Search

This piece takes its cue from a pair of incidents – a not unfamiliar theme in game studies – relating to game scholarship and its engagement with right-wing politics. In the first case, well-known game scholar Bonnie 'Bo' Ruberg called on editors and reviewers to stop insisting that scholars include a reference to a certain online campaign of harassment, doxing and threats of physical violence. In the second case, I had a reviewer insist that I had to include a reference to the 'Fortnite to alt-right pipeline' because clearly games were causing alt-right lunacy. To be sure, these both constitute genre criticism – among others – at its most reductive and cynical, deciding what the institutional and audience expectations entail based on an assumption of the industrial ones. Then, biographical criticism and assertions about authorial intent or the necessary 'touchstones' began to appear. There seems to be a consistent and persistent insistence that somehow even the best and most accomplished scholars should forget decades of scholarship because 'games are different' and this tendency has been conditioned and shaped by reading games through the 'lens' of the Trump presidency. This is important because it confirms that essays about games still tend to fit into one of the two boxes Ruberg ticks: game scholars who are not necessarily adept at the specific content area or specialists in a given field who are not really game scholars. It is telling and symptomatic of the centripetal and centrifugal movements in game studies; that is, from within and without. Admittedly, games are different, but not so different that we should forget or ignore decades of scholarship or worse, do not bother to find out if it exists at all. Not only are many of these positions ahistorical – ignoring the fact that, as some much maligned games quite cleverly point out repeatedly within, the same things have been said about the corrupting power of soap operas, romance novels, comic books, wrestling, rap and hip hop, backwards masking in heavy metal and plain old rock 'n' roll – the positions are also tacitly or unwittingly ageist, classist and/or occasionally racist, homophobic and transphobic even as the author purports to be concerned with inequitable representations. Moreover, there are peculiarly US American concerns that are transposed onto ostensibly universal ones. These reveal that even the most 'woke' of the American left can be a cultural imperialist and that American exceptionalism is inescapable if not ineluctable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 5 years the UK has seen a significant rise in the prominence of trans-exclusionary feminism. What was once termed TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminism/feminist) is now more often referred to as gender critical feminism/feminist. In this article I argue that this new moniker represents more than a renaming. Instead, it can be interpreted as a rebranding for a present-day where the explicit transphobia of earlier trans-exclusionary feminism is no longer tolerated. I will map two telling changes that I argue currently separates gender critical from TERF, this involves (i) the linguistic pivot from 'anti-trans' to 'pro-woman' and, (ii) the nascent questioning of the traditional theoretical underpinning of trans-exclusionary feminism. Through this mapping I will explain the rebranding as an attempted claim to legitimacy with an aim of accruing mainstream support. However, exploration of the two changes will show that, despite efforts to obscure the point, gender critical feminism continues to rely on transphobic tropes, moral panics and essentialist understandings of men and women. These factors also continue to link trans-exclusionary feminism to anti-feminist reactionary politics and other 'anti-gender' movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to analyze an online news story and the comments made by readers regarding a teacher who taught a class set up as a drag queen in relation to the curriculum and cultural pedagogy of masculinities. Methodologically, the data were collected from digital ethnography carried out on a journalistic website on which it was published. The theoretical perspective adopted is post-critical in Education. It was understood how much the positive and negative criticisms of his professional performance indicated, curriculumpedagogically, the masculinity that has been produced in contexts of moral panic and anti-Human Rights agendas. At the same time, the deterritorialization of gender through the prosthetic performance of drag in a school institution allowed expanding processes of recognition beyond a hegemonic expectation in terms of sexual difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief essay reflects on the conjunctional histories of anti‐black and anti‐trans criminalization in the context of the contemporary moral panic aimed at eradicating transgender life. Within the last couple of years, conservatives have introduced and (and sometimes passed) legislation in thirty‐four states criminalizing trans people (with an emphasis on trans healthcare and bathroom use) and the parents, doctors, and teachers who have sought to serve as trans allies. How is this wave of fascist panic and propaganda linked to broader histories of racial and gendered criminalization in the United States? And how might a more thorough understanding of the carceral dimensions of race and gender aid in solidarity efforts between cis and trans abolitionist organizers? This paper reflects on these questions and their stakes in our current political moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Direito e Práxis is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite being dissimilar cases, both Poland and Russia exhibit strong anti-liberal and democratic backsliding tendencies. Concomitantly, politicians are spreading a demographic moral panic, employing the argument that both nations are in danger of demise. There is scaremongering concerning below-replacement population growth rates and, in parallel, a tightening grasp on reproductive health rights and a growing fear of non-binary gender identities, people of color, and homosexuality. The political anti-gender mobilization in Poland in the 2010s and the gendered anti-Western and anti-gay conspiracy narratives in Russia are examples of this phenomenon. How are the policy responses to "demographic crises" constructed and gendered in political discourses today? What lies behind it and what is its role in illiberal politics? In this article, I discuss the current demographic discourses in Poland and in Russia. I argue that the politics of rallying against "demographic crises" surfaced on the wave of growing dominance of ultraconservative and nationalist discourses in East-Central Europe in response to perceived socio-economic pressures. I demonstrate how Polish and Russian politicians have been utilizing nativism, familialism, and "tradition" discourses for reasons of political legitimacy and expediency. Looking at political debates and concrete demographic strategies, I trace how the rhetoric of "democratic crises" is deployed to shore up illiberalism in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores interpretations made by the press, specialists, citizens, and authorities of the Mexican capital regarding the phenomenon of youth gangs from 1956 to 1965. The analysis stresses that the city’s socio-spatial differentiation in those years was central in explanations about and representations of youth gangs; such differentiation also played a central role in the actions authorities took against young gangs, and the social perception of their dangerousness. Thus, the aforementioned social sectors outlined two contrasting stereotypes, which shared one common point: sexual violence. Rebeldes sin causa (rebels without a cause) and pandilleros (gang members) were social types that intertwined expressions of moral panic and feelings of insecurity, which perpetuated territorial stigmas concerning proletarian neighborhoods and slums, as well as gender discourses that influenced the urban experience of their inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cadernos PAGU is the property of Universidade Estadual de Campinas - Portal de Periodicos Eletronicos Cientificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The protest against the alleged introduction of gender ideology in Italian school proofs to be still lively. Its current phase is characterized by an ongoing mobilization activated mostly at local level. Following the call for action of anti-gender organizations, informal networks of parents and teachers report to institutions projects they deem as dangerous in order to stop them. While most of the available literature has engaged in deconstructing the rhetoric promoted by anti-gender movements, this article questions how mothers and teachers get involved in practices of school surveillance. Building on interviews with those who attended anti-gender conferences in 2015, the analysis is focused on women's participation in the protest. The content of the interviews illuminates the incorporation of the key-point on which the rhetoric of the movements insists: the ideology of gender exists and represents a tangible danger. However, the consent to the mobilization is not unanimous and univocal. In fact, two narratives emerged: one «moderate», the other «radicalized». They reflect a plural interpretation of the anti-gender discourse, even in a limited social space such as the one investigated by this research. Finally, the analysis shows how the different narratives converge on a shared willingness to supervise the school, as the priority of family in sexual education remain unchallenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Kriminologisches Journal is the property of Julius Beltz GmbH & Co. KG Beltz Juventa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article aims to analyze the context of linguistic guerrilla on gender in contemporary Brazil. It focuses on two phenomena: on the one hand, Dilma Rousseff's use of the title presidenta, a strategy of feminization of a historically masculine term and political position; and on the other hand, the use of the letter x as a neutral gender ending, a strategy of rupture in the heterocispatriarchal and binary linguistic system of Portuguese that has become visible in public space in recent years. These phenomena enable us to perceive that "the 'x' of the question," in the case of Brazil, is merely the expression of a moral panic over the political potency of the concept of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the language used by the Polish nationalist right in relation to LGBT communities and the right to abortion. The authors show links between the language of Church hierarchs and right-wing columnists as the ideological backbone of the governing right-wing populist right. According to the authors, the attack on gender is the same method of political mobilisation and power management as the campaign against refugees and the anti-immigrant hysteria. On the one hand, the anti-gender discourse may strengthen the narrative against the 'liberal EU' and, on the other hand, it is used to show substitute 'scapegoats' in Poland. Moral panic makes it possible to release class tensions in the manner that is safe for the system through the artificially induced cultural and ideological conflict. However, the dispersed anti-gender discourse has a real impact on social attitudes – on the one hand, it polarises social sympathies and, on the other hand, it strengthens conservative attitudes. The analysis is based on right-wing press articles, Church hierarchs' statements, videos on YouTube and a parliamentary debate about the right to abortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how assumptions about the nature of childhood have been triggered in the confrontations about the legitimacy of gender and sexuality themes in education in contemporary Brazil. We analyse two practical-discursive pitfalls that have been consolidated in these confrontations. The first, forged by anti-gender discussion and education activists, consists in the narrative construction of vulnerable childhood to be protected, and triggers moral panic at the prospect of discussions about gender and sexuality in schools. The second, more subtle trap, concerns the situation of passivity attributed to students in the school context, who are considered to be the subjects of instruction by teachers, including those moments when gender and sexuality issues are addressed in the classroom. The image of a child-prisoner, passive and in danger made-up by the "gender ideologues," populates the narratives analysed in the first part of the paper. It allows us to discuss the political uses of the hyperinflation of this idea of child vulnerability. However, even in educational practices that invest in working gender and sexuality matters in school setting, we observe that children can be conceived as lacking agency, such as discussed in the paper's second part. In order to challenge these logics, we highlight the ludic dimension and playing with conceptual and methodological tools that can contribute to a non-pedagogizing approach to gender and sexuality in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In France, political opposition to the inclusion of so-called 'gender theory' in school curricula reached a peak during the debate over gay marriage in 2012–2013, where many observers were surprised by the strength of the opposition to government reforms promoting gender equality. The Catholic church played a leading role in this 'anti-gender' protest movement, seeing an opportunity to integrate conservative sexual morality into the movement's broader ideological framework. Here, I discuss this movement in order to draw out the shortcomings of the 'classical' movement-countermovement theoretical perspective, which often views conservative religious movements as monolithic actors, locked into a binary relationship with progressive forces. I argue however that the key outcomes of the 'anti-gender' movement are its effects not on its political opponents, but on the Catholic community itself. Indeed, the shaping of 'gender' as an imaginary enemy has powerful performative effects, including on the very group that invented it, including the reinforcement of Catholic identity 'we feeling' processes. Its effects include access to a wider audience, appealing to atheists in a global context of panic over the stability of sexual identities, and alliance with other religious groups, on the basis of shared moral values. Nevertheless, this strategy also has its drawbacks: it has revived old conflicts within the Church, and accelerated the internal division of the Catholic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Práxis Educativa is the property of Revista Praxis Educativa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

'Gender ideology' discourse has been one of the most recurrent strategies of neo-conservative activism at a global level. Through this syntagma, a variety of moral panics have been mobilized against feminist agendas and LGBTI rights, accusing them of promoting the destruction of natural order, the spread of Marxism and global conspiracy. The academic literature has highlighted that the genesis of this strategic discourse was an intellectual production in the mid-1990s; we can trace back texts written in conjunction by secular neo-conservative intellectuals in the United States and members of the Catholic hierarchy. However, the tendency has been to ignore the strong intellectual production that neo-conservative activists developed at that time in Argentina, particularly in Córdoba and Buenos Aires, which helped to lay the foundations of the present 'gender ideology' discourse. The intention of this work is to draw attention to that local production and its connection with the ideas that were being developed in parallel in the global North. In order to do this, the article analyzes a series of texts produced by neo-conservatives in Argentina in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case study of an early twentieth century controversy over “white slavery” demonstrates the importance of an explicit consideration of mobility based rhetoric to understanding space and political subjectivities within space. Through an analytical framework of mobility that considers scale, connection, time, and agency, I find that the city was constructed as a gendered and racialized space, which enabled restrictions to corporal mobility. I provide both a justification and a model for reading mobility based rhetoric in public controversy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In October 2011, a young South African woman named Kirsty Theologo was set on fire and left for dead by a group of her high school contemporaries in Linmeyer, Johannesburg. The killing was defined as a “Satanist murder,” leading to media, judicial, and religious interventions aimed at countering the apparent Satanic threat. This article examines press material surrounding Kirsty Theologo’s death and the subsequent arrest and trial of her killers. It argues that the ongoing moral panic around Satanism in contemporary South Africa has obscured the often gendered nature of so-called satanic violence, showing the way in which the murder was instead placed within a familiar framework of Satanic panic in an act of collective displacement that elided the structural and historical contexts of acts of extreme violence perpetrated by young South African men on the bodies of young South African women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of my paper is to show how the concept of moral panic (described as a disproportional social reaction to a phenomenon perceived as a threat to societal order and values) is used in Polish context. On the example of the debate on civil partnerships, threatening society with "genderism" and opposing the ratification of the convention on preventing violence against women I show how some conservative milieus in Poland react to transforming gender and sexual norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that, despite Poland's better situation during the economic crisis, the long -lasting rationalisation of permanent austerity overshadows and hinders any alternative solutions in the field of social policies. In this sense, the crisis that hurt the economies of many other countries represented a reference frame for adhering to the path of austerity policies in Poland. The neoliberal track in social and economic policies was accompanied by the strengthening of their conservative pillar: any slight improvements in family policies took a maternalist direction, with a well -paid maternity leave prolonged to one year without the same individual rights being granted to fathers. Finally, the crisis served as a background for the Catholic Church's attack on the category of "gender", an example of moral panic. The policy changes as well as the stronger anti -feminism in public discourse were in line with the institutional and ideological legacies of the period of transition, while the crisis served as a direct and indirect reference point for the actors behind these developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction boom of cinema auditoria in Britain coincided with a period of significant social change involving attitudes to leisure, courtship and gender equality. As a result, the new social space of the cinema was under scrutiny by a variety of social purity groups made suspicious of the opportunities offered by the dark, warm, democratising new buildings. The ‘khaki fever’ moral panic proved to be the means through which society interrogated these developments. In order to maintain a sense of propriety in the midst of social change, the government introduced measures to limit sexual permissiveness to prevent the spread of venereal infection from affecting soldiers sent to the front. Women patrols were introduced, sourced from social purity groups established in the 1880s. They patrolled sites of particular cultural resonance to prevent the rise of sexual permissiveness. What appears to have been at stake here is both the right of women to work within the police force and the right of younger women to express their sexual independence. Both camps chose to make the cinema their battleground. This paper assesses police observations regarding the Rink Cinema, Finsbury Park, concluding that these issues were indicative not only of generational and moral anxieties, but also of the fear of the impact of modernity upon British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine a crisis of faith among nonliberal Jews in Brooklyn that was blamed on the Internet. The ensuing moral panic led many in the community to attend to affect as an indexical sign of gendered faith. Here I analyze inspirational lectures for and by middle-aged nonliberal Jewish women designed to strengthen faith. Lectures syncretically drew on Hebrew texts and the language of the therapeutic framework, engaging with secular liberal knowledge, genres, and media. At the intersection of language use, media, and embodied practices, lectures were part of a broader effort among nonliberal Jews to tell an alternative narrative of progress--one that redefined temporality and truth to deny the authority of secular and non-Jewish modernity. Live lectures and their circulation via audiocassettes shed light on moral interpretations of changing media, dynamics between discourse and materiality, and gendered faith over time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined video game–playing aggression among graduate and undergraduate students at Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York. The following three research questions were posed: In the context of video game playing, what differences are there in levels of aggression in relation to sex? What differences are there in levels of aggression and type of video games played? Are aggression and length of video game playing related? A nonprobability sample of students (N = 175) was selected and electronically surveyed. The Buss–Perry Aggression Questionnaire, a widely used self-reported measure, was used to assess aggression. No significant difference was found between men and women with regard to levels of aggression, and no statistically significant relationship was found between aggression and length of video game playing (r = −.05, p = .52). However, significant differences were found in levels of aggression between playing and nonplaying respondents of action role-playing (t = −1.48, df = 175, p = .01) and role-playing video games (t = −1.24, df = 175, p = .02). Players of role-playing games had lower levels of aggression than nonplayers. Since role-playing requires one to take the part of another person, empathy might play a role in reduced levels of aggression. Although exposure to violent video games has been related to decreased empathy, role-playing games show just the opposite. It is suggested that controversies regarding violent video games might best be explained by moral panic theory and that competitive games may attract more aggressive players. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented concerning regulating representations of sex and gender during the culture wars. It explores the moral panic that has accompanied attempts by the New Right to mold and define the American citizen as heterosexual, white and a believer in middle-class family values. This discussion draws on the work of Judith Butler to comprehend the role of critique in undoing the oppressive effects of restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life.

In the Netherlands, moral panic about boys' education and behavioural problems has led to public concern about the almost exclusively female environment in which young boys in daycare find themselves. Female daycare workers are attacked for creating a feminized culture in daycare centres. In this article we explore the extent to which these media stereotypes about female workers in daycare coincide with their own ideas and experiences of their work. In 2004 we conducted a (preliminary) study involving more than 80 childcare students in an intermediate vocational training programme in Social Pedagogic Work to qualify them to work in daycare centres in the Netherlands. The results of the study do not support the binary stereotypical representation of women's professional and personal characteristics as an adequate picture of these trainees' opinions of their work in early childhood care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyze the context of linguistic guerrilla on gender in contemporary Brazil. It focuses on two phenomena: on the one hand, Dilma Rousseff's use of the title presidenta, a strategy of feminization of a historically masculine term and political position; and on the other hand, the use of the letter x as a neutral gender ending, a strategy of rupture in the heterocispatriarchal and binary linguistic system of Portuguese that has become visible in public space in recent years. These phenomena enable us to perceive that "the 'x' of the question," in the case of Brazil, is merely the expression of a moral panic over the political potency of the concept of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]