Gender & Society recent issues

Introduction: Well, How Did I Get Here?

Misra, J. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

In this introduction to Gender & Society’s symposium on Patricia Hill Collins’s path-breaking work on intersectionality, I reflect on how the symposium contributors have used intersectional perspectives in their own work, and on how Collins’ conceptualizations have shaped interdisciplinary scholarship more broadly. I also take this opportunity to present my own vision as the new editor of Gender & Society, and to reextend this journal’s longstanding welcome to all who work to expand and deepen our understanding of the workings and effects of gender, in societies around the globe.

Looking Back, Moving Ahead: Scholarship in Service to Social Justice

Collins, P. H. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Patricia Hill Collins reflects upon her past, present, and future scholarship.

Reflections on the Early Contributions of Patricia Hill Collins

Higginbotham, E. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Patricia Hill Collins: Past and Future Innovations

Baca Zinn, M. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Intersectionality and the Study of Black, Sexual Minority Women

Moore, M. R. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

The Transnational Journey of Intersectionality

Choo, H. Y. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Dialogical Epistemology--An Intersectional Resistance to the "Oppression Olympics"

Yuval-Davis, N. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Intersectionality in a Transnational World

Purkayastha, B. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Intersectionality and Global Gender Inequality

Bose, C. E. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Extensive Mothering: Employed Mothers' Constructions of the Good Mother

Christopher, K. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Social scientists have provided rich descriptions of the ascendant cultural ideologies surrounding motherhood and paid work. In this article, I use in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of 40 employed mothers to explore how they navigate the "intensive mother" and "ideal worker" ideologies and construct their own accounts of good mothering. Married mothers in this sample construct scripts of "extensive mothering," in which they delegate substantial amounts of the day-to-day child care to others, and reframe good mothering as being "in charge" of and ultimately responsible for their children’s well-being. Single mothers describe extensive mothering in different ways, and their narratives suggest less accountability to the "intensive mothering" model. Mothers in this sample also justify employment in novel ways: They emphasize the benefits of employment for themselves—not only their children—and they reject the long work hours imposed by an ideal worker model. The article ends with the implications of extensive mothering for the motherhood and employment literatures and for gender equality.

Men's Perceptions of Women's Rights and Changing Gender Relations in South Africa: Lessons for Working With Men and Boys in HIV and Antiviolence Programs

Dworkin, S. L., Colvin, C., Hatcher, A., Peacock, D. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Emerging out of increased attention to gender equality within violence and HIV prevention efforts in South African society has been an intensified focus on masculinities. Garnering a deeper understanding of how men respond to shifting gender relations and rights on the ground is of urgent importance, particularly since social constructions of gender are implicated in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As social scientists collaborating on a rights-based HIV and antiviolence program, we sought to understand masculinities, rights, and gender norms across six high HIV/AIDS seroprevalence provinces in South Africa. Drawing on focus group research, we explore the ways that men who are engaged in HIV and antiviolence programming can often be simultaneously resistant to and embracing of changes in masculinities, women’s rights, and gender relations. We use our findings on men’s responses to changing gender relations to make suggestions for how to better engage men in HIV and antiviolence programs.

Book Review: The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work

Kwan, S. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Race, Gender, and the Labor Market: Inequalities at Work

Skaggs, S. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Digesting Race, Class, and Gender: Sugar as Metaphor

Wingfield, A. H. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Wealth, Whiteness, and the Matrix of Privilege: The View from the Country Club

Gengler, A. M. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America

Tuominen, M. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care

Legerski, E. M. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960

Williams-Forson, P. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Selling Welfare Reform: Work-First and the New Common Sense of Employment

Reich, J. A. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Hard Lives, Mean Streets: Violence in the Lives of Homeless Women

Hetzler, O. R. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Mexican Women and the Other Side of Immigration: Engendering Transnational Ties

Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Through Our Eyes: African American Men's Experiences of Race, Gender, and Violence

Smith, E. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Maskulinitas: Culture, Gender and Politics in Indonesia

Thomann, M. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Gender Circuits: Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age

Ransom, E. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women's Reproduction in America

Moe, A. M. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Global Gender Research: Transnational Perspectives

Valentine, C. G. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Protection of Sexual Minorities since Stonewall: Progress and Stalemate in Developed and Developing Countries

Post, S. M. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: African Feminist Politics of Knowledge: Tensions, Challenges, Possibilities

Norwood, C. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan

Gu, C.-J. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship

Shayne, J. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Book Review: Activist Scholarship: Antiracism, Feminism, and Social Change

Orr, C. M. — 2012-01-23T12:58:44-08:00

Something from Nothing: Women, Space, and Resistance

Ore, T. E. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

Distancing as a Gendered Barrier: Understanding Women Scientists' Gender Practices

Rhoton, L. A. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

Gendered barriers to women’s advancement in STEM disciplines are subtle, often the result of gender practices, gender stereotypes, and gendered occupational cultures. Professional socialization into scientific cultures encourages and rewards gender practices that help to maintain gendered barriers. This article focuses more specifically on how individual women scientists’ gender practices potentially sustain gender barriers. Findings based on interview data from thirty women in academic STEM fields reveal that women draw on gendered expectations and norms within their disciplines to discursively distance themselves from other women they perceive as having deviated from such norms and expectations. The types of distancing in which these respondents engage reflect and support gendered structures, cultures, and practices that ultimately disadvantage women and obscure gender inequality. I conclude by discussing the implications of women scientists’ distancing practices for efforts to change the gendered cultures of STEM disciplines.

Breadwinning Wives and "Left-Behind" Husbands: Men and Masculinities in the Vietnamese Transnational Family

Hoang, L. A., Yeoh, B. S. A. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

This article explores an aspect of women’s transnational labor migration that has been understudied in many labor-sending countries: how men experience shifts in the household labor division triggered by women’s migration. In so doing, we shed light on the diverse ways notions of masculinity and gender identities are being reworked and renegotiated in the transnational family. Drawing on qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews with carers of left-behind children in Northern Vietnam, we show how men are confronted with the need to take on child care duties, which have traditionally been ascribed to women, while at the same time being under considerable pressure to live up to locally accepted masculinity ideals. We provide interesting insights into the changing family structures and dynamics in Vietnamese society where patriarchal norms continue to exert significant influence on different facets of life.

Women Breaking the Silence: Military Service, Gender, and Antiwar Protest

Sasson-Levy, O., Levy, Y., Lomsky-Feder, E. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

This paper analyzes how military service can be a source of women’s antiwar voices, using the Israeli case of "Women Breaking the Silence" (WBS). WBS is a collection of testimonies from Israeli women ex-soldiers who have served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The WBS testimonies change the nature of women’s antiwar protest by offering a new, paradoxical source of symbolic legitimacy for women’s antiwar discourse from the gendered marginalized position of "outsiders within" the military. From this contradictory standpoint, the women soldiers offer a critical gendered voice, which focuses on criticism of the combat masculinity and gendered identification with the Palestinian "other." While they reaffirm the republican ethos that grants political dominance to male soldiers, they also deconstruct the image of hegemonic masculinity as the emblem of the nation and undermine gendered militarized norms.

Gender Discrimination at Work: Connecting Gender Stereotypes, Institutional Policies, and Gender Composition of Workplace

Bobbitt-Zeher, D. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

Research on gender inequality has posited the importance of gender discrimination for women’s experiences at work. Previous studies have suggested that gender stereotyping and organizational factors may contribute to discrimination. Yet it is not well understood how these elements connect to foster gender discrimination in everyday workplaces. This work contributes to our understanding of these relationships by analyzing 219 discrimination narratives constructed from sex discrimination cases brought before the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. By looking across a variety of actual work settings, the analysis sheds light on the cultural underpinnings and structural contexts in which discriminatory actions occur. The analyses reveal how gender stereotyping combines in predictable ways with sex composition of workplaces and organizational policies, often through interactional dynamics of discretionary policy usage, to result in discrimination. The findings suggest the importance of cultural, structural, and interactional influences on gender discrimination.

Book Review: Gender, Culture, and Physicality: Paradoxes and Taboos

De Welde, K. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

Book Review: Social Sources of Disparities in Health and Health Care and Linkages to Policy, Population Concerns and Providers of Care

Thomas, J. E. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

Book Review: Stretched Thin: Poor Families, Welfare Work, and Welfare Reform

Danziger, S. K. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

Book Review: Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers

Esara, P. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

Book Review: African Women's Movements: Changing Political Landscapes

Osirim, M. J. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

Book Review: Liberalization's Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India

Desai, M. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

Book Review: The Art of the Gut: Manhood, Power, and Ethics in Japanese Politics

Martin, S. L. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

Book Review: Hillary Clinton's Race for the White House: Gender Politics & the Media on the Campaign Trail

Sobieraj, S. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

Book Review: Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics

Ochoa, G. L. — 2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

With Thanks

2011-12-05T17:04:23-08:00

Casual Hookups to Formal Dates: Refining the Boundaries of the Sexual Double Standard

Reid, J. A., Elliott, S., Webber, G. R. — 2011-09-15T13:27:26-07:00

"Hooking up," a popular type of sexual behavior among college students, has become a pathway to dating relationships. Based on open-ended narratives written by 273 undergraduates, we analyze how students interpreted a vignette describing a heterosexual hookup followed by a sexless first date. In contrast to the sexual script which holds that women want relationships more than sex and men care about sex more than relationships, students generally accorded women sexual agency and desire in the hookup and validated men’s post-hookup relationship interest. However, in explaining the sexless date, students typically reasoned the woman was being chaste and withholding sex to redeem her reputation whereas they often characterized the man’s abstinence in terms of a pity date. The findings underscore the tenacity of gendered sexual scripts around heterosexual dates and hookups but also reveal fissures and contradictions that suggest some changes to the sexual double standard.

Show or Tell? Feminist Dilemmas and Implicit Feminism at Girls' Rock Camp

Giffort, D. M. — 2011-09-15T13:27:26-07:00

Previous research demonstrates how activists who do not identify as feminist sometimes engage in "implicitly feminist practices." In this paper, I extend this research by asking: Do self-identified feminists also employ such implicit strategies in the course of their activist efforts? If so, why would they "do" feminism implicitly? Based on participant observation and semistructured interviews at Girls Rock! Midwest—a week-long summer day camp program that aims to empower girls through rock music production—I develop the concept of implicit feminism. I define implicit feminism as a strategy practiced by feminist activists within organizations that are operating in an anti- and postfeminist environment in which they conceal feminist identities and ideas while emphasizing the more socially acceptable angles of their efforts. My research demonstrates how feminist-identified activists employ implicitly feminist practices as a strategic response to feminist dilemmas stemming from competing organizational demands, how they envision the possibilities and drawbacks of such a strategy, and what this suggests for the shape and future of feminist politics.

Programs for Undergraduate Women in Science and Engineering: Issues, Problems, and Solutions

Fox, M. F., Sonnert, G., Nikiforova, I. — 2011-09-15T13:27:26-07:00

We analyze programs for undergraduate women in science and engineering as strategic research sites in the study of disparities between women and men in scientific fields within higher education. Based on responses to a survey of the directors of the universe of these programs in the United States, the findings reveal key patterns in the programs’ (1) definitions of the issues of women in science and engineering, (2) their solutions to address the issues, (3) their goals and perceived success with goals, and (4) their organizational characteristics and relationship to the larger institutional environments. The findings—which are conceptually grounded in the distinction between structural/institutional and individual issues facing women in science—have implications for understanding gender, science, and higher education, and for initiatives undertaken to improve the condition of women in scientific fields. The findings may also inform strategic efforts to reduce gender disparity in other organizational contexts.

Youth Privilege: Doing Age and Gender in Russia's Single-Mother Families

Utrata, J. — 2011-09-15T13:27:26-07:00

Relative to gender, race, and class, age relations are undertheorized. Yet age, like gender, is routinely accomplished in daily life. Grandmothers and adult daughters simultaneously do age and gender as they support one another in managing paid work and domestic responsibilities. Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with 90 single mothers and 30 grandmothers (babushki) in Russia, I explore intergenerational negotiations for support. Both single mothers and grandmothers are held accountable for doing gendered age, but labor and marriage markets tip the balance in favor of single mothers. Single mothers re-create youth privilege, finding their lives simpler with a babushka. Some grandmothers embrace newer discourses of femininity, challenging assumptions about age and family status that oblige them to perform care work. But most grandmothers do whatever they can to help daughters, feeling more dependent than ever on them because of the uncertainties of capitalism and the state’s retrenchment. I contribute to theories of age and gender intersectionality by making visible both single mothers’ youth privilege and grandmothers’ unpaid, often devalued, care work.

Stay-at-Home Fathers and Breadwinning Mothers: Gender, Couple Dynamics, and Social Change

Chesley, N. — 2011-09-15T13:27:27-07:00

I examine experiences of married couples to better understand whether economic shifts that push couples into gender-atypical work/family arrangements influence gender inequality. I draw on in-depth interviews conducted in 2008 with stay-at-home husbands and their wives in 21 married-couple families with children (42 individual interviews). I find that the decision to have a father stay home is heavily influenced by economic conditions, suggesting that men’s increased job instability and shifts in the relative employment conditions of husbands and wives push some men into at-home fatherhood. However, this shift in family arrangements can promote change toward greater gender equality even in couples that initially hold entrenched, gendered beliefs. The data indicate that at-home fathers come to value their increased involvement in children’s care in ways that reduce gender differences in parenting and that have the potential to translate into institutional change, particularly when they reenter the labor force. Furthermore, at-home father arrangements generally appear to provide increased support for women’s employment and promote changes in women’s work behavior that may reduce inequities that stem from traditionally gendered divisions in work/family responsibilities.

Book Review: Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities and Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture

Taylor, J. — 2011-09-15T13:27:27-07:00

Book Review: Governing the Female Body: Gender, Health, and Networks of Power

Smith, T. — 2011-09-15T13:27:27-07:00

Book Review: Media and Middle Class Moms: Images and Realities of Work and Family

Sutherland, J.-A. — 2011-09-15T13:27:27-07:00

Book Review: Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic and The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade

Samarasinghe, V. — 2011-09-15T13:27:27-07:00

Book Review: DES Daughters: Embodied Knowledge and the Transformation of Women's Health Politics

Hicks, K. M. — 2011-09-15T13:27:27-07:00

Book Review: Skate Life: Re-imagining White Masculinity

Best, A. L. — 2011-09-15T13:27:27-07:00

Book Review: Glass Ceilings & 100-Hour Couples: What the Opt-Out Phenomenon Can Teach Us about Work and Family

Solomon, C. R. — 2011-09-15T13:27:27-07:00

Book Review: Dividing the Domestic: Men, Women and Household Work in Cross-National Perspective

Davis, S. N. — 2011-09-15T13:27:27-07:00

Book Review: College Sex: Philosophy for Everyone, Philosophers with Benefits

Currier, D. M. — 2011-09-15T13:27:27-07:00

A "Major Career Woman"?: How Women Develop Early Expectations about Work

Damaske, S. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

Using data from 80 in-depth qualitative interviews with women randomly sampled from New York City, I ask: how do women develop expectations about their future workforce participation? Using an intersectional approach, I find that women’s expectations about workforce participation stem from gendered, classed, and raced ideas of who works full-time. Socioeconomic status, race, gender, and sexuality influenced early expectations about work and the process through which these expectations developed. Women from white and Latino working-class families were evenly divided in their expectations about their future workforce participation, while the vast majority of white, Asian, African American, and Latina middle-class women expected to work continually as adults. Unlike their working-class white and Hispanic peers, all of the working-class Black respondents developed expectations that they would work continuously as adults. The intersections of race, class, and gender play a central role in shaping women’s expectations about their participation in paid work.

"It's the Knowledge That Puts You in Control": The Embodied Labor of Gynecological Educators

Underman, K. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

Studies have recently begun to attend to the ways paid labor is embodied. However, the literature on embodied labor has not adequately addressed occupations for which the site of labor is the worker’s own body. One such occupation is that of gynecological educators—female-bodied instructors who teach breast and pelvic examinations to medical students using their own bodies as models. Drawing on interviews with current and former gynecological educators and professional directors, I ask how workers use their bodies to produce legitimated forms of knowledge and how workers navigate gendered meanings attached to bodies. Gynecological educators use a distancing technique I call strategic dualism, which draws on using constructions of the body as an object while simultaneously relying on subjective experiences. This technique allows them to maintain their knowledge and authority, and suggests that workers are able to selectively draw on gendered meanings about the female body to pursue their goals.

Dreaded "Otherness": Heteronormative Patrolling in Women's Body Hair Rebellions

Fahs, B. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

Research on bodies and sexualities has long debated ideas about choice, agency, and power, particularly as women conform to, or rebel against, traditional social scripts about femininity and heterosexuality. In this study, I have used responses from 34 college women who completed an extra credit assignment in a women’s studies class that asked them to reject social norms and grow out their leg and underarm hair for a period of 10 weeks. Responses reveal that women confronted direct and anticipated homophobia and heterosexism from others as well as hostility for rejecting traditional norms of femininity. Heterosexual women regularly encountered demands that they acquire permission to grow body hair from their male partners, while queer and bisexual women expressed reluctance about further "outing" themselves via their body hair. I consider implications for linking sexual identity discrimination and body hair practices, and for imagining bodies as sites of resistance inside and outside of pedagogical settings.

Constructing Arab Female Leadership Lessons from the Moroccan Media

Skalli, L. H. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

How the Arab media construct Middle Eastern women as political actors, frame their leadership roles, and narrate their activities to the public are important questions largely ignored in the growing scholarship on women’s political participation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s reflections on the politics of recognition and distribution (2007), I examine the construction of women’s leadership in Morocco during the four-month period leading to the local elections of June 2009. Analysis of 1,738 news items from five print media sources reveals that the "symbolic annihilation" of political women, a thesis traditionally applied to Western contexts, is disturbingly robust in Morocco. The Moroccan case alerts us that institutional mechanisms supporting women’s leadership might begin to address gender biases in the distribution of political power, but they do not guarantee the recognition of gender equality in the cultural sphere of knowledge production and opinion formation. Struggles over gender equity in Morocco and elsewhere in MENA should engage more fully with the politics of recognition given the disjuncture between women’s leadership competences and achievements and the dominant ideological frames constructing women’s leadership.

Men Bring Condoms, Women Take Pills: Men's and Women's Roles in Contraceptive Decision Making

Fennell, J. L. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

The most popular form of reversible contraception in the United States is the female-controlled hormonal birth control pill. Consequently, scholars and lay people have typically assumed that women take primary responsibility for contraceptive decision making in relationships. Although many studies have shown that men exert strong influence in couple’s contraceptive decisions in developing countries, very few studies have considered the gendered dynamic of contraceptive decision making in developed societies. This study uses in-depth interviews with 30 American opposite-sex couples to show that contraceptive responsibility in long-term relationships in the United States often conforms to a gendered division of labor, with women primarily in charge. A substantial minority of men in this study were highly committed contraceptors. However, the social framing of contraception as being primarily in women’s "sphere," and the technological constraints on their participation, made even these men reluctant to discuss contraception with their women partners.

Book Review: A Typology of Domestic Violence: Intimate Terrorism, Violent Resistance, and Situational Couple Violence

Durfee, A. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

Book Review: The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex, and Sin in the New American Heartland

Lerum, K. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

Book Review: America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation

Keys, J. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

Book Review: Family, Gender, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia

Scott, D. B. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

Book Review: Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement

Ryan, C. R. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

Book Review: Women on Probation and Parole: A Feminist Critique of Community Programs and Services

Lempert, L. B. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

Book Review: Racing Romance: Love, Power, and Desire among Asian American/White Couples

Le Espiritu, Y. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

Book Review: When Couples Become Parents: The Creation of Gender in the Transition to Parenthood

McQuillan, J. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00

Book Review: Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman

Wallace, G. — 2011-08-04T11:33:15-07:00