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This paper examines the situated ways in which Moroccan immigrant children in Spain create imagined, alternative life worlds and explore possible forms of identification through an investigation of these children’s hybrid linguistic practices in the midst of play. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) notions of heteroglossia and hybridity, the analysis focuses on the meanings of codeswitching practices that a group of Moroccan immigrant girls deploy in pretend-play sequences involving dolls to construct female identities; identities that they treat as desirable in the context of Spanish idealizations of femininity, but that are considered transgressional by adults in Moroccan diaspora communities in Spain. Neighborhood peer group play affords Moroccan immigrant girls’ transformations and engagement in subversive tactics, in that these activities take place outside the scrutiny of parents and other adults. The rich verbal and sociocultural environment of Moroccan immigrant children’s peer groups provide us with an excellent window to investigate peer language socialization processes in relation to how immigrant children negotiate, transform, and subvert in the midst of play the different, and often incongruous, socio-cultural and linguistic expectations and constraints that they encounter on a daily basis. Use of Moroccan Arabic and Spanish in this pretend play, in particular, results in a heteroglossic polyphony of voices imbued with moral tensions (Bahktin 1981, 1986). This analysis highlights the importance of these hybrid linguistic practices in immigrant girls’ explorations of alternative processes of gendered identification in multilingual, culturally-syncretic environments. Through surreptitious pretend-play, Moroccan immigrant girls explore imagined transgressional possible identities and moral worlds. In this sense, this research also underscores the implications of children’s language use and language choice in pretend-play for larger processes of cultural continuity and transformation in transnational, diasporic communities undergoing rapid change.

This article examines how gender ideologies linked to global processes such as migration and the spread of youth popular culture pose certain challenges for teenage girls who live in patriarchal social contexts. Drawing on a corpus of ethnographic data at a multiethnic middle school in Cyprus, the article focuses on the ways in which language practices mediate this experience and the possibilities that language envelops in the process of gender identity formation in globalizing times. At the intersection of contradictory ideologies ranging from the school’s religious gender discourse, which promotes modesty and chastity, to the predominant media discourse of femininity, which highlights female sexuality, girls’ gender identity claims become fraught with moral implications. In the local peer culture, girls are placed on a fabricated and culturally widespread “virgin-whore” continuum along which different cultural groups – which are often equated with ethnic groups – are evaluated. Paradoxically, girls who embrace sexual freedom (either in practice or rhetorically) may in fact exercise agency and become empowered precisely because of early adolescents’ fascination with sexuality. These girls draw largely on the dominant discourse of femininity abundantly marketed by global media and the pop culture. They thus manage to explore alternative ideas about agency and gender in a locally rebellious manner that defies the traditionalist female roles that school and church promote.

Over the past decade, activewear has become a booming international business and cultural phenomenon. It has simultaneously been critiqued for its pervasive neoliberal, postfeminist, and healthism rhetoric and the ways it continues to (re)produce hegemonic femininity. In this paper, the author drew upon new materialist theory, specifically Karen Barad’s concept of spacetimemattering, to contribute to this body of literature, providing an alternative perspective on the production of femininity and feminist politics within activewear. Using a Baradian-inspired approach, this paper brought various material-discourses and events from multiple time periods into dialogue with the activewear phenomenon to (re)think the production of femininity. Specifically, the analysis explored how activewear entanglements across various spatiotemporalities challenge appearance-based femininity and increase the visibility (and acceptance) of the moving female body. Through this exploration, the author provided a way to (re)imagine feminist politics that are embedded in women’s everyday fitness practices.

This essay aims to investigate the meaning of masculinity norms within the forestry sector in Sweden, and how these norms affect the gender equality within the industry. A qualitative research method was applied to highlight and investigate the research aim and questions. Six semi-structured interviews were conducted and furthermore analyzed with a discursive analysis method and a gender theoretical perspective. This study is a continuation of and has its starting point, where the project Jämställdhet i skogsbranschen, implemented by Länsstyrelsen in Västernorrland and other actors, left off. The fourth aim of that project became an object of focus for us and this essay as a whole. The results of this study implied that there are several masculinity norms within the Swedish forestry sector and that the norms influence both men and women. A hegemonic masculinity within the industry became apparent that affected women as well as men. Finally, the gender equality work within the sector could be affected by masculinity norms, that could be considered to prohibit existing and ongoing gender equality work.

This article presents the responses of 1,432 male association football fans, collected via an online survey from March 2020 to April 2020, regarding their views on sexuality in women's football in the United Kingdom. The analysis focuses on two broad themes that emerged from the data: (1) the association of women footballers with masculinity and how they subsequently transgress the traditional characteristics of femininity; and (2) a reduced stigma surrounding sexuality in women's football given its lower profile in terms of coverage and the smaller number of fans in comparison to men's football. The article concludes by outlining how there is less homonegativity concerning sexuality in women's football in the United Kingdom, primarily because the heteromasculine position of male fans is not challenged, but fans also reaffirm the stereotypes and myths of nonheterosexual women playing a sport like football. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

School playgrounds are critical arenas wherein children’s gender performances unfold, and ‘games’ of gender subordination or domination transpire. Theoretically predicated on Butlerian and Baradian gender performativity approaches, this qualitative study analyses how children negotiate and perform gender, exploring the material-discursive effects of human and non-human agents (e.g. football, sartorial elements) in their intra-actions with the body. Data were collected through observations and semi-structured interviews with 80 pupils from two Athenian elementary schools. Findings showed that playgrounds were dichotomised into rigid gender zones, and the children reaffirmed their gender allegiances by forming gender-homogeneous playgroups and engaging in diametrical activities. Gender-zone transgressions were frequent, albeit with high social and emotional cost, especially for boys who were uninterested in football and lacked athletic dexterity. Finally, the results highlighted the effects of material-discursive forces in gender identity development and, specifically, how ‘successful’ masculinity, girly femininity, sissies, and tomboys emerged through the material-discursive intra-actions of playgrounds, bodies, football, and heteronormative discourses.

The paper presents Foucault's rich philosophical thoughts and analyses on various fields in the historical and cultural settings, and how his ideas are critiqued by feminists of various movements. Although his analyses are really productive and helpful for many feminists in pursuing their studies and activities, yet there are also many critics coming from the feminist group that Foucault's analyses are so androcentrism, namely centralized too much on man (patria potestas), as if woman is identical with man physically and psychologically. Foucault therefore is seen as "gender blindness" as he does not analyze enough women in many different aspects, e.d., masculinity and femininity (gender).

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hardy’s non-conformist views are evident through the dialectic of negation which opposes institutionalized codes, and rejects the stereotypical Victorian concepts of femininity. He hovers over Tess like a stricken father, and presents her as an innocent victim, yet he has not been able to save her from her pre-destined death. His endeavours to create a Utopian society and change the cultural logos in regards to sex and gender, have been hampered by various forms of repression from editors, reviews, publishers and supporters of “the purity movement”. In his attempt to avoid the trauma of rejection, he made substantial expurgations and revisions of the original text, but the tragic death at the end of the book shows that the prevailing ideology, and excessive prudishness of supporters of the league of virtue have outweighed his perceptions and defeated his liberal concepts.” His frustration, bitter experience, and the unpleasant attacks waged on him and his works, were apparently influential in making him cease writing novels.

Sport is a powerful social institution where hegemonic masculinity is constantly constructed and naturalised through the positioning of physicality and athleticism alongside maleness. Female athletes continue to be sub-ordinated by means of under-representation and trivialising gender discourses. So far, the extensive discussion of gendered language in sports media has primarily focussed on identifying the manifestations of gender bias in traditional news media. There has been little endeavour to explore the language of online media and tournament organisers. This study addresses that gap by comparing online gender representations of tennis players during the Wimbledon Championships 2018 on five online news websites and the tournament website. It also contributes to existing literature by providing corpus evidence of gender bias in sports media. The corpus consists of 1,622 articles (1,076,475 tokens). Findings from frequency, collocation and concordance analysis indicate that despite some instances of gender-neutral representations, female players are prone to gender marking and gender-bland sexism on all websites. I argue that the challenges women face relate to the tension between femininity and athleticism, and the misguided belief that women need to but can never eliminate the muscle gap.

Summary The study investigates the construction of femininity ideologies of girls-only school websites in Thailand and deconstructs them for analysis at the lexical level. Ideological beliefs underlying the custom of upbringing of young women in Thai cultural contexts are the focus of investigation. We pay a particular attention to how the schools communicate their key messages of vision, mission, core values, and about us on their websites and conduct a corpus-driven discourse analysis on the data. Findings from running tests of frequency and collocation reveal the traits of femininity constructed in the discourse, built the praising of obedience, submissiveness and lady-like features. We conclude that benevolent sexism is a common cultural practice evident in educational institutions.

In a 2017 landmark reform, Saudi authorities decided to lift the ban on women driving in this conservative society. In tribute to women's newly-gained freedom to drive, major automakers turned to Twitter to launch creative femvertising campaigns that vividly articulate the female empowering motto 'driving is feminine'. Building on the eloquence of visual rhetoric, which combines the communicative force of figurative language with the expressive potential of visual imagery, automobile advertisers resorted to visual metaphtonymy to efficiently target prospective female consumers. The selection of this visual compound, which emerges from the intricate interplay between metaphor and metonymy, allows for a dynamic interaction between the highlighting function of metonymy and the mapping role of metaphoric thought to establish informed parallels between femininity and automobility. Analysis of survey data on the likeability, complexity and effectiveness of a representative sample of four digital automobile advertisements asserts the role and value of visual metaphtontonymy in automobile femvertising.

This study aims to uncover the femininity contained in the novel Ayah by Andrea Hirata with the female main character Marlena and the male main character Sabari. This research is a qualitative descriptive research using critical discourse analysis method. The data source is the novel Ayah by Andrea Hirata published in Bentang 2017. The technique of collecting data is by reading and recording on a data card. The data collection instrument is the human instrument or the researcher himself using a postmodern feminism approach. In analyzing the data, it was carried out in three stages, namely (1) word reduction; (2) data presentation; and (3) drawing conclusions. The results of deconstruction of femininity show that there are six forms of deconstruction of femininity in Andrea Hirata's novel Ayah, namely: feminine image, feminine desire, beauty, feminine habits, feminine work, and feminine principles. Femininity in the novel Ayah is owned and practiced by the female main character and the male main character who have strengths and weaknesses. Through the deconstruction of postmodern femininity, Andrea Hirata is able to present the main character as the subject of the construction of femininity who tries to free himself from the shackles of society's conventions.

This study explores how women game live streamers in Southeast Asia make sense of their experiences as performers and gamers on streaming platforms dominated by Western products and performers. We conducted 13 in-depth interviews guided by an interpretive phenomenological approach to understand their experiences. Women streamers strive to develop audience communities and gain acceptance in the larger gaming community, in part by successfully displaying their own gaming capital. However, they face challenges regarding audience connection and maintenance, presenting their own femininity amid stereotypes and misogyny, and the influence of their respective cultures on their success as performers. We discuss directions of study that further explore gaming and streaming as a form of cultural labor in Asia and the world.

O objetivo deste estudo foi descrever como foram tratadas as questões de gênero e sexualidade nas teses e dissertações sobre balé no Brasil até 2019. Foi realizada busca no banco da CAPES e dado maior ênfase analítica aos trabalhos com proximidade aos conceitos e análises históricas, sociais e culturais. Houve um padrão de problematizações referentes à aproximação do universo do balé às características de feminilidade, sendo que isso produz, simultaneamente, o afastamento da lógica social de masculinidade e a estigmatização dos homens que dançam – foram comuns afirmações de que, pelo senso comum, esse ambiente é atrelado à homossexualidade. Acredita-se que uma alternativa viável e talvez inovadora seja admitir a existência de ações subversivas propositais em relação às regras heteronormativas dos homens nesse universo artístico.

Although conservative evangelical Protestants advocate for protecting the embryo in their opposition to abortion and embryonic stem-cell research, they generally support the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure that routinely results in embryo loss. This study draws on 42 interviews with Protestant women experiencing infertility—the majority of whom are evangelicals who ascribe personhood to embryos—to examine how these women navigate issues of fertility, religion, and reproductive technologies. In their pursuit of parenthood, these women drew on cultural ideals of femininity, such as nurturance and protection, in forming attachments to embryos. These ideals of femininity were also invoked in the women's moral reasoning surrounding embryo loss, where women emphasized their procreative intention as the creation, not the destruction, of embryos. In doing so, the women described themselves as embracing motherhood. Embryo loss was often understood as a means to create the family formations that God intended. I develop the concept of gendered moralities to show how evangelical women mobilize and enact culturally valued forms of femininity in their reasoning about embryo loss. These findings shed light on larger debates about when and why embryo loss becomes a moral issue. I argue that because embryo loss in the fertility clinic occurs in a space where women are striving to become mothers, the clinic and its largely white, middle-class clientele are shielded from moral condemnation that occurs in other settings. This suggests that the fertility clinic, along with its patients and practitioners, occupies a privileged space within the moral hierarchies of reproduction.

Esse estudo tem como objetivo identificar o perfil das publicações acerca das discussões sobre mulher e esporte no Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), especificamente nas áreas temáticas das Ciências Humanas e Ciências Sociais Aplicadas. A revisão integrativa das publicações indexadas na base de dados SciELO foi o método selecionado para essa pesquisa. Como resultado foi possível identificar publicações com a temática mulher e esporte em áreas da Ciências da Saúde, Ciências Exatas e da Terra, Ciências Humanas e Ciências Sociais Aplicadas. Após uma análise dos estudos das duas últimas áreas, percebeu-se que a discussão e produção com base científica nessas áreas ainda carecem de mais investigação e publicação. Houve um direcionamento mínimo para publicações em revistas específicas da Educação Física. Porém, atenta-se a interdisciplinaridade existente nos direcionamentos para revistas que tratam sobre a temática. Os dados coletados apresentam uma variedade de resultados, apresentando discussões que permeiam os conteúdos sobre políticas públicas de inclusão, participação, representação, feminilidade e outros. É necessário que as discussões sobre o tema e conteúdos possam influenciar novas diretrizes que formulem e ampliem as oportunidades de investigações e publicações que explorem as diversas nuances sobre a mulher e esporte.

In March 2016, Microsoft launched Tay.AI, a chatbot designed to experiment with conversational understanding through direct engagement with social media users. Marketed as the digital repre...

Sustainable trust building is a crucial yet underanalyzed process, both in its successes and its more common failures. Because the politics of masculinization and feminization play salient ...

The objective was to analyze how modern studies in the field of administrative sciences whose object of analysis is women in labor relations explain the inequalities between being a working man and being a working woman. To this end, it was made a theoretical exposition about modern scientificity and also the main aspects that permeate the issue of oppression of women was exposed. From a bibliometric survey on the theme "woman" in the field of Administration, and subsequent analysis of qualitative aspects of the texts we found an analytical corpus distributed by subarea and approach, which t made it possible the emersion of the analytical categories "motherhood and homecare" and "femininity versus masculinity". We conclude that such studies on the subject are recent and scarce, but represent a potential for women's struggle since the agenda is legitimate whilst scientific. However, they also represent a limitation, because scientific rationality imposes itself over the real, and even those articles that present themselves as critical ones end up, in part, contributing to the naturalization of this oppression.

Women in Latin America present unique challenges and opportunities due to the family responsibilities they assume because of their gender role. The article focuses on examining the driving forces for Latin American entrepreneurship as empowerment and family support, and the restraining forces as their exclusion from males spheres, labor discrimination, lack of support, and families responsibilities from an intersectionality approach. The study includes the implications of how the entrepreneurial phenomenon develops in the context of women in Latin American. Studies of this type in this context being scarce. Likewise, an analysis of entrepreneurial femininity is carried out to identify the most appropriate Latin context. Equally, an analysis model is proposed that integrates these driving and restrictive forces. The methodology is qualitative, cross-sectional, integrates the case study, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and discourse interpretation. The conclusion presents the women barriers face in startup businesses and how their family responsibilities limit them, being the key support for their development, especially in Latin American when they face a macho atmosphere and a social representation associated with femininity (seems to be contrary to entrepreneurial spirit), the main role of women in the home, without economic support, with financial responsibility for taking care of their families, is shown as a cause for businesses not to grow. Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Latin America; women; family support; Family-Work Enrichment; empowerment; intersectionality.

Despite a growth in single women in UK society over the past two decades, single femininity continues to be highly stigmatised. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of the heterosexual matrix and applying this to qualitative interview data with 25 single women, I argue that single femininity is produced as abject through processes of silencing which render the single female a ‘failed’ subject and reinscribe heteronormative coupled femininity. Yet while deeply painful, such ‘failures’ may also be productive, offering moments where the boundaries of heteronormative feminine subjectivity and hierarchies of intimate life are troubled and transformed. This article complicates understandings of stigma and resistance through a nuanced analysis of processes of abjectification and ambivalence.

This article investigates the construction of gender identities of Pakistani men and women Facebook users given that Facebook has emerged as the prime social media platform through which Pakistani users interact. By employing thematic analysis and taking insights from theory of performativity and intersectionality, the findings of the interview data suggest that the formation, negotiation, and expression of gender identities on Facebook occurs through complex interplay between the discourses of religion, class, culture, and tradition. In some cases, Facebook highlighted the reproduction of the prevalent cultural models of masculinity and femininity while in other cases; there was resistance to the existing socio-religious cultural norms of the society.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the construction of master narratives related to age, gender and entrepreneurship in the context of entrepreneurship education (EE) in Finnish higher education (HE). This is important as master narratives create and limit our understanding of entrepreneurship.Design/methodology/approachThe data comprises 30 student interviews generated in one multidisciplinary Finnish university. The data were analyzed using narrative positioning analysis to examine what kinds of master narratives are (re)constructed in relation to age and entrepreneurship by Finnish university students and how gender intertwines with age in the construction of entrepreneurship.FindingsThree aged and gendered master narratives were identified: (1) youthful, masculine, startup/growth entrepreneurship; (2) middle-aged feminine, expert entrepreneurship and (3) modest, feminine, senior entrepreneurship. The paper makes visible aged and gendered master narratives and cultural norms related to entrepreneurship in the context of EE and HE. Authors argue that the youthful, masculine startup/growth entrepreneurship is the hegemonic master narrative in the context of EE in Finnish HE. Femininity is mostly excluded from this master narrative.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to critical literature on entrepreneurship as an aged as well as gendered phenomenon in the context of EE and HE. So far research on entrepreneurship as an aged and gendered phenomenon in EE and in the context of HE has been virtually non-existent. Moreover, the theoretical and methodological focus on master narratives in entrepreneurship and EE literature is novel. The master narratives identified in the study show that HE students are not addressed equally in relation to entrepreneurship, but aged and gendered hierarchies are sustained.

From policy to personal practice, injunctions to harness the positive effects of positive affects are pulsing through global emotion regimes. Scholarship tracing this phenomenon links the push for positivity – and other seemingly “entrepreneurial” affects – to neoliberal cultural formations. Within and beyond psychology, feminist analyses are highlighting the gendered address of these formations and their imbrication with contemporary femininities. While this raises important questions about the gendered implications of positivity imperatives, an absence of fine-grained empirical work means little is known regarding how positivity discourse is taken up and lived out. We draw from interviews with 24 women facing distinctive emotional management demands (influencers, mothers and service workers) to investigate how positivity inflects everyday living. Our analysis presents two affective–discursive repertoires that participants drew on to explain positivity: positivity as attractive relationality and positivity as agentic cognitive style. We also identified four figures who are central to positivity talk, and three affective– discursive practices linked to positivity: keeping emotions in check, virtuously declining negativity and triumphant positivity. We conclude that, while offering new and appealing feeling positions, positivity discourse may also reaffirm profoundly unequal patterns of emotional practice and regulation.

This conversation emerges from the Afro-Feminist Performance Routes's biennial gatherings at Duke University that have taken place since 2016. Hinging on the work of Lēnablou (Guadeloupe), Rujeko Dumbutshena (Zimbabwe, United States), Sephora Germain (Haiti), Yanique Hume (Jamaica, Cuba, Barbados), Jessi Knight (United States), Halifu Osumare (United States), Luciane Ramos-Silva (Brazil), and Jade Power Sotomayor (Puerto Rico, United States), the focused residency has nurtured embodied dialogues centered on African-derived dance practices and gender, femininity, womanhood, femme, and feminisms. What follows is a scripted simulation of conversations generated in roundtables, workshops, performances, and interviews, as well as around dinner tables and during late-night chats. We've woven together the artists’ statements under two umbrella themes—embodied philosophies and contours of diaspora—in order to highlight the relationship between creative practice and lived experience, between singularity and collective, between precarity and the everyday, between AfroFem and becoming.

Contextualized within corruption issues in Jordan, the Arab Spring uprisings as well as outsiders’ padded relations and interests in the Arab region, this study explores how marriage and family metaphors construct the political reality of the partners involved. The integrative principles of the conceptual metaphor theory and critical metaphor analysis along with the concept of ‘metaphor scenario’ were applied to the data gathered from online Jordanian editorials published by Ahmad Al-Zu’bi (2010-2015). These metaphors were found in 97 out of 1000 editorials used in a larger study of different metaphors. Findings suggest the political relationships of the Arab rulers with the citizens and the outsiders are akin to marriage of convenience that violate the sociocultural traditions. Gender roles also appear to be tailored to the notion of masculine authority over femininity in so far as husbands’ stubbornness or tenacity contributes to wives’ zero-tolerance, hence the collapse of marriage and family system which is reflected on the ailing situation of the Jordanian sociopolitics. The key emotion of shaming permeates in 7 metaphorical scenarios: A stepmother scenario, illegitimate pregnancy, marriage proposal, dysfunctional family, parentless children, engagement, and married partners scenarios. Rhetorically, these scenarios serve as a call for principled relations between partners and emancipation of the passive Arabs from oppressing politics.

The regulation of public space is generative of new approaches to gender nonconformity. In 1968 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, a group of people who identified aswadam—a new term made by combining parts of Indonesian words denoting “femininity” and “masculinity”—made a claim to the city's governor that they had the right to appear in public space. This article illustrates the paradoxical achievement of obtaining recognition on terms constituted through public nuisance regulations governing access to and movement through space. The origins and diffuse effects of recognition achieved by those who identified aswadamand, a decade later,wariafacilitated the partial recognition of a status that was legal but nonconforming. This possibility emerged out of city-level innovations and historical conceptualizations of the body in Indonesia. Attending to the way that gender nonconformity was folded into existing methods of codifying space at the scale of the city reflects a broader anxiety over who can enter public space and on what basis. Considering a concern for struggles to contend with nonconformity on spatial grounds at the level of the city encourages an alternative perspective on the emergence of gender and sexual morality as a definitive feature of national belonging in Indonesia and elsewhere.

In this article, I use the 2018 Guns in American Life Survey (GALS) to investigate the relationship between feminist identity, gun ownership, gun carrying, and women’s empowerment. Notably, while identifying as a feminist lessens the likelihood that a woman will own a gun, of women who own handguns, feminists are more likely to carry their guns all or most of the time. Past victimization is associated with ownership and carrying, confirming genuine concern by women about their safety. Finally, findings reveal that women are more empowered by guns than are men and the relationship is moderated by age. Results are discussed in light of the current American gun culture focused on self-defense and a carry mindset that some women develop as feminist culture in action.