in Japan, the Gender Role Scale. Using data from a large, national, quota-based sample of 2,389 Japanese conducted in March 2020, the authors visualize the subcomponents of Gender Role Scale, showing cross-gender differences in attitudes. The findings extend the large literature on politics and gender and provide a measure for reuse in Japan and for extension to other countries that lag behind in women’s empowerment.

Hate Speech in Myanmar

Freedom of expression can be abused in concerning with race, religion or nation, politics and gender and it transfers into a hate speech. This research intends to investigate the gap between the legal ideals and actual practice, especially to understand effectiveness or impact of a draft for the Protection against and Prevention of Hate Speech Law in Myanmar. This paper analyzes the Domestic Laws such as the Constitution of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, 2008 and the Penal Code, 1861 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discriminations against Women (CEDAW) and the Genocide Convention relating to international Conventions and international other documents. This research uses a qualitative approach research method, applying analysis of laws. The draft law is required to balance the right to freedom of expression and the prohibition of hate speech. International human rights laws and standards recognize all protected characteristics of human rights that should be comprised all protecting range of any actions to define “hate speech” in the draft law and should not be restricted to ethnicity, religion, nation, politic and gender. The Government should provide the upcoming Law Protection against and Prevention of Hate Speech in Myanmar urgently.

Posthumanity and the Prison-House of Gender in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs

This article aims to analyze Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs with a deliberate emphasis on posthuman theory, body politics, and gender to construe the transformation of the human body, human-machine nexus, and captivity in inhumanity with a struggle to (re)humanize minds and their bodies. One of the arguments of the paper will be that posthumanism offers a new outlet for breaking the chains of captivity, that is, escaping into non-human to redefine humanity and to emancipate the human mind and human body to notch up a more liberated and more equitable definition of humanity. As gender and sex are further marked by the mechanical and mass-mediated reproduction of human experiences, history, and memory, space and time, postmodern gender theories present a perpetual in-betweenness, transgression and fluidity and the dissolution of grand narratives also resulted in a dissolution of the heteronormative and essentialist uniformity and solidity of the human body. Gender in a posthuman context is characterized by a parallel tendency for reclaiming the possession of the body and sexual identity with a desire to transform the body as a physical entity through plastic surgery, genetic cloning, in vitro fertilization, and computerization of human mind and memory. Therefore, the human body has lost its quality as gendered and sexed and has been imprisoned in an embodiment of infantile innocence and manipulability, a “ghost in the machine,” or a cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism (Haraway). The human-machine symbiosis, then, is exteriorized and extended into a network of objects switching “natural human body” to an immaterialized, dehumanized, and prosthetic “data made flesh.” In this regard, Coupland’s Microserfs boldly explores the potential of posthuman culture to provide a deconstruction of human subjectivity through an analysis of human and machine interaction and to demonstrate how human beings transgress the captivity of humanity by technologizing their bodies and minds in an attempt to become more human than human.

“State Regimes of Gender: Legal Aspects of Gender Identity Registration, Trans-Relevant Policies and Quality of LGBTIQ Lives”: A Roundtable Discussion

<p>This roundtable took place at the European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPG) in July 2019. </p><div><br clear="all" /><div><p> </p><p> </p></div></div>

Ideology in Advertising: Some Implications for Transcreation into Arabic

Ideology has a twofold sense in advertising. One is general and aims to standardize the consumers' needs and traits by globalized means to persuade them to buy the products. The other is specific whereby the advertisement campaigns can introduce, reinforce and /or challenge some ideological values as of politics, religion, race and gender. To sell globally, advertisements are translated into other languages. This requires adjusting the ideological values to the Target Language (TL) audience. When the ideological dimension of the TL is given priority, transcreation, instead of translation per se, becomes the best choice. Unlike the traditional translator who is expected to be faithful to the Source Language (SL), the transcreator should always maintain proximity to the TL ideology so as to avoid unwanted sensitivities of the TL audience and should adopt creative ideas in order to achieve resonance in the TL. The present paper aims to investigate the implications of advertising ideology for transcreation into Arabic. The global advertisement campaigners seem to be aware that Arabic and Islam represent a unified ideology represented in values of national identity, politics and gender. Most transcreation of these campaigns have achieved both proximity to the TL audience and creativity of ideas that do not clash with the ideological status quo in the Arab World. But despite the laudable reputation of transcreation nowadays in the Translation Studies literature as the best strategy of advertisement translation, it looks like it cannot escape the twofold sense of ideology in those texts. While it does embrace diversity of ideological values of SL and TL, an advertisement campaign transcreation is unable to outbalance the general and more solid ideology of standardizing the consumers' needs and motives.