Hybrid Masculinities and The Limits of Anti-Violence Efforts in BDSM Communities

This article interrogates the gendered consequences of men’s anti-violence work in pansexual BDSM communities. Based on interview data from BDSM practitioners, I demonstrate empirically that Bridges and Pascoe's heuristic split of hybrid masculine practices—strategic borrowing, discursive distancing, and boundary fortification—does not account for the necessary interrelationship of these practices. I argue that mutual constitutiveness allows for the further obfuscation and security of men’s dominance in the gender hierarchy. The hybrid masculine practices of men who engage in anti-violence work in pansexual BDSM communities are reliant upon narratives of women in need of saving, positioning women as victims and men as saviors who protect them. The women I interviewed were critical of the anti-violence work that men in their communities were doing to prevent or respond to violence; women’s general distrust of men doing this work signals a gendered disconnect between who is doing this work and the effects of it in kink communities more broadly. Although they intended to challenge and prevent sexual violence, men’s hybrid masculine practices in their anti-violence efforts in BDSM communities reproduce the gender inequality that maintains sexual violence both within and beyond these communities.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Social Construction of Patriarchy: The Case of the Bukusu of Kenya

This article is an ethnographic study on the Bukusu number system and the connections between Indigenous knowledge and patriarchy. It examines the ways patriarchy is embedded in everyday knowledge through a number system that has deep gender hierarchy symbolisms. The findings show strong connection between everyday knowledge and social norms that define the status of men and women. While this article is centered on Bukusu society in Kenya, it is premised on the understanding that patriarchy is a pervasive social problem that goes beyond Indigenous societies as evident in the feminist critiques of contemporary societies. Just as Durkheim traced the genesis of society to the simplest forms of rules associated with totemic beliefs, this article also points to the roots of patriarchy in Indigenous society so as to draw attention to the variety of ways in which patriarchy is manifested. By incorporating feminist critiques of patriarchy, it shows conceptual connections between the blatant manifestation of patriarchy in Indigenous societies and the latent, albeit oppressive, manifestations of patriarchy in modern societies. Overall, the article provides deep conceptual insights into the intersection of knowledge systems and patriarchy.

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.

Jeremiah and Gender

This chapter explores salient features of gendered language and gender performance in Jeremiah from a feminist perspective. At first sight, the book witnesses a patriarchal world of male privilege and female subordination, which is expressed by gendered language and sexualized metaphors. The personification of Jerusalem—Judah as adulterous wife of YHWH and the devastation of her female body—generates horrific images that express the shame and humiliation of its ancient audiences, but are unbearable for postmodern readers. Inspecting some passages more closely, this chapter reveals flaws in this rhetoric of shaming and breaches in gender performance that help to deconstruct an allegedly rigid gender hierarchy and to seek ways to alternative interpretations of the divine-human relationship.

PLATFORM AS NEW “DADDY”: CHINA’S GENDERED WANGHONG ECONOMY AND PATRIARCHAL PLATFORMS BEHIND

This paper provides an explorative analysis of gender as a critical dimension of the prospering wanghong economy in China with special attention devoted to the e-commerce wanghong value chains that are yet to be examined by scholars so far. Wanghong refers to a particular stream of vocational Chinese internet celebrities that have acquired their celebrity online and have acute incentives through various models to liquidate such online influence by transforming followers into consumers. While wanghong economy is often projected as a new platform economy that is by the women and for the women on diverse media outlets, my analysis highlights the structurally embedded gender hierarchy of this platform business ecosystem and the platform power increasingly associated with patriarchal order as exemplified by the updated meanings constructed around the Chinese term “baba” (daddy), which now is used to refer to platforms by wanghong and netizens. By combining the analysis of female participation at different levels of wanghong economy with the “platform-as-daddy” discourse prevalent on Douyin, one of the most popular social media platforms, this paper seeks to connect the industrial analysis of wanghong economy as one of the most prominent “platform economies” in contemporary China with its cultural dimensions. It accentuates the key roles of major Chinese platform companies as not only new critical intermediaries in perpetuating the ongoing patriarchal system between the state and users but also active participants that actively construct, and aggressively profit from, the gendered wanghong economy value chains.

Gender, Populism and Anti-Immigrations

In current struggles over cultural hegemony, conservative and right-wing populist dis- course is marked by an omni-presence of topics related to gender and sexuality. This article examines the ways in which diverse actors of what will be called the ‘right-wing populist complex’ use gender in order to catapult a variety of arguments into the public sphere with particular focus on actors in the Americas and Germany. Suggest- ing a first set of Right-Wing Populist Patterns of Gendering1, the article pursues the question how seemingly emancipatory arguments function in right-wing discourse, especially in performing a modernisation paradigm, while simultaneously, and in of- ten paradoxical ways, promoting a program of re-traditionalisation. Therefore, often, gender arguments—like the sexual freedom of ‘autochtonous’ women—are used to justify anti-immigration and racist politics. One’s own society can thus be depicted as supposedly already fully emancipated in contrast to the alleged ‘backward’ social order of immigrants. Through this ethno-sexist twist, the article argues that gender provides right-wing populist discourse a useful tool for affectively bridging seemingly paradoxical arguments and transferring diverse social hierarchies shaped by late neo- liberalism onto the gender hierarchy of a society. Since gender as a discursive element is foundational for right-wing discourse, an analytical, systematic and intersectional gender lens—or a critical gender theory—is crucial in right-wing populism research in order to grasp patterns of gendering and their entanglements with racialisation and racist structures.

ASSÉDIO E O ABUSO NO ENSINO SUPERIOR:

O presente artigo tem por objetivo identificar os casos de assédio e abuso no ensino superior da cidade de Ponta Grossa/Paraná. Buscando analisar como se evidenciam e se originam esses casos, foram recolhidos depoimentos de acadêmicos de ambos os gêneros, visando compreender a situação na perspectiva da vítima, analisando como elas, suas testemunhas e seus supervisores estão tratando os assuntos referentes ao tema. Os dados foram coletados por meio de questionário on-line composto de questões objetivas e questões descritivas. Todos os casos apresentados ocorreram por haver uma relação de poder entre agressor e vítima, seja essa relação uma hierarquia institucional, de cargos, classe, raça ou de gênero. Palavras-chaveEnsino Superior, Gênero, Violência, Relação professor-aluno, Relações de poder. HARASSMENT AND ABUSE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: from aggressions to institutional omission AbstractThe purpose of this article is to identify cases of harassment and abuse in higher education of the city of Ponta Grossa, Paraná. Seeking out to analyze how these cases are evidenced and originated, testimonials were collected from academics of both genders, in order to understand the situation from the perspective of the victim, analyzing how they, their witnesses and their supervisors are dealing with the subjects. The data was collected by means of on-line questionnaire composed of objective questions and descriptive questions. All cases presented occurred because there is a power relation between aggressor and victim, whether that relationship is an institutional, job, class, race or gender hierarchy. KeywordsHigher Education, Gender, Violence, Teacher-student relationship, Power relations.

Heteronormativity and the Justification of Gender Hierarchy: Investigating the Archival Data From 16 European Countries

Within the framework of the System Justification Theory, this study tested on the archival data from 16 European countries the general hypothesis that homonegativity (HN), as an expression of gender binarism and heteronormativity, works as a legitimizing myth of gender hierarchy. Specifically, we hypothesized that (1) system justification (SJ) would positively relate to HN and (2) this relation would depend on the country level of gender hierarchy, (3) on the gender of respondents, and (4) on the interaction between gender hierarchy and gender. We selected the Gender Equality Index (GEI) as an indicator of the gender hierarchy of the country system and the items from the European Social Survey-Round 9 (ESS-9) as the indicators of the gender of respondents and the levels of SJ and HN. The Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) partially confirmed the hypotheses, suggesting HN to work as a blatant prejudice and being more viable as a legitimizing myth in females from countries with higher gender hierarchy and in males from more gender-equal countries. In both cases, HN serves as a myth to justify the ontological premise of participants that the world is fair and to counteract the cognitive dissonance generated by the perception of a gender-unequal system (in the case of a woman) or by the perception of a gender-equal system that can threaten gender privileges (in the case of a man).

Gender Blindness on Turkish Children’s Televisions

The representation of the dominant gender-based discourse on television inevitably affects children’s perceptions of masculinity and femininity. Gender blindness, the embodiment of gender hierarchy in which gender differences are exaggerated and attributed to natural differences between men and women, is inevitably used in the media, especially in children’s broadcasting. This study aims to reveal the gender blindness in children’s television on Turkey’s only thematic children’s television stations Minika GO and Minika Cocuk’, focusing on all local productions aired in 2020. Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of representation debates and text analysis expressed as constructing the meaning world of relationships and collective culture, guided the study. The representations are conveyed to the audience through the narration of the story in the animations, the plots of the story, the presentation of male and female characters, the use of space and images. In the cartoons, the frequency of female and male characters appearing on the screen, the physical appearance of the characters, their behavioral characteristics, and the spatial presentation in the stories were searched. As a result, it is possible to say that male and female characters are depicted unequally in all the themes studied in animations resulting in gender blindness.

Gender, Power, and Cricket Spectators in Calcutta, 1960s–1990s

Historians of modern India have emphasized the reflexivity of men and women in the making of womanhood, paying attention to notions of gender difference emerging from both primordial, restrictive codes of behaviour and contrarian impulses towards what was popularly called progress. There have been relatively few attempts to trace gender interaction in outdoor leisure activities, public displays of femininity, and male regulatory anxieties in the post-colonial context. By studying the symbolism of women's presence in the Eden Gardens, the international cricket stadium in Calcutta, from the 1960s to the 1990s, this article reflects on the nature of power, authority, and gender hierarchy in urban Indian society. This study of questions of gender hierarchy, women's mannerisms, social identity, and informal resistance through a historical lens will enable us to understand the trajectory of women's outsider status in urban public spaces. Through a reading of the mediated parti pris impressions of female spectators, it will also map the transition in society's approach to sport from a structured homosocial community activity to a relatively unstructured field of shared experience.