Advances in Gender Research – serie

This series is aimed at presenting current methodological and theoretical research in the area of gender studies. It discusses topics such as gender labour markets and social policy, women and families in Costa Rica, and economic development, patriarchy, and intrahousehold dynamics.

The contributors to this volume, the third in the series, refine ideas that have been part of the conceptual toolkit of gender scholarship from its inception, identifying new challenges to and new applications for the concepts of the public/private dichotomy and of patriarchy.

The contributors to this volume consider policy implications of gender research with an emphasis on its relevance for children-particularly girls; and gender inequality within a range of contexts from that of Cameroon society where basic education is an issue, to that of feminist family settings in the United States.

In this volume, 15 feminist scholars from five continents, who participated in the 1998 conference co-sponsored by Research Committee 32, Women in Society, of the International Sociological Association (WISISA) and the Centre for Research and Teaching on Women at McGill University, consider, critique and construct theories of society. Their papers examine four inter-related themes: an explicit or implicit acknowledgment and critique of the European Enlightenment as a basis for the modern production of knowledge; the use and utility of "gender" as a concept; problems and solutions in feminist theories of development; and the place of feminism in the production of knowledge and on-the-ground change. Each paper reflects the author's experience as a researcher, theorist or change agent, as well as the discussion and dialogue of the five-day conference.

Contemporary scholars have made important substantive and theoretical contributions to understanding the ways in which power is exercised through gender and through sexuality. Drawing upon a number of theoretical frameworks, including feminism, post-modernism, masculinities and queer theory, researchers have challenged dichotomous, static, and biologically reductionist conceptualizations of gender and sexuality. They have documented the myriad ways in which sex, gender and sexualities are far more complex than previously assumed. However, despite these advances in research, the tendency in the literature has been to examine gender or sexuality. This volume proposes a corrective to that trend by offering a collection of research based articles in which the authors examine the exercise of power at the intersection of gender and sexuality. The articles in this collection offer insights into some of the ways in which gender can be used to challenge the exercise of sexual power, as well as the ways that it can reify patriarchal, heteronormative sexual relations. Additionally, the articles advance the understanding of some of the institutionalized ways that sexual power might be used to challenge or reify gender relations. The articles in this volume have been written so that each is accessible to both students and senior scholars of gender and sexuality.

This volume is about gender, health and medicine broadly defined. From the essays in it, it is abundantly clear that medicine is a gendered and class-structured institution. Taken as a whole the volume offers a critique of exclusively biomedical approaches to personal and public health and calls for more sociological input, qualitative research and an intersectional approach to help us understand various aspects of health and illness. Among the recurrent themes in the seven essays are the medicalization of personal and social problems, the commodification of healthcare, and questions of agency, responsibility and control on the parts of recipients and dispensers of healthcare. Six of the seven essays deal with Western medicine exclusively, the seventh examines a situation where women have a choice between Western and traditional treatment. Timely topics such as somatic distress among women with breast cancer, drug company funding of research on women's sexual problems, and racial and ethnic health disparities are represented. A companion volume will focus on conventional and unconventional approaches to managing pregnancy and childbirth. The intended audience is the social science community, especially those who are interested in the social scientific study of medicine or of gender including those who may not be familiar with the areas in which the two overlap.

This volume offers feminist perspectives on the social, cultural and medical aspects of women as sexual beings and of their fertility, pregnancy and child bearing. It serves as a companion to "Advances in Gender Research volume 7, Gender perspectives on Health and Medicine: Key Themes". As in the previous volume, the authors critique and transcend conventional biomedical approaches to the subject matter. The seven essays raise questions about control and agency asking who decides if, when and how fertility should be controlled and the circumstances under which child birth takes place. They address decision-making on multiple levels from the individual to the national and transnational and grapple with such controversial matters as genital cutting, self-help menstrual extraction and direct-entry midwifery. They interrogate the policies and practices of states and transnational agencies that have a bearing on sexuality and reproductive health, the ways in which womens genitalia have been objectified and manipulated by practices that purport to be both traditional and modern, and the motivations of those who provide alternative forms of fertility control and birthing methods. The intended audience is the social science community, especially those who are interested in the study of gender, sexuality and reproductive health, medicine and alternative medicine, and the areas where these interface.

The ten papers in "Gender Realities: Local and Global" document the types of work in which women engage, and gender equity issues they face. They show both the importance of considering the uniqueness of cultural contexts for understanding and resolving problems and how global interdependence affects local gender realities. The papers fall into two broad and overlapping categories: gender, work and development, and gender and discrimination. Papers related to particular settings focus on the resettlement of villagers in Lesotho, the development of welfare policies in Puerto Rico, the experiences of fishery workers in Newfoundland and of immigrants to Maritime Canada, decisions made by retired couples in the United States, problems faced by academics in Finnish universities, classroom interaction in Canadian law schools, and attitudes of and about school children in Nepal. Other papers examine the role of gender in the informal economy worldwide and the globalization of sexual harassment. Authors based in the United States, Canada and Finland employ a variety of qualitative and quantitative research methods including extensive field work, interviews, surveys, and literature reviews. An introduction by the editors relates the papers to one another and to broad gender themes. Each paper includes an extensive reference list and the volume index allows readers to track specific topics from one paper to the next.

The nine papers in this volume have a world in which the local/global connection is salient as background. Examining gender and its implications for feminist action within this setting, they fall into three overlapping categories. The first, theory, involves the theoretical consideration of gender across place and time. The second, research, reveals cultural differences in attitudes toward gender, and the third, action, concerns the feminist implications of gender as hierarchy. Disciplines represented include archaeology, cultural anthropology, sociology, and urban studies. Comparing, contrasting, and critiquing, authors based in Australia, Brazil, Italy, New Zealand, and the United States report research findings and personal experiences from their home countries as well as Canada, Mexico, Siberia, Slovakia, and a range of Asian nations. In every instance, gender dynamics are shown to be challenging and complex and new insights and directions for gender research, theory and action are revealed. It discusses theory, research and action tied to gender and geographic location. A variety of cultures are represented from diverse countries in the Americas, Asia and Europe. It provides new insights and directions for gender research.

This volume illuminates the encounter of feminist activism with scholarship in political science, cultural studies, sociology, ethnic studies, and economics. The essays contribute images of the forces that lead to the development of many different kinds of feminisms and womens movements across the globe in the 20th century and recently. They explore the cultural constructions and legitimations of sustainability during the processes through which various agents interpret the relevance of feminisms for their social and political initiatives. The volume offers new dimensions on the relationships across time and place among activisms and scholarships, as ways to contemplate how feminisms are sustainable and whether there is a future beyond sustainability. This book gives a genealogical account of various different kinds of feminisms. It offers new dimensions on the relationships across time and place among activisms and scholarships. It investigates and discusses how feminisms are sustainable.

The papers in this volume were selected and revised from among those presented at the conference "Gender and Social Transformation: Global, Transnational, and Local Realities and Perspectives", Beijing, China in 2009. Through case studies and interview data from across the globe we see how intersectionality and inequality are contextualized shaping women's agencies, gender relations, identity, the politics of belonging, power structures, institutional arrangements, and empowerment (self and/or collective) in local communities and cultures influenced by transnational and global networks and processes. Those who experience inequality, the politics of exclusion and social injustice by virtue of gender, ethnicity and/or class and other differences are the most vulnerable in the face of new adversities, including those that occur in response to globalization. Broader theoretical and methodological contexts for these nation- and region-specific studies are provided in essays by leading gender theorists. Divisions of labor, migration, war and peace-building are among the specific topics addressed in papers from China, India, Israel, Korea, Germany, Australia, Turkey and the United States.

"Advances in gender research" is a new series aimed at presenting current methodological and theoretical research in an area of rapid change and with a subject which is interdisciplinary spanning the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences. The papers in volume 1 reflect the current state of gender research in terms of the variety of material and the approach. The authors take various positions within the configuration which include liberal, radical and material feminisms. The pieces also vary in the extent to which the authors' theoretical orientation and ideas about social change are implicit or explicit. The diversity of current gender research is shown in the subjects presented ranging from an examination of the everyday world experienced by poor women and women of colour in American society and post-colonial women on a global basis to research along the critical lines of postmodernism and queer theory. Focus is placed on 'advances' and developments in gender theory. This new series will be of interest to scholars and experts in sociology, anthropology, ethnography, political science and to those with a particular interest in gender studies and race and ethnic relations.

This volume examines the ways individuals, families and societies strive to balance paid and unpaid labor, engage in parenting and accomplish other care-work, seek education for themselves and their children and respond to the mass media, sometimes under conditions of poverty or violence.

"Notions of Family: Intersectional Perspectives" presents new and original research on gender and the institution of family featuring both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The objective of this volume is to present a framework for understanding the ways in which the salient identities of gender, class position, race, sexuality, and other demographic characteristics function simultaneously to produce the outcomes we observe in the lives of individuals as integral forces in the maintenance of family. While there is a large body of literature in each of these demographic areas of analysis and theory, only within the past decade have academics attempted to model and analyze the "simultaneity" of their functioning as one concerted force in our everyday lived experience. Moreover, there has been little directed focus on any particular institutional force in current textual discussions of intersectionality. We seek to begin the process of addressing this void in the academic literature with this edited volume on the family as a societal institution.

Gender inequality/inequity in the academy has been evidenced globally as women outnumber men seeking degrees in institutions of higher education, but remain concentrated in the lower faculty ranks and absent from administrative positions, particularly in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines The chapters in this volume document the gender inequality in higher education in the United States as well as in Australia, Austria, Portugal, South Africa, and Sweden. They explore the reasons for it and test or suggest remedies. Several are based on projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which seeks to address the issue as it is evidenced in STEM disciplines through ADVANCE, a program developed to increase the participation and advancement of women in these disciplines. The authors consider women's situation in the context of a variety of types of educational settings including community colleges, primarily undergraduate institutions, and research-intensive universities.

At the Center reflects on how the study of gender has changed and how studying gender has affected our research methods and our knowledge of the world around us. In honor of Bell Hooks' prophetic work, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, the volume considers how advances in gender research represent a centering of feminist knowledge and an understanding of the process by which feminist knowledge is constructed. A multinational group of contributors explore relatively new problems such as the integration of transgender study, traditional topics in so far as they incorporate current knowledge and methodological issues pertaining to the effects of research on the researcher and the researched as well as other epistemological matters associated with the construction of gender knowledge. Chapters reflect the strength of a range of qualitative methods including life histories and auto-ethnography and explore the ways that large sample quantitative analyses can enhance understanding of everyday dilemmas. The interdisciplinary nature of gender studies and the cross-pollination of theoretical perspectives are illustrated as is the globalization of gender theory, research and policies.

The drive for gender equality is not a recent phenomenon with the UN cited as occupying a central role for legislative change globally. Gender inequality persists in most countries and although it appears that we have a long way to go, this collection contributes to a feminist scholarship that highlights a destabilising of established patterns of behaviour and gender relations. It acknowledges the multiplicity of discrimination but locates women at the centre of a dialogue and presents key interventions in gender and race matters. For the contributors, gender serves as an analytical framework and covers the experiences of women in different global settings related to education, political activism, corporeal violence, identity, sexuality, and poverty. The use of poetry and literature provides a powerful voice for women against exclusion and recognises their contribution to society. This collection is innovative in not only relating experiential evidence but also putting forward how women are able to challenge oppression through circumventing rules, roles, obligations and prejudice through a powerful agency.

Volume 22 explores the complex relationships between gender and food in a variety of locations and time periods using a range of research methods. Authors show that gender inequality and men’s dominance are implicit or explicit, and that in times of both stability and change, the burden of many if not most aspects of food production and provisioning falls upon women and is an integral part of the care work they perform. Food is shown to be related to societal structures of power, resources and labor markets, as well as households, bodies and emotions. Health, well-being and sustainability emerge as major tropes in the economic and geographic north and south from the arctic to the equator and places between. Western cultural trends regarding specialized diets as they relate to health and illness are examined from a gender lens as is children’s nutrition worldwide. Gender inequality as it affects the struggle for access to land, the affordability of food, and its nutritional value is identified as a major social policy issue.

Discourses on Gender and Sexual Inequality: The Legacy of Sandra L. Bemfocuses on emerging discourses on gender, gender roles, and gender schemas. This collection of essays aims to honor the legacy of Sandra Lipsitz Bem and, particularly, her trail-blazing text, The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. Long before the terms transgender and cisgender were introduced into mainstream, academic, and activist discourses on gender, Bem was busy interrogating the use of gender as an essential organizing principle in society.Chapters in this volume aim to draw attention to the significance of Bem’s research for current debates on gender and gender roles in the social sciences, questioning the ways in which the institution of gender has been, and remains, deeply contested. Contributors examine lived experiences of individuals influenced by institutional constructions of gender and examine practical aspects of gender from the perspectives of social policy.

Using diverse theories and methods including analysis of online data, feminist critical discourse, fieldwork, grounded theory, and queer theory, this edited volume explores gender panic and policy in the United States as well as Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Japan, Russia, Sweden, and subnational populations. Contributors consider a range of issues from the meaning of learning to play the traditional female role in order to develop a contemporary heteronormative romantic relationship to the difficulties of fairly accommodating non-binary people in traditionally gendered settings or the problem of implementing a gender-neutral rape law in a prison system that is structurally gendered. Gendered policies pertaining, particularly, to women and their fertility as a result of panics over low birthrates are explored as are issues relating to the validation of and problems with binary gender categories in elite sports. The impact of UN gender equality initiatives including LGBT equality on nation-states is also examined.

Media images shape and are shaped by society. They reflect the ways in which the social order changes and stays the same. The contributors to Gender and the Media: Women’s Places consider a variety of media to explore the impact of what is there, as well as what is missing. Their focus is on women. Networks of the cyberbullying of women of color are rendered graphically and the agency claimed by women in Western Sahara refugee camps is shown in photos. How college women and men respond to the masculinity reflected in hip-hop lyrics and videos, and what it feels like to be a woman in a comic book store are conveyed in excerpts from interviews. Contributors detail how publications discuss rape in India and trafficking in Moldova and ponder the absence of the topic of anorexia in U.S. cinema. Social change is reflected in how trade publications discuss the increasing number of women in the funeral industry. The relation of the local to the global and female invisibility is considered in an analysis of Portuguese punk fanzines. An examination of advice books for American tween girls documents not only the subject matter, but also the racial, ethnic and religious homogeneity and heteronormativity assumed in the text and illustrations. Finally, a comparison of the critical response to identical music recorded by female and male artists provides the opportunity to see the role gender plays in criticism of aesthetic materials.

This volume focuses on the ways in which mothers aremarginalized based on intersecting identities, such as immigration status,race, class, disability, sexuality, and how these women mother from the margins.Divided into three sections, this collection brings forth the voices andexperiences of mothers and highlights the institutions and laws thatmarginalize them.  In the first section, mothersface barriers such as institutional constraints that block them from neededresources and the ability to mother as they see fit.  In section two, contributors examine theborders of marginalized mothering - boundaries reflected through citizenship,walls, geography, dealings with intimate partners and welfare offices, or prisonbars. Readings in this section highlight mothers’ efforts to transcend, resist,or even just survive experiences with borders. The final section centers on mothers that explicitly adopt motheringstrategies of resistance or explicitly use their status as mothers in theiractivism. Topics range from mothers who engage in milk sharing to mothers ofcolor whom organize against police brutality. Throughout the volume, contributors demonstrate the striking resilienceof these mothers, and their resistance in challenging the ideologies andinstitutions that marginalize them.

This volume focuses on the ways in which gender interacts with generation. Developed as the contributors and editors lived through the Covid-19 pandemic, the chapters offer a timely examination of gender-related changes that have occurred against the backdrop of changing socio-dynamics such as increasing and decreasing fertility and the aging of populations, and now, potentially, a global pandemic.The authors demonstrate how gendered and generational interactions intersect with class, immigration status, sexualities, and race and ethnicity. They discuss the various ways generation is defined and measured and they identify areas of intergenerational conflict. Chapters explore how ageism differentially affects the retirement of women and men, the intersectional quality of care-giving, and generational differences in gender attitudes. While chapters primarily cover the US, intergenerational mobility aspirations and female exploitation in Eastern India is also covered. This edited collection offers a wide-reaching look at the dynamics between gender and generations.

In the global South there is growing concern about the dynamics of global politics that have the potential to marginalize the diverse voices and perspectives of subaltern communities. Exploring ongoing and new feminist dialogues in the global South, this book examines the ways in which dominant epistemologies are challenged, unique identities formed, and the implications for the global feminist agenda. With chapters addressing feminist issues in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the authors explore how feminist scholars and activists consciously challenge dominant hegemonic discourses and methodologies. The volume raises several critical questions: How do Southern feminist scholars and activists conceptualize and interpret the multiple facets of women’s lived experiences in their societies? What factors shape their positionality and identity as feminist scholars and activists? How do Southern feminist discourses offer possibilities of new insights that reflect the multiple and shifting conditions in their societies? What might their perspectives bring to global feminist agendas? This volume offers a space within which feminist voices from multiple locations in and on the global South can find expression in conversations that redefine, reconfigure, and envision knowledge production from their standpoints and in ways that positively impact the lives of women in the global South.

This volume of Advances in Gender Research gives space and voice to trans peoples’ experiences and interactions with various social institutions, including but not limited to, social media, healthcare and medicalization, the criminal justice system, and the family. The chapters in this volume utilize intersectional approaches, qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and many have clear implications for policy and advocacy for trans and gender diverse people.The first part of the book covers a wide array of issues relating to health and healthcare for trans people, with authors examining health and aging for older trans people, the continued cisnormativity and transphobia that plagues the healthcare field, questions of body modification and how this relates to fertility, as well as access to mental health care. Part two explores trans inclusion in institutions and societies around the world, with authors exploring non-binary gender options on state sanctioned identification, prison experiences and policy recommendations in the U.S. and England, and positive changes to support trans students on college campuses. Part three covers trans resources, healing, and resilience. The aim of this volume is greater than merely updating the research in trans studies, it stems from a desire to support the trans community in the continued fight for recognition and rights. The volume urges scholars to better understand gender expansion and to turn more attention towards trans hope. To encourage this, the volume ends with a section on resources, healing, and resilience, paving the way for the future of trans studies in sociology.

Gender can be rendered invisible when the gendered nature of institutions is ignored or when the genders of participants in events or movements are not identified. The genders of non-binary and gender-diverse individuals can be erased when gender is conceived of as binary. From an intersectional perspective, genders of people of various classes, castes, races, ethnicities, ages, occupations, or other specific characteristics may be absent from data, erased from public view or rendered invisible by stereotypes or policy decisions.Gender Visibility and Erasure offers a unique way of focusing on gender by identifying the multiple contexts in which issues of visibility, invisibility, and erasure manifest. It is a consideration of who is seen and who is ignored, who has voice and who is silenced, who has agency and who is controlled. Social, cultural, and political factors associated with gender and visibility are also discussed throughout the work. International in perspective, further considerations are made around how gender visibility may change over time in varying contexts such as migration, a program for recruiting lower income girls into STEM fields, academia, government family planning policy, and domestic violence.This 33rd volume of the Advanced Gender Research series, Gender Visibility and Erasure is the ideal work for those studying and researching the in/visibility aspects regarding gender and how this currently and may continue to impact society.

Gender, Power, and Society explores the multifaceted relationship between gender and power in contemporary society. Bringing together a diverse set of scholars who apply innovative theoretical frameworks, including intersectionality and feminism, chapters examine how power is distributed and exercised in various social structures, institutions, and interpersonal interactions. Authors investigate the manifestations of power at the macro, meso, and micro levels, addressing critical issues such as gender-based violence, sexual harassment, fertility decisions, and media representation. Exploring how economic, political, and legal forces intersect with gender, the edited collection uncovers the complex ways in which power operates in both overt and subtle forms, from universities and workplaces to new oil towns and Indian cinema. Targeting scholars and students in gender studies, sociology, legal studies, and media studies, Gender, Power, and Society provides valuable insights for those seeking to understand the intersections of gender and power in contemporary society. Its interdisciplinary approach makes it essential reading for anyone engaged in research or education focused on gender-based inequality, social justice, and the broader implications of power.

Intersectional in approach, this volume of Advances in Gender Research offers an overview of the ways in which environments — broadly defined to include social, natural and built territories, domains and habitats — are gendered. Rooted in qualitative, feminist and change-oriented perspectives, this international set of scholars and practitioners provides an understanding of how marginalized and indigenous populations, often overlooked, relate to natural and built environments.Drawing on real-world interviews, as well as their political and historical contexts, contributors highlight the voices of women and their interactions with their environments. Chapters critically consider the threats, barriers and limitations of urban design to the movements of women, including those with disabilities, covering cases such as:home-based sex work in Punjab citiesworkplace environments and their role in women’s career buildingenvironmental activism and citiesAsian American women in STEM disciplinesindigenous change agents in the Amazonchange in built environments, specifically in Athens and Romeagriculture in the Colombian Amazonqueer eco-spiritualityDemonstrating how women and other marginalized groups respond to the limits and options imposed by the history and structure of spaces, People, Spaces and Places in Gendered Environments envisions a world beyond colonial, able-bodied, class and patriarchal limitations where freedom of movement functions for all.

Beauty embodiment and representations of beauty are crafted by legitimised hierarchies of power in popular culture, including across fashion, sports, media and social media outlets, and the arts. Informed and guided by an intersectional lens with a focus on underrepresented communities, this volume of Advances in Gender Research foregrounds gender and sexuality to engage with beauty as a site of knowledge creation.Interrogating its very definition, chapters take a revolutionary, intersectional approach to explore beauty as an avenue to create alternative knowledge as well as a conduit to engage in critical conversations on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, illness, and fitness. Emphasizing that beauty definitions and standards in any given society closely reflect the distribution of power within it, contributors think critically about the role of institutions such as the hair industry, workplaces, the visual arts, and classical dance in how beauty is socially construed and conceptualized.Grounded in a more open-ended conception that goes beyond aesthetics, Embodiment and Representations of Beauty celebrates beauty’s capacity as a source of liberation, agency, social justice, decolonization, and survival for marginalized communities, as well as an emancipatory path to feminist liberation.