There Aint No Cowboys in Portishead (or Are There?): Story Fragments, Identity, and Singing the American Dream With an English Accent

In this performance autoethnography I explore how songs and cowboy images, typically American phenomena, have imprinted my life and have helped provide narrative resources for challenging available stereotypical gender scripts.

Gender fluidity as affordance negotiation

Gender is often viewed as static binary state for people to embody, based on the sex they were assigned at birth. However, cultural studies increasingly understand gender as neither binary nor static, a view supported both in psychology and sociology. On this view, gender is negotiated between individuals, and highly dependent on context. Specifically, individuals are thought to be offered culturally gendered social scripts that allow them and their interlocutors the ability to predict future actions, and to understand the scene being set, establishing roles and expectations. We propose to understand scripts in the framework of enactive-ecological predictivism, which integrates aspects of ecological enactivism, notably the importance of dynamical sensorimotor interaction with an environment conceived as a field of affordances, and predictive processing, which views the brain as a predictive engine that builds its probabilistic models in an effort to reduce prediction error. Under this view, script-based negotiation can be linked to the enactive neuroscience concept of a cultural niche, as a landscape of cultural affordances. Affordances are possibilities for action that constrain what actions are pre-reflectively felt possible based on biological, experiential and cultural multisensorial cues. With the shifting landscapes of cultural affordances brought about by a number of recent social, technological and epistemic developments, the gender scripts offered to individuals are less culturally rigid, which translates in an increase in the variety of affordance fields each individual can negotiate. This entails that any individual has an increased possibility for gender fluidity, as shown by the increasing number of people currently identifying outside the binary.

Good men need to be you dandang: negotiating masculinity in intimate relationships in contemporary China

This article examines Chinese young men’s negotiation of masculinity and male roles in intimate relationships. It addresses how masculine ideals are interpreted and lived out in young men’s experiences of relationships and marriage. Based on data generated through in-depth interviews, it argues that you dandang – being willing to shoulder responsibilities and capable of fulfilling male roles – is the key criterion of masculinity in the intimate sphere. This sentiment captures the complexity and nuances of intimate relationships in the Chinese context, which are imbued with traditional Confucian ethics but also subject to contemporary renegotiation. In order to align themselves with this masculine ideal, Chinese young men deploy different strategies in a reflexive and relational manner, embedded within their personal networks and wider social realities. While there are moments when the patriarchal gender order is questioned and challenged, Chinese men’s intimate experiences often reinstate traditional gender scripts and reinforce male authority.

Queer-Sensible Designing

Conventional design practices regard gender as a given precondition defined by femininity and masculinity. To shift these strategies to include non-heteronormative or queer users, queer theory served as a source of inspiration as well as user sensitive design techniques. As a result, a co-design workshop was developed and executed. Participants supported claims that gender scripts in designed artefacts uphold gender norms. The practice did not specify a definition of a queer design style. However, the co-design practice opened up the design process to non-normative gender scripts by unmasking binary gender dichotomies in industrial design.

COMO PROBLEMATIZAR AS VIOLÊNCIAS DE GÊNERO NA EDUCAÇÃO INFANTIL? UMA PROPOSTA EM DISCUSSÃO

RESUMOEste trabalho tem por objetivo discutir as violências de gênero e suas implicações e consequências na Educação Infantil, pois muitas crianças vivenciam situações de violência intrafamiliar. Nosso compromisso como educadores/as tem sido problematizar o tema, tendo como referencial teórico os Estudos de Gênero e os Estudos Culturais. Para tanto, realizamos um trabalho contínuo com crianças de quatro e cinco anos, em uma EMEI de Novo Hamburgo/RS, sobre Direitos Humanos e equidade de gênero, promovendo atividades lúdicas e leituras literárias, que visam discutir a divisão do trabalho doméstico, modos de resolução de conflitos e o respeito às diferenças. Os resultados apontam que as crianças foram (re)construindo alguns scripts de gênero, trazendo soluções para as divisões de tarefas.Palavras-chave: Violências de gênero. Educação Infantil. Scripts de gênero. Prática pedagógica. ABSTRACTThis work aims to discuss gender violence and its implications and consequences in Early Childhood Education, since many children experience situations of intrafamily violence. Our commitment as educators has been to problematize the theme, having as theoretical reference the Studies of Gender and Cultural Studies. For that, we carried out a continuous work with children of four and five years, in an EMEI of Novo Hamburgo / RS, on Human Rights and gender equality, promoting play activities and literary readings, that aim to discuss the division of domestic work, ways of conflict resolution and respect for differences. The results show that children have been (re) constructing some gender scripts, bringing solutions to task divisions.Keywords: Gender violence. Child education. Gender scripts. Pedagogical practice.

Gendered Quest in Recent Hungarian Fantasy Films

Although the fantastic in print looks back upon a tradition of commenting on issues of race and gender, films that use the mode tend to be more conservative in their approach to subverting the patriarchal script, that is, the tendency of patriarchal society prescribing certain normative behaviors based on gender while punishing deviations from these norms. While this is especially true for blockbuster movies, independent filmmaking has come to appreciate the subversive potential of fantasy. The present study will scrutinize the fantastic as a storytelling mechanism in recent Hungarian cinema, with special emphasis on the uses of the quest formula and its intersections with gender scripts in the films Hurok [‘Loop’] (2016), and Liza, a rókatündér [‘Liza, the Fox-Fairy’] (2015).

Redoing Gender, Redoing Religion

This article advances a critical gender lens on the sociology of religion by arguing that “doing gender” and “doing religion” function as intertwined systems of accountability. To demonstrate the inextricability of these two systems, this study analyzes open-ended survey data from 576 Jewish women who wear kippot (skullcaps that are traditionally worn by Jewish men). These women’s responses reveal that this religious practice is fraught with social sanctions on the basis of the women’s simultaneous gender deviance and religious deviance. These women are not read as simply “doing Jewish” when they wear kippot; rather, they are read as doing something that is implicitly gendered, such as “doing religious feminism.” It appears that when Jewish women “un/re/do religion,” they simultaneously “un/re/do gender” and vice versa: gender scripts and religious scripts are inextricably intertwined.

Challenging gender norms and practices through women’s entrepreneurship

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore the potential of women’s entrepreneurship to bring about greater gender equality. Understanding women’s entrepreneurship as a gendered process (Bird and Brush, 2002), the study presents the challenges encountered by women entrepreneurs as a result of gender ideologies. It documents structural barriers, discriminatory interactions and oppressive gender scripts and their effects on the women and their businesses. Acknowledging women’s possibilities for agency and resistance, the study analyzes how women entrepreneurs conform, contest or negotiate gender scripts and constraints, and looks at the consequences of these actions. Design/methodology/approach Drawing from elements of social interactionism and the doing and undoing gender theories, the authors use a feminist theoretic framework to guide analysis of qualitative data from two focus groups conducted with 19 women entrepreneurs in Colombia. Findings Gender ideologies were manifested in the forms of interrelated structural barriers that restricted women entrepreneurs’ access to resources. Social interactions represented spaces in which gender ideologies were reinforced, but also spaces women used to produce changes through resistance and accommodation strategies. Entrepreneurship was associated with positive changes toward greater gender equality, although negative consequences were reported. Research limitations/implications Due to the limited sample, more studies across countries may be needed for the consolidation of a generalizable theoretical framework. Originality/value This study presents a feminist theoretic framework in dialogue with the lived experiences of women entrepreneurs. It observes the processes of change toward gender equality embedded in business development.