Patriarchy

A Declaration of Caring: Towards Ecological Masculinism

Citation:

Pulé, Paul M. 2013. “A Declaration of Caring: Towards Ecological Masculinism.” PhD diss., Murdoch University.

Author: Paul M. Pulé

Abstract:

This dissertation argues that the social and environmental problems we face are primarily the result of patriarchal or ‘malestream’ norms. These norms are constructed on hypermasculinist ways of being, thinking and doing that inhibit the growth and development of sustainable principles and practices. Responding to this assertion and following in the footsteps of deep ecology, social ecology and ecological feminism, the study brings masculinities concerns to the heart of the human/Nature relationship while also bringing concerns for society and the environment to the ways we think about men in the modern West. Further, it argues that if we are to achieve a truly sustainable future, then we must encourage men to reawaken their innate care. The dissertation declares that all men are born good and possess an infinite capacity to care and be caring. It is however recognised that these innate capacities for men to care and be caring are suppressed by ‘men’s oppression’ and that this oppression can prevent men from expressing their fullest humanness to the detriment of all Others and themselves. The dissertation recommends that men develop emotional competencies along with their intellect and intuition in order to authentically nurture the relational space between Others and themselves. Building on feminist care theory, a theoretical framework termed ecological masculinism is introduced, which facilitates modern Western men to care for and be caring towards society, Nature and the self—concurrently. The dissertation constructs a theoretical framework for ecological masculinism that is accompanied by a plurality of ecomasculine praxes. This ecologised masculinities theory and praxes instigates a new conversation in environmental philosophy that facilitates the rise of ‘ecomen’ who serve important roles in forging a deep green future for all of life on Earth.

Topics: Environment, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Masculinism

Year: 2013

Right-Wing Sisterhood: Everyday Politics of Hindu Nationalist Women in India and Zionist Settler Women in Israel-Palestine

Citation:

Mehta, Akanksha. 2017. "Right-Wing Sisterhood: Everyday Politics of Hindu Nationalist Women in India and Zionist Settler Women in Israel-Palestine." PhD diss., SOAS University of London.

Author: Akanksha Mehta

Annotation:

Summary: 
"Right-Wing movements have gained political momentum in the last few decades, drawing within their ranks women who not only embody their exclusionary and violent politics but who also simultaneously contest everyday patriarchies. This thesis examines the everyday politics of women in two right-wing movements, the cultural nationalist Hindu right-wing project in India and the settler-colonial Zionist project in Israel-Palestine. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic, narrative, and visual ‘fieldwork’ conducted with women in both these movements, I argue that through a politics of the everyday, right-wing women bargain and negotiate with patriarchal communities/homes, male-formulated ideologies and discourses, and maledominated right-wing projects and spaces. These mediations replicate and affirm as well as subvert and challenge patriarchal structures and power hierarchies, troubling the binaries of home/world, private/public, personal/political, and victim/agent. I assert that dominant literature on rightwing women focuses on motherhood and family, ignoring various other crucial subject positions that are constituted and occupied by right-wing women and neglecting the agential and empowering potential of right-wing women’s subjectivities.
 
"I use four themes/lenses to examine the everyday politics of right-wing women. These are: pedagogy and education; charity and humanitarian work; intimacy, friendship, sociability and leisure; and political violence. By interrogating the practices that are contained in and enabled by these four locations of Hindu right-wing and Zionist settler women’s everyday politics, this thesis highlights the multiple narratives, contradictions, pluralities, hierarchies, power structures, languages, and discourses that encompass right-wing women’s projects" (Mehta 2017, 3-4). 

Topics: Armed Conflict, Occupation, Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Nationalism, Political Participation, Religion, Violence Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East, Southeast Asia Countries: India, Israel, Palestine / Occupied Palestinian Territories

Year: 2017

Post-Conflict Ruptures and the Space for Women's Empowerment in Bangladesh

Citation:

Hossain, Naomi. 2018. “Post-Conflict Ruptures and the Space for Women's Empowerment in Bangladesh.” Women's Studies International Forum 68: 104–12.

Author: Naomi Hossain

Abstract:

Bangladesh is widely deemed to have made rapid progress on gender equality and women's empowerment. How to understand the apparent advances of women in a poor, populous, Muslim-majority country in the belt of classic patriarchy? This paper locates the origins of these changes in the immediate aftermath of Bangladesh's struggle for independence in 1971, when a series of visible ruptures to the patriarchal bargain dramatized the ongoing crisis of social reproduction. This drew elite attention to the conditions of landless rural women, creating space for their programmatic inclusion in the political settlement, within a newly biopolitical project of national development. The paper argues that it is possible to make sense of the gains women have made as well as old and new obstacles to gender justice - including women's continuing responsibility for care - in this critical juncture in the political history of gender relations in Bangladesh.

Keywords: Bangladesh, women's empowerment, biopower, patriarchal bargains, post-conflict gender relations

Topics: Armed Conflict, National Liberation Wars, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Rights, Land Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Bangladesh

Year: 2018

Negotiating Mobility in Gendered Spaces: Case of Pakistani Women Doctors

Citation:

Masood, Ayesha. 2018. “Negotiating Mobility in Gendered Spaces: Case of Pakistani Women Doctors.” Gender, Place & Culture 25 (2): 188–206.

Author: Ayesha Masood

Abstract:

Through their gendered spatial practices, women in Pakistan re-negotiate and contest the multiple social and material restrictions in their daily mobility to reclaim the urban transit spaces, specifically, roads. Ethnographic research on the automobile use and driving with the women doctors in Lahore, Pakistan reveal the relationship between these strategic practices and the educational and occupational choices of women. These spatially embedded, intentional practices of women doctors, contingent on their social and economic positions, are directly linked to the emerging gendered identities and changing social and material gendered boundaries in Pakistani society. Moreover, these changing spaces are part of on-going flux of shifting power relations between traditional patriarchy and capitalism.

Keywords: driving, mobility, transport, public geography, women doctors, Pakistan

Topics: Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Infrastructure, Transportation, Livelihoods Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Pakistan

Year: 2018

Gender in Road Construction: Experience in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

Citation:

Widana, Anura. 2018. “Gender in Road Construction: Experience in the Papua New Guinea Highlands.” Open Access Library Journal 5 (12). 

Author: Anura Widana

Abstract:

This article presents experiences in engaging women in road construction work in Papua New Guinea (PNG) Highlands. Providing labour for road construction is a new experience and a demand for tribal women in the highlands region. Women have never before worked on paid road construction works. However, similar to men, women also need cash to pay for goods purchased for the household. Although several road construction activities are in progress in a number of Pacific countries including PNG, there is less evidence reported on the engagement of women. This article initially begins a discussion on gender role in a patriarchy society and gender engagement in road construction program. The article highlights the need for and the process of getting women engaged in road construction works. Women engagement in road construction has been zero in the early years of road construction program which has been increased to 13% of the work force in late 2017. This massive increase is attributable to various strategies adopted by the project staff. The women’s new role in road construction, benefits accrued to both men and women and, recommendation to increase women participation in road construction is discussed. The paper is based mainly on the extensive knowledge gained by the author in working on road construction projects in the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Highlands. Where possible, the findings are supported by previous research.

Keywords: Papua New Guinea, Highland Region, Gender, road construction

Topics: Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Households, Infrastructure, Transportation, Livelihoods Regions: Oceania Countries: Papua New Guinea

Year: 2018

Security Sector Reform and the Paradoxical Tension between Local Ownership and Gender Equality

Citation:

Gordon, Eleanor, Anthony Cleland Welch, and Emmicki Roos. 2015. “Security Sector Reform and the Paradoxical Tension between Local Ownership and Gender Equality.” Stability: International Journal of Security and Development 4 (1).

Authors: Eleanor Gordon, Anthony Cleland Welch, Emmicki Roos

Abstract:

This article analyses the tension or conflict that can exist between the principles of local ownership and gender equality that guide Security Sector Reform (SSR) programmes when gender discrimination and patriarchal values characterise the local environment (and ‘locals’ do not value gender equality). In these situations, international actors may be reluctant to advocate gender equality, regarding it as imposing culturally alien values and potentially destabilising to the SSR process. It is argued, however, that the tension between local ownership and gender equality is deceptive and merely serves to protect the power of dominant groups and disempower the marginalised, often serving to disguise the power relations at play in post-conflict environments and avoid addressing the security needs of those who are often at most risk. The paper concludes that rather than a tension existing between the two principles, in fact, local ownership without gender equality is meaningless. Moreover, failing to promote gender equality undermines the extent to which SSR programmes result in security and justice sector institutions that are representative of and responsive to the needs of both men and women. It can also perpetuate structural inequalities and conflict dynamics and, ultimately, limit the success of SSR and broader peacebuilding processes.

Topics: Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Gender Equality/Inequality, Justice, Peacebuilding, Post-Conflict, Security, Security Sector Reform

Year: 2015

Margins, Silences, and Bottom Rungs: How to Overcome the Underestimation of Power in the Study of International Relations

Citation:

Enloe, Cynthia. 2004. “Margins, Silences, and Bottom Rungs: How to Overcome the Underestimation of Power in the Study of International Relations.” In The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, 19–42. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Author: Cynthia Enloe

Annotation:

Summary: 
When I think about what it is that seems so unrealistic (yes, that loaded term) in most formal analyses of international politics, what strikes me is how far their authors are willing to go in underestimating the amounts and varieties of power it takes to form and sustain any given set of relationships between states. This conclusion, of course, rings oddly. So many analysts, after all, profess to be interested chiefly in power – who has it, how they got it, what they try to do with it. Their profession notwithstanding, I believe that by concentrating so single-mindedly on what is referred to euphemistically as the ‘centre’, scores of analysts have produced a naive portrait of how international politics really (there's that tricky concept again) work.
 
No individual or social group finds themselves on the ‘margins’ of any web of relationships – a football league, an industry, an empire, a military alliance, a state – without some other individual or group having accumulated enough power to create the ‘centre’ somewhere else. Beyond its creation, too, there is the yearly and daily business of maintaining the margin where it currently is and the centre where it now is. It is harder for those at the alleged centre to hear the hopes, fears and explanations of those on the margins, not because of physical distance – the margin may be two blocks from the White House, four stops on the Paris metro from the Quai d'Orsay – but because it takes resources and access to be ‘heard’ when and where it matters. (Summary from Cambridge University Press)

Topics: Feminisms, Gender, Gender Roles, Gender Analysis, Gendered Discourses, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy

Year: 2004

Authoritarianism in the Hypermasculinized State: Hybridity, Patriarchy, and Capitalism in Korea

Citation:

Han, Jongwoo, and L. H. M Ling. 1998. “Authoritarianism in the Hypermasculinized State: Hybridity, Patriarchy, and Capitalism in Korea.” International Studies Quarterly 42 (1): 53–78.

Authors: Jongwoo Han, L. H. M Ling

Abstract:

Authoritarianism in East Asia's capitalist developmental state (CDS) is highly gendered. A hybrid product of Western masculinist capitalism and Confucian parental governance, CDS authoritarianism takes on a hypermasculinized developmentalism that assumes all the rights and privileges of classical Confucian patriarchy for the state while assigning to society the characteristics of classical Confucian womanhood: diligence, discipline, and deference. Society subsequently bears the burden of economic development without equal access to political representation or voice. Women in the CDS now face three tiers of patriarchal authority and exploitation: family, state, and economy. Nevertheless, new opportunities for democratization may arise even in the hypermasculinized state. We suggest: (1) em- phasizing substantive, notjust procedural, democratization, (2) exercising a maternalized discourse of dissent, and (3) applying hybrid strategies of social mobilization across states, societies, cultures, and movements. South Korea during the 1960s-1970s serves as our case study.

Topics: Economies, Feminisms, Gender, Gender Analysis, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Governance, Political Economies Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: South Korea

Year: 1998

Cognitive Short Cuts

Citation:

Hutchings, Kimberly. 2008. “Cognitive Short Cuts.” In Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart and Marysia Zalewski, 23–46. London: Zed Books.

Author: Kimberly Hutchings

Annotation:

Summary:
"The purpose of this chapter is to examine one of the reasons for this ongoing marginalization of feminist/gender concerns. I will argue that a key reason for the ongoing invisibility of women and gender in the theoretical frames through which post-cold-war international politics is grasped is the legitimizing function of masculinity discourses within those theories. My central claim is that masculinity operates as a resource for though in theorizing international politics. That is to say, masculinity operates as a kind of commonsense, implicit, often unconscious shorthand for processes of explanatory and normative judgement, thereby as one of the crucial ways in which our social scientific imagination is shaped and limited. I will explore how this works in two very influential but different accounts of contemporary international politics: the 'offensive' realism of Mearsheimer (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001) and the post-Marxist story of 'empire/multitude' in the work of Hardt and Negri (Empire, 2000). In conclusion, I will argue that one can hope, to paraphrase Ferguson, to loosen the hold of masculinity on meaning and life only once one has appreciated how much intellectual work is accomplished by masculinity's logical structure (Ferguson 1993: 29). Without the logic of masculinity, grand theorists of international politics would be required to work a great deal harder in order to persuade us of the accuracy of their diagnoses of the times" (Hutchings 2008, 23-24). 

Topics: Feminisms, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gender Analysis, Femininity/ies, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Masculinism

Year: 2008

New Patriotisms: The Beauty Queen and the Bomb

Citation:

Sangari, Kumkum. 2004. “New Patriotisms: The Beauty Queen and the Bomb.” In From Gender to Nation, edited by Rada Ivekovic and Julie Mostov, 153–70. New Delhi: Zubaan.

Author: Kumkum Sangari

Annotation:

Summary:
"The significant literature on gender and nationalism generated in the past decade shows that the emphasis on women as biological reproducers or members of a bounded collectivity, and the centrality of womanhood to the ideological reproduction of the nation are common to a variety of nationalisms. Yet the ideological distinctions between nationalisms remain significant. Given the intertwined legacies of colonialism, the patriarchal assumptions in nationalism, and the particularism of the Hindu right-wing, definitions of Indian culture have always been problematic, especially in the way they cast the "nation" as an entity affected and endangered by the "west". The secular, multireligious or more inclusive nationalisms that emerged in the colonial period were implicated in the specific types of antifeminism and new conservatism that crystallized around anticolonialism; however, they cannot be confused with the obsessive particularisms that attempted to seize nationalism and twist it to their own ends. These particularisms sought the aura of nationalism but pushed for a single majoritarian religious identity, and a tighter patriarchy by polarizing an alien, "selfgenerated" and modem "west". Neither anticolonialism, nor antiwesternism, nor antimodernity could guarantee national authenticity since they were shaped in a two-way cultural traffic marked by recursivity, transformation, resistance and ideological collaboration. They, did however, produce a powerful imaginary India exemplified in its nonmodern or antimodern areas (notably a subsuming religiosity and chaste, self-sacrificing women) to be preserved, an India that was most emphatically (though not exclusively) deployed by the Hindu right" (Sangari 2004, 153).

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Gender, Gendered Discourses, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Nationalism, Religion, Security, Weapons /Arms Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: India

Year: 2004

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