Conceptual foundations of organizational structure: re-structuring of women's health services

PurposeResearchers often debate health service structure. Understanding of the practical implications of this debate is often limited by researchers' neglect to integrate participants' views on structural options with discourses those views represent. As a case study, this paper aims to discern the extent to which and how conceptual underpinnings of stakeholder views on women's health contextualize different positions in the debate over the ideal structure of health services.Design/methodology/approachThe researchers chose a self-standing, comprehensive women's health service facing the prospect of being dispersed into “mainstream” health services. The researchers gathered perspectives of 53 professional and consumer stakeholders in ten focus groups and seven semi-structured interviews, analyzed through inductive thematic analysis.Findings“Women's marginalization” was the core theme of the debate over structure. The authors found clear patterns between views on the function of women's health services, women's health needs, ideal client group, ideal health service structure and particular feminist discourses. The desire to re-organize services into separate mainstream units reflected a liberal feminist discourse, conceiving marginalization as explicit demonstration of its effects, such as domestic abuse. The desire to maintain a comprehensive women's health service variously reflected post-structural feminism's emphasis on plurality of identities, and a radical feminist discourse, holding that womanhood itself constituted a category of marginalization – that is, merely being at risk of unmet health needs.Originality/valueAs a contribution to health organizational theory, the paper shows that the discernment of discursive underpinnings of particular stakeholder views can clarify options for the structure of health services.

Created After, From, and For the Man?

This article examines the diachronic development of Shiʿi exegetic discourse on the sentence Khalaqakum min nafs wāḥida wa-khalaqa minhā zawjahā (“created you from a single soul and created its mate from it”) in the Quranic verse 4:1, customarily read as describing the creation of the first couple, Adam and Eve. Applying feminist discourse analysis and focusing on the Arabic-language commentaries of twelve premodern Imāmī exegetes from the third/ninth to the eleventh/seventeenth century, my study reveals that the medieval commentary material both accumulated and transformed along a hermeneutical trajectory comprising three distinctive discursive stages. The first stage established the lore on Eve’s creation in dismissive terms, and the second strengthened these misogynous views to make the potential substance of Eve’s creation even more negligible. This concept was further expanded in the third discursive stage, in which the weak woman, inclined toward the material and the corporal, was seen as created to provide service and entertainment for the man. Her creation was thus used to justify gender hierarchy, even the seclusion of women.

Exploring the Feminization of Backseat Gaming Through Girlfriend Reviews YouTube Channel

This paper scrutinizes the feminization of backseat gaming by examining the successful YouTube gaming reviews channel, Girlfriend Reviews. As video games are considered a male-dominated hobby, this channel, which provides the perspective of a male gamer’s girlfriend offers a compelling case study to explore the ways in which women can access the gaming community. Through analyzing the opinions and sentiments expressed in the comment sections, we explore how viewers engage with the channel and why they support or condone it. We argue that viewers gravitate toward the channel for three significant reasons: the girlfriend being (1) a supportive backseat gamer, (2) who holds no prior knowledge on gaming, and (3) does not engage with feminist discourse. We argue that the position of “the girlfriend”/“backseat gamer” provides women an alternative pathway into the gaming community. However, moments of pushback demonstrate the fragility of women’s position in such presumed male-dominated communities.

Ökonomien der Liebe

Using the terms »reproductive labour« and »care«, the contribution traces the feminist discourse on (domestic) labour. The focus is on two publications from 1977 and 2019 that, despite different theoretical traditions, refer to love as a justification for gendered social inequalities. However, love is conceptualised here one-dimensionally as an inequality-creating variable. For this reason, the contribution argues for an integration of emotion-sociological approaches into the current care debate.

Women in Culture. Introduction to the Issue

The late 1960s and early 1970s development of liberation discourses (postcolonial, racial, ethnic, gender, environmental, etc.) resulted in them turning not only and not so much into an intellectual strategy, but instead, in their entering culture as social practices, and becoming the main patterns of behavior and models of thinking. 1 In this context, the feminist discourse, 2 which initially developed as a political and legal narrative of the struggle for women’s rights, unfortunately became a world view and even an ideological discourse of opposition and competition between the sexes as it spread. In view of the above, the current cultural situation pursued by feminist activists in terms of gender can be described as a struggle for alpha leadership between an antagonist and a protagonist in the course of a liberation discourse (Gaag, 2014; Carrigan, Connell & Lee, 1985, pp. 551–604; Wood, 2011). Such a struggle is also often described in the terminology of Darwinian natural selection and, therefore, it is realized in social practices as an all-out war between the “oppressors” and the “oppressed,” justified by the criteria of biological (non)utility in nature or society.

Renewing Relationships? Solitudes, Decolonisation, and Feminist International Policy

In this article we seek to understand how gendered coloniality is re-affirmed and reproduced. It does so by analysing the inter-national relationships formalised through two recent policy initiatives by the Government of Canada: its Feminist International Assistance Policy and ongoing bilateral mechanisms with Indigenous peoples organisations. Using feminist discourse analysis, we argue that the logics underpinning these initiatives are treated as mutually exclusive, with the result being solitudes across policy areas – Indigenous reconciliation and feminist governance – that should instead overlap. Our analysis suggests that in addition to failing to address systemic marginalisation, establishing exclusive domains of feminist and reconciliation policy reproduces gendered coloniality through the building of inter-national relationships. Ultimately, this results in a failure of both policy initiatives.

On Shifting Ground: Self-narrative, Feminist Theory and Writing Practice

<p>This thesis centres on a problem that stands at the heart of feminist theory: how women may come to understand themselves as speaking subjects located within historically specific, discursive social structures, to question those structures aloud, and to seek to change them. It combines self-narrative, feminist theory and writing practice to make sense of a body of published work which I produced between 1984 and 1999, with a consistent focus on some form of gendered discourse, by setting it in its personal, historical, and theoretical contexts. Although the thesis is built around published work, it is not primarily about results or outcomes, but rather about a set of active historical processes. Taking the form of a spirally structured critical autobiography spanning five and a half decades, it traces how one voice of what I have termed feminist oppositional imagining has emerged and taken its own worded shape. First, it constructs a double story of coming to writing and coming to feminism, in order to explore the formation of a writing subject and show the critical importance of the connections between subjectivity and oppositional imagining, and to highlight the need to find ways of producing knowledge which do not rely on the notion of the detached observer. Secondly, in a deliberate shift of form and focus, it steps back to canvass the historical context for the work I produced in response to the discursive shift that has become known as the New Right. It argues that by usefully enforcing a focus on the necessity of a commitment to social justice and human interdependence, this shift spurred the development of a feminist discourse, centred on unpaid work, which is capable of understanding and countering New Right perspectives on what it means to be a human being and to live in human society.</p>

On Shifting Ground: Self-narrative, Feminist Theory and Writing Practice

<p>This thesis centres on a problem that stands at the heart of feminist theory: how women may come to understand themselves as speaking subjects located within historically specific, discursive social structures, to question those structures aloud, and to seek to change them. It combines self-narrative, feminist theory and writing practice to make sense of a body of published work which I produced between 1984 and 1999, with a consistent focus on some form of gendered discourse, by setting it in its personal, historical, and theoretical contexts. Although the thesis is built around published work, it is not primarily about results or outcomes, but rather about a set of active historical processes. Taking the form of a spirally structured critical autobiography spanning five and a half decades, it traces how one voice of what I have termed feminist oppositional imagining has emerged and taken its own worded shape. First, it constructs a double story of coming to writing and coming to feminism, in order to explore the formation of a writing subject and show the critical importance of the connections between subjectivity and oppositional imagining, and to highlight the need to find ways of producing knowledge which do not rely on the notion of the detached observer. Secondly, in a deliberate shift of form and focus, it steps back to canvass the historical context for the work I produced in response to the discursive shift that has become known as the New Right. It argues that by usefully enforcing a focus on the necessity of a commitment to social justice and human interdependence, this shift spurred the development of a feminist discourse, centred on unpaid work, which is capable of understanding and countering New Right perspectives on what it means to be a human being and to live in human society.</p>

Specifics of Modern Ukrainian Feminism (Sociophilosophical Section of the Problem)

The article is devoted to the study of the specifics of modern Ukrainian feminism as a theoretical discourse and practical experience. As a theory, feminism is presented in a wide cross-sectional range of research (in history, philosophy, psychology, literary studies, political science, cultural research, pedagogy, etc.) from gender studies to essays on women's history. Observing the thirty-year progress of feminism in Ukraine and not delving into the discussion of, relatively speaking, "aboriginality" / "foreignness" of feminism for Ukraine, we can draw certain conclusions about the peculiarities of its progress in this area. It seems that this specificity consists in two parallel processes that directly relate to feminism. Namely: the development of the so-called "open" pro-Western type of feminism and a parallel process – the formation of the "disguised" feminism, adapted to the level of mass consciousness of modern Ukrainians. The "open" feminism is actively developing in Ukraine primarily in the academic environment, and in this respect it, as an emancipatory movement, coincides with Ukrainian democratic nationalism as a process of national liberation of Ukrainians. The "disguised" Ukrainian feminism, using traditional vocabulary and mythology, fills them with a fundamentally new meaning. The most striking example of such transformations is the phenomenon of berehynstvo (female guardianship). Based on the analysis, the author concludes that the specificity of modern Ukrainian feminism is its "dual nature": "openness" of the Western type of feminism, most characteristic of academic feminist discourse in Ukraine and "disguise" of feminist practices that "fit" the stereotypes of mass consciousness of modern Ukrainians’ traditional mythological ideas. The originality of these processes, their adequacy to the current state of development of the Ukrainian society, which, in the end, allows us to call it "Ukrainian feminism", is also noted.