Journal of International Women's Studies
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The Journal of International Women's Studies is an on-line, open-access, peer reviewed feminist journal that provides a forum for scholars, activists, and students to explore the relationships among theories of gender and sexuality and various forms of organizing and critical practice.
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The Globethics library contains articles of Jounral of International Women's Studies as of vol. 1(2001) to current.
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Women’s Empowerment and the Honey Production Projects in the Protected Areas of Usumacinta Canyon, MexicoBeekeeping is an activity with positive effects for biodiversity and food security; furthermore, it is compatible with the conservation objectives of protected areas. Likewise, previous studies show that the participation of women in beekeeping projects gives them access to paid work and triggers the possibility of their empowerment. The aim of the article is to explore the process of women’s empowerment as one of the social results that derives from the meliponic farmers and beekeepers’ projects implemented in the protected area of the Usumacinta Canyon, Mexico. For this research project, visits were made to the places of honey production in the Usumacinta Canyon, notes were collected from participant observation and unstructured interviews were taken at the site. The findings indicate that the participation of women in these projects has given them access to material resources, such as earning income from their work, and they exhibited other dimensions of the empowerment process, in particular agency—the ability to define and achieve their goals.
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Jordanian Women in Academia: Barriers and Motivators in Scientific Research and PromotionThe purpose of this study is to evaluate the research output and status of women academics in science fields in Jordan. The rationale is to identify trends as well as challenges to advise policy makers and university administrators on how to promote more involvement of women academics within the university. A survey of two sections was developed. The first section included 36 items that measure demographics and challenges in academic, research, administrative, and family contexts. The second section included questions regarding motivators and barriers to academic research. Participants were prompted to respond per the Likert’s Scale, where the responses were later categorized to a dichotomous variable (e.g., yes/no responses). The tools’ reliability and validity were tested in a pilot study conducted among 36 participants as well as from feedback from experts in the field. A description of the profile of women scientists in Jordan is presented. There was no significant difference between married and unmarried academics and their responses regarding opportunities and challenges faced in research. Additionally, there was no significant difference in responses between those who are married to academics and those married to nonacademics. Furthermore, the t-test showed that those who expressed dissatisfaction with promotion rules in their universities significantly expressed facing more challenges than those satisfied with promotion regulations. This is the first comprehensive study investigating women academics in Jordan in specific and in the Middle East region in general. Whereas previous research in the literature focused on comparing women academics’ progress and achievements with that of men academics, the novelty of this study lies in investigating sub-populations of women academics and identifying factors that affect academic achievement among women themselves. The article also offers suggestions for tailored intervention to improve the professional growth of women scientists in Jordan.
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Survivors of Sexual Assault on the Stand: A New Feminist and Victim-Centered Bioethical Framework to Discuss Justice and TraumaThis essay argues that neuroscientific knowledge of trauma should be utilized to address injustices experienced by survivors of sexual assault (SA) in the courtroom and introduces a new feminist and victim-centered bioethical framework. Survivors face several injustices during a SA trial. Rape myths and victim stereotypes, which stem from gender discrimination, create unrealistic expectations for survivors’ behaviors and engender epistemic injustices. Other injustices are inherent to SA trials. Notably, the justice system fails to protect survivors and actually harms them by granting them little agency while risking secondary victimization. Many injustices experienced by survivors are linked to their reactions to trauma during and after the SA. However, neuroscientists have an extensive understanding of trauma, and they shed light on its mechanisms, effects, and consequences. Neuroscientific knowledge of trauma can improve survivors’ experience in the courtroom through two core means: educating stakeholders and implementing trauma-sensitive and trauma-informed practices in the justice system. A traditional evidence-based framework aims to balance the defendant’s rights and society’s interest in justice, hence eclipsing the survivor’s interests. An evidential framework appears inefficient for discussing survivors’ experiences in the courtroom. Consequently, a new feminist and victim-centered bioethical framework is introduced as it allows for a focus on survivors’ health needs and well-being without compromising the justice system’s need for fairness.
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Leaning in and Bouncing Back: Neoliberal Feminism and the Work of Self-Transformation in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) and Halle Butler’s The New Me (2019)This article is concerned with the capacity of contemporary fiction to reveal and oppose the ubiquity of work in Western culture. I conduct a comparative literary analysis of two contemporary novels that expose how neoliberal rationality has transformed work into an all-encompassing project, endorsed by a corresponding manifestation of feminism. Rather than challenging gendered labor relations through collective action, this “neoliberal feminism” incites women to turn their critical gaze within and transform themselves into resilient citizens and workers. Its sensibility is disseminated through popular literature, from “chick-lit” to self-help books, via narratives of physical and psychological self-transformation. This article builds on feminist scholarship which has critiqued the popular cultural domination of neoliberal feminism, offering a new contribution by identifying a nascent genre of anti-neoliberal feminist fictional writing. I argue that Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) and Halle Butler’s The New Me (2019) constitute a literary resistance to neoliberal feminism where the trope of self-transformation is employed to expose and reject an endorsement of oppressive work culture. Depicting characters who obsessively work on themselves to survive the precarious neoliberal labor market, they reveal the hypocrisy of a feminism subdued by incessant labor and pressed into the service of neoliberalism, positioning literature as a potential site for resistance.
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Sober Women’s Feminist Resistance to Alcohol Marketing and Cultural Representations of Women’s Drinking PracticesAlcohol is marketed to women as a glamorous and empowering reward for juggling the demands of work and family life. This essay explores the ways in which women who do not drink reject the feminization of alcohol and drinking practices and frame this rejection within discourses of feminist resistance. This essay draws on data collected as part of a mixed-method ethnographic research project that investigates women’s use of, and participation in, online sobriety communities. Findings suggest that women who lead or utilize online sobriety communities have considerable awareness of the feminized marketing of alcohol, and some express strong ideological opposition to it. The marketing of alcohol is positioned as a predatory force that takes advantage of women’s exhaustion as mothers and perpetuates the double standards associated with women’s drinking. Sobriety may prompt a feminist awakening regarding the connections between the feminization of alcohol and women’s inequality within society and, in turn, disrupt women’s identification with post-feminist cultural representations of women’s drinking practices. Through the public identification and critique of these marketing practices, women critically engage with feminism while raising consciousness and building a community of sober women.
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Performance Art as a Site of Socio-spatial Resistance: Challenging Geographies of Gendered ViolenceBy researching the intersections of art, geography, and violence, this paper interrogates performance art and its capacity to question one’s gendered existence in space/place. Through an analysis of two performance art pieces—J. Hawkes’s Playing Kate (2018) and Cassils’s PISSED (2017)—I explore the connections between art, gendered bodies, and space/place, while establishing a link between and across feminist and trans* gendered tyrannies. While discussing feminist and trans* performance art, this paper probes the felt and lived harms that are experienced by feminist women and trans* individuals in gendered locales and addresses ways in which art can challenge socio-spatial violence. Overall, through a broad exploration of geographies of art and violence, this paper speaks of spatial gendered oppression as well as spatialized potential and hope.
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To What Extent Does Labor Force Participation Empower Women?This paper critically examines the relationship between women’s labor force participation (LFP) and empowerment, particularly in the Global South, utilizing Naila Kabeer’s empowerment framework. By challenging the orthodox conceptualization of LFP, the study reveals its methodological limitations as a measure of women’s economic engagement. By emphasizing the dynamic nature of empowerment as a multifaceted process within the formal and informal sector, this paper highlights the interplay of agency, resources, and achievements within Kabeer’s framework. Drawing from global examples, it demonstrates the varied impacts of paid work on women’s decision-making in both private and public spheres. While acknowledging the potential of LFP to enhance women’s empowerment, the paper underscores the significance of contextual factors in shaping this relationship. By shedding light on the complexities and nuances of women’s labor and empowerment, the study offers valuable insights for policymakers and researchers striving for gender equality and women’s empowerment worldwide.
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“Homes for Ukraine”: Gendered Refugee Hosting, Differential Inclusion, and Domopolitics in the United KingdomSince the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many Ukrainians have been displaced and sought refuge in other European countries, including the United Kingdom. Analyzing newspaper articles, public opinion polls, and emerging reports on the scheme, I argue that this policy draws on a particular conception of home, blurring the distinctions between private and public forms of hospitality towards certain kinds of migrants. In this moment of intensified public engagement with border politics, through a crisis displacing primarily women, this essay considers the “Homes for Ukraine” scheme as an overt manifestation of gendered domopolitics. In comparing the response to Ukrainians with the response to other kinds of refugees, I argue that this hospitality is conditional and gendered, reinforcing hierarchical claims to migration and belonging. The question of who is an (un)welcome guest through processes of racialization, nationalism, and gendering becomes more entangled as the sophisticated filtration mechanisms of bordering emerge within the home itself as an extension of the nation—and also the nation as an extension of the home.
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We Deliver: The Condition of the Woman Academic in India TodayThis auto-ethnographic essay draws upon Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge to discuss the condition of Indian women in the Humanities in academia today. While acknowledging the encouragingly gender-inclusive projections in India’s National Education Policy vision statement from 2020, I argue for more probing engagement with the concrete reality of being a woman teacher and researcher in the increasingly competitive and corporatized milieu of higher education. My methodology has been a close reading of the NEP’s vision statement to analyze recurrences of terms and concepts as pointers to its discursive field. I argue that this policy statement implicitly envisions an empowered new-age Indian woman teacher, notionally mother to all her pupils, aiding their awakening intuitively from the very heart of her experiences, skills, and memories. Against this somewhat idealized feminine ecology of the NEP in principle and spirit, I juxtapose the actual everyday choices and struggles of women in academic positions. Does the decolonization of education in spirit also impart actual transformative agency to women academics? Will women be listened to? Not one essential woman, but heterogeneous women—women across different strata, identities, professional spaces, and ideologies? Above all, my essay probes the challenges and dividends of transitioning to a more home-grown teaching and research methodology derived from current Western academic models. For instance, what forms and lines of interdisciplinarity could best serve the interest of quality control in research and teaching? In the third and last section, I argue that women are equal contributors in the discourse of academics in the future. We are committed stakeholders that can help enhance collective performance and efficiency in ways that are commensurate and compatible with our particular needs, contexts, restraints, aptitudes, and encumbrances. I conclude my essay by urging colleagues in academia, women and men, to recognize that we can truly deliver on this challenge only in a spirit of intellectual, ethical, and interpersonal collaboration and collegiality.
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“I’m Different from You but Very Much Like You”: Religious Women Activists and their Father FiguresThis study examined activist women in religious society in Israel in order to gain in-depth insights into their lived experience and coping strategies in advocating for change in their society. The article is based on thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with fourteen such women. Contrary to the expectation that there would be a dominant mother figure influencing the activists’ lives, the findings show that the influence of mothers was marginal and even an impeding factor, while father figures were the most significant in these women’s childhood and development into activists. All religious activists perceived their fathers as highly influential, in three contexts: the father as a pioneer, the father as an extraordinary figure, and a strong attachment to the father. Based on these findings, we believe it is important to involve and integrate men in programs that act to promote and empower religious women in Israeli society on both the political and occupational level.
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Women Supporting Women: A Glass Ceiling for Women Politicians in Ibadan, NigeriaNigerian women account for almost half of the country’s population, yet they represent a minuscule percentage of elected positions. Many scholars have attributed this to the patriarchal system inherent in Nigeria. This study, however, submits that the rate at which women support women politicians during elections is a major contributing factor to unequal gender representation in Nigerian politics. The concept of the glass ceiling and postcolonial theory guided the explanatory framework for this study. The study was conducted among women within voting age in Ibadan, in southwestern Nigeria. The study adopted a mixed-method design to generalize and gain deep insights. Hence, the questionnaire was used to elicit quantitative data while the Key Informant interview (KII) was used to collect qualitative data. Quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS version 20 while qualitative data was content analyzed. While 87.3% of the respondents claimed they supported women politicians during elections, only 16.7% voted for them. On the reasons why women support female politicians, about 38.0% stated that they supported them because of their perceived ability to represent the interests of women better than men. However, 21.7% of the respondents felt that supporting women in politics may expose them to the danger of political violence inherent in Nigeria. Furthermore, negative stereotypes against women politicians were also found to be among the major impediments to their victory at the polls. Awareness campaigns for women’s participation in politics, therefore, should also focus on encouraging women to vote for other women during elections, as that is the major means of ensuring adequate women’s representation.
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Triumphant or Trapped Pakistani Women? A Feminist Critique of Mueenuddin’s “Nawabdin Electrician” and Haq’s Song “Chamkeeli”In patriarchal societies, women are traditionally subjugated and suppressed in one way or another. Men are privileged and kept at the center. They speak, express, and dream while benefiting from the autonomy provided to them by the phallogocentric system. By contrast, women are marginalized. Patriarchal writers define women as weak, fragile, helpless, docile, submissive, and emotional. However, this paper reveals that in Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “Nawabdin Electrician” and Abrar-ul-Haq’s song “Chamkeeli,” regardless of a change in times and “gender performativity,” Pakistani male writers continue to stigmatize women. This study shows that although gender roles are changing, women remain subjugated. My paper claims that whereas women were previously portrayed as submissive, docile, suppressed, uncritical, and mindlessly silent, in these two more recent texts women are represented as uncontrollable, hypersexual, dangerous, mad, violent, hysterically dominating, and madly authoritative. I argue that these recent portrayals do not help or emancipate Pakistani women. In 2019, Advocate Rana Adnan Asghar filed a petition against Haq’s song in the Lahore Civil Court, declaring it a scurrilous attack on men’s integrity. My study, however, reveals that Haq has depicted incapacitated men in contrast to strong women, as a way to prove that women’s emancipation is a potential threat to patriarchy. Thus, rather than demeaning men, Haq’s depiction of a madly uncontrollable woman is more critical of women than of men. This implies that Pakistan’s dominant patriarchal familial and social structures suppress women more in order to protect men from disgrace. My study reveals that in the time between these texts (2009 to 2019), no significant change has occurred because gender discrimination persists in the works of Pakistani men. This article offers a dismantling of these recent prejudiced female stereotypes in order to achieve a more emancipatory future for women.
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Older Women as Active Online Agents: Diversifying Cultural Conceptions of “Grannies” through Social MediaWith the advent of social media, the media environment has become more participatory for its users, making it possible for older adults to produce content for social media and be agential in online spaces. This article observes a group of older women known as Activist Grannies (Aktivistimummot in Finnish) and 60+ Finnish women bloggers who identify as “grannies” to discover what kind of agency social media potentially enables for older women. In addition, this article explores the cultural knowledge produced by older women’s self-representations as activist grannies and “granny bloggers.” I demonstrate that social media offers a space to make visible older women’s lives and societal contributions. This visibility challenges ageist conceptions and conveys affirmative understandings of aging, such as viewing higher age as a source of strength. Social media also makes it more achievable for older adults to participate in current societal debates and to exercise political agency. This study expands the existing research on older adults and social media by adding to the scant knowledge about older women as content-creators and identifies the ways older femininities are constructed and negotiated online.
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A Review of the Cultural Gender Norms Contributing to Gender Inequality in Ghana: An Ecological Systems PerspectiveWhile significant progress has been made in improving the wellbeing of women and girls around the world, a gender gap still exists between men and women which is very evident in Ghana. Gender inequalities continue to persist in Ghana because of cultural gender norms that exalt and favor men and put women in subordinate and subservient roles. These cultural gender norms hinder women’s development and widen gender inequality between men and women in different system levels of society. Therefore, there is a need to examine the influence of these cultural gender norms on women’s lives using a systems framework to capture a full picture of women’s experiences at these systemic levels of society. In this paper, we use Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems multilevel approach to examine the impact of these cultural gender norms on women’s lives at the different system levels. We conducted a desk review of studies published in sub-Saharan Africa focused on cultural gender norms and gender inequality. The findings showed that the impact of cultural gender norms on gender inequality at the levels of the four social systems (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem) are interconnected, creating and widening the inequality gap between men and women. Cultural gender norms influence gender role socialization in the home, which then transmits to the school and religious institutions as the mesosystem. At the school level, cultural gender norms act as a mesosystem manifest through discriminatory classroom practices, gender role assignment of school responsibilities, and gender role representations in textbooks. In Christianity and Islam, cultural gender norms create doctrines that enforce men’s domination over women, and, in the workplace, cultural gender norms have gendered labor by defining a man’s occupation and limiting women to domestic and low-paying occupations. The mass media is the exosystem that displays images of women to fit cultural gender norms of what is defined as acceptable for women. Finally, the macrosystem is the overall sociocultural norms that have been accepted by society that perpetuate discriminatory practices against women.