Escape to Germany in Syrian Television Drama: From Cross-Cultural Gender Constructions to Transnational Tropes of Masculinity and Homeland

Looking at programs from the 1960s onward, this article shows the persistence and evolution of the gender imbalance in Syrian television characters' relationships with Germany. Before the 2011 uprising, screenwriters linked women charac ters to Germany as a way to challenge patriarchal standards of sexuality and gendered conceptions of national belonging. As the war has ensued, this trope has vanished. Meanwhile, long-standing narratives about men emigrating to Germany continue to represent abandonment of the homeland and have become intensified through nationalist nostalgia.

Doing Gender and Reshaping the Self: The Rehabilitation Narratives of TBI Survivors

This article provides a review of selected studies conducted in recent years on the relationship between gender identity and recovery following traumatic brain injury (TBI) with the goal of determining whether gender constructions play a role in the lived experience of TBI survivors. The studies reviewed show that psychosocial issues resulting from perceived difficulties in doing gender can be a burden to successful recovery and that addressing these constructions can have a positive influence on long-term results. Consequently, the author argues that gender should be considered a critical element in the aetiology and management of psychosocial issues following the injury and that a combination of factors should be addressed when looking at gendered aspects of post-TBI recovery, including attitudes toward care, motivation and satisfaction with rehabilitation outcomes. In particular, stronger collaboration between the medical field and social sciences is encouraged, with the aim of exploring individual perspectives and experiences especially on a larger scale than what has currently been achieved.

I’m Taking Back My Body (The Female Body in the ‘Purity’ Culture)

This paper aims to analyse the American purity movement by examining how the female body became part of an ideology offered as the most viable solution to moral and cultural crises and how this generated counterreactions from the members of the evangelical community (insiders and outsiders alike) since the evangelical discourse on body with its gender-based expressions produces schematised gender constructions and toxic forms of masculinity and femininity that generate confusion, shame and guilt. The four American writers mentioned here (Dianna Anderson, Bromleigh McCleneghan, Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey) agree that biblical womanhood is a myth; a woman’s body is not what “purity” culture suggests it should be; human sexuality is more than premarital abstinence and a set of rules; sacredness is not the appanage of marital sex. The red thread of all four writings is given by the non-dualistic thinking (rejecting Neoplatonic dichotomous separation between body and spirit) that asserts women’s right to body ownership, a sexual ethics based on consent, mutuality, safety and respect, gender equality and partnership. Anderson, McCleneghan, Evans and Bessey are also among the fiercest contesters of the “purity” movement, an American evangelical movement that reduced purity to its genital dimension and salvation to purification of sexual desire.

Why Do Men Not Disclose Their Sexual Abuse History?

When it comes to childhood sexual abuse (CSA), gender is a huge water divisor. Cases of male victims are less reported, less studied, and receive less help. This paper reflects on some of the myths and misconceptions involving male sexual abuse, trying to understand social contributors for why victims stand so much in the shadows. Misconceptions seem to be highly influenced by social factors such as gender constructions, adding so many barriers that access to treatment becomes more difficult and leads to worse outcomes. The prejudice and invisibility involved are so strong that they penetrate clinicians, who are less prompt to identify and work with male victims. They are neither seen nor heard, are not perceived as victims, and therefore not supported and not treated as such. This is a call for furthering studies, public debates, social awareness, and professional training in the field.

“Castration or Decapitation?” A Feminist Reading of Two Stories by Angela Carter

This article examines two stories by Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber” (1979) and “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter” (1974) to account for Carter’s unique and ambivalent dismantling of patriarchal myths. Carter conflates two patriarchal tropes, castration and decapitation, to figure the oppression of women while allowing for an avenue of resistance. Using the French version of feminism, the work of Hélène Cixous in particular, the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan, and the postmodern critique of Linda Hutcheon, the article contends that Carter uses the trope of decapitation to link beheading to loss of agency and thus to serve her project of exposing violent patriarchal and sexual structures. She utilizes decapitation to interrogate female inferiority and project its castrating impact on those women who are threatened with this punishment. Decapitation, however, becomes a means of undermining patriarchal logic from within since Carter reverses its targets and logic just as she does with castration. Carter’s act of conflating castration and decapitation and unsettling their connotations revises power structures and challenges attributing castration to men and decapitation to women, offering a postmodern critique of patriarchal fixities, oppressive boundaries, and negative gender constructions imposed on women.

Gender, education and men's health: some approaches on formation

Social, political and cultural roles are in a continuous process of reconstruction. In this sense, relevant reflections on the production of masculinity and gender conceptions are necessary. Understanding how professionals are trained and how the current curricula are arranged will help us to understand how much gender constructions influence this process. We aimed to analyze the training of professionals on Men's Health, with regard to theoretical-practical perspectives and their relationship with training in gender and its specificities. Studies show that there should be a better preparation of users and professionals in the area to serve men in services. Satisfactory curriculum standards and qualified professionals are indispensable to achieve the completeness of the contents. It is identified the need to promote changes in professional training in order to bring it closer to the concepts and principles that will enable universal and integral attention of the subjects, including gender issues.

Male parody, sketch comedy and cultural subversion : the work of Scott Thompson, Rick Mercer and Steve Smith

"Male Parody, Sketch Comedy and Cultural Subversion" is a Master's thesis that analyzes the male performances of Canadian comedians Scott Thompson, Rick Mercer and Steve Smith. Queer and feminist scholars suggest that subversive gender performance techniques such as camp can destabilize compulsory heteronormativity and binary gender constructions. Through the study of sketch comics Thompson, Mercer and Smith, it is evident that a range of masculine performances, both implicitly and explicitly in support of queer politics, are supported within popular comedy and Canadian maninstream media. The diverse comic techniques used by these actors prove effective in critiquing aspects of patriarchy, masculinity and heteronormativity as well as questioning essentialist assumptions behind social notions of hierarchy and marginality.

Male parody, sketch comedy and cultural subversion : the work of Scott Thompson, Rick Mercer and Steve Smith

"Male Parody, Sketch Comedy and Cultural Subversion" is a Master's thesis that analyzes the male performances of Canadian comedians Scott Thompson, Rick Mercer and Steve Smith. Queer and feminist scholars suggest that subversive gender performance techniques such as camp can destabilize compulsory heteronormativity and binary gender constructions. Through the study of sketch comics Thompson, Mercer and Smith, it is evident that a range of masculine performances, both implicitly and explicitly in support of queer politics, are supported within popular comedy and Canadian maninstream media. The diverse comic techniques used by these actors prove effective in critiquing aspects of patriarchy, masculinity and heteronormativity as well as questioning essentialist assumptions behind social notions of hierarchy and marginality.

Gender differences in marital violence: A cross-ethnic study among Bengali, Garo, and Santal communities in rural Bangladesh

Studies on marital violence (MV) in Bangladesh have primarily focused on the women of the mainstream Bengali people, although half of the population is men, and there are also ethnic minority communities with diverse gender constructions. The current study examined the gender differences in MV among the matrilineal ethnic minority Garo, patrilineal ethnic minority Santal, and the patrilineal mainstream Bengali communities in rural Bangladesh. Adopting a cross-sectional design, we randomly included 1,929 currently married men and women from 24 villages. We used cross-tabulations as well as multivariate logistic regressions to estimate the ethnic and gender differences in MV. Data revealed that women were widely exposed to different types of MV, while only a few men experienced such abuses. It showed that 95.6% of the women experienced emotional abuse, 63.5% physical abuse, 71.4% sexual abuse, and 50.6% poly-victimization, whereas these rates were quite low among the men (emotional = 9.7%, physical = 0.7%, sexual = 0.1%). No men reported poly-victimization. The odds ratio (OR) for emotional, physical, and sexual MV were respectively, 184.44 (95% CI = 93.65−363.24, p<0.001), 449.23 (95% CI = 181.59−1111.35, p<0.001), and 2789.71(95% CI = 381.36−20407.08, p<0.001) for women compared to men. Data further revealed that matrilineal Garo women experienced less MV (emotional = 90.7%, physical = 53.4%, sexual = 64.0%, poly = 38.8%) than the patrilineal Santal (emotional = 99.4%, physical = 67.3%, sexual = 71.3%, poly = 53.9%) and Bengali women (emotional = 96.6%, physical = 69.6%, sexual = 78.8%, poly = 58.9%). Multivariate regressions also showed that the Bengali society perpetrated more physical (OR = 1.90, 95% CI = 1.27−2.85, p = 0.002) and sexual (OR = 2.04, 95% CI = 1.34−3.10, p = 0.001) MV than the Garo society. It appears that MV is largely a gendered issue in the country. Though both women and men can be the victims of MV, the nature/extent of victimization noticeably differs according to the social organization. Matrilineal society appears to be less abusive than the patrilineal one. Interventions aimed to prevent domestic violence in rural Bangladesh should take these findings into account.

Gender Constructions in the Theological Dimension of the Sufi Premakhyans

Through the analysis of the Citravali (1613 ce) by Usman, this article explores the interrelation between aesthetics, gender and religion within the Indian Sufi romances (premakhyans) in Avadhi language. These narratives reinterpret the Sufi semantics of love, narrating the quest of the hero in yogic disguise in search of the heroine, portrayed as a divine woman. Usman creatively reimagines the heroine of his romance as an artist, drawing on this motif to trace the allegory of creation as divine art. Therefore, this article identifies conventional aesthetic patterns in Usman’s narrative reproducing relevant gender dynamics, such as the eroticized and yet idealized image of the heroine in relation to the hero’s spiritual growth, contrasting with the escalation of the villain’s sexual desire. The traditional Hindu setting of the story broadly reflects the socio-cultural norms of the North Indian world in early modern times, and implies gender hierarchies established by the local society. The intersection of these points in the Citravali suggests further reflections on the articulation of gender in a rich branch of Sufi literature composed in a regional language of India, which may open new perspectives in the interpretation of the relationship between mysticism and eroticism.