Gender, care and agency
Session chair: Helena Hirvonen (University of Jyväskylä), Marita Husso (University of Jyväskylä) and Tuija Virkki (University of Jyväskylä); contact: marita.husso[a]jyu.fi
Location: AgC221.1 (upper floor).
Programme:
Saturday (October 10)
9:30-10:00 Leo Couacaud (University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia): “Tactility, and the Literalness of the Feeling of Emotions”
10:00-10:30 Harry Lunabba (University of Helsinki): The fortune of being a boy?
10:30-11:00 Ira Virtanen (University of Tampere): “Definite differences. I just don’t know what they are”. Men’s views on gender in emotional talk and social support
11:00-11:30 Deeptima Massey (University of Sussex, Brighton, UK): Women’s Agency and Activity Space during Temporary Absence of Migrant Men: A Study in Rural West Bengal, India
11:30-12:00 Chin-ju Lin (Kaohsiung Medical University, Taiwan): The Reconciliation of Work and Family Life of immigrant women in Taiwan
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Approved participants in alphaphetical order
Couacaud, Leo: “Tactility, and the Literalness of the Feeling of Emotions”
Lin, Chin-ju: The Reconciliation of Work and Family Life of immigrant women in Taiwan
This research explores care conditions and work-family dilemmas that immigrant women are facing in Taiwan. Taiwan is a country with very limited public provision of childcare. Most of the children under six are cared by their mother, and then the grandparents. Immigrant women in Taiwan, due to the restrictions of immigration laws, are mostly marriage migrants from South-east Asian countries, marrying a Taiwanese husband of working-class and peasant family backgrounds. By conducting in-depth interviews with twenty immigrant women from Vietnam, Indonesian, and Cambodian, this paper investigates the following issues: How do immigrant women raise their children with a foreign husband in a foreign land? What strategies do they adopt? What kind of work predicament are they facing? What are the barriers in terms of their gender, class and ethnicity at home and work? When lack of state welfare provision, is it possible to maintain a balance between caring needs of the children and woman’s rights to work? An intersectional approach that is sensitive to immigrant women’s particular cultural, economic and familiar contexts will provide policy implications to the reconciliation of work and family life in immigrant families. It will also enrich feminist understanding about conditions of care in working-class and immigrant families.
Lunabba, Harry: The fortune of being a boy?
Boys are considered as a challenging group to encounter within welfare services. Recent violent outbursts in Finnish schools have furthered the discussions of boys’ needs to be helped. But, we still need to ask: ¬– How are we going to help them? The purpose of my study is to explore how boys are encountered in upper-level contemporary school. My aim is to develop knowledge on how boys’ needs of support are recognized, how their needs are encountered and how boys’ make use of welfare practices in school. The study is ethnographic. The data was gathered from two upper-level comprehensive schools in Helsinki. My tentative idea is that there are four different ways of understanding problems in a multidisciplinary school context, based on different paradigms on how we understand childhood (boys) and society. These four ways of recognizing are: diagnose, condemnation, comprehension and confrontation. Further, my study focuses on two phenomena that has been discovered during fieldwork: the more exceptional concept of not recognizing a boy’s problem and the more common phenomenon of recognizing a boy’s problem, but experiencing inability to do something about it. I will argue that these two challenges that we face with boys are an expression of an unsatisfying relationship between adults and boys in school. In effort to establish early intervention I suggest that the primary focus should be on the relationships between boys and adults in school, rather than in identifying risks and potential problems.
Massey, Deeptima: Women’s Agency and Activity Space during Temporary Absence of Migrant Men: A Study in Rural West Bengal, India
This paper is concerned with the changes in women’s agency as well as social and economic activity spaces while they stay behind during the temporary absence of men. The first part of the paper provides a vantage point from which to look at gender norms and ideologies and changing power relations in rural households when men migrate for manual work. In doing so, it focuses on the gaps in existing literature related to women’s agency in rural areas and emerging questions for this research. The second part is analysis of women’s domestic, social and economic activity spaces and reconstruction of gender norms and ideologies in the absence of migrant men. The paper concludes by considering the significance of the analysis of understanding women’s agency in migrant households. This study takes the challenges of studying the changes in women’s agency while staying behind, and examines how significant the temporary absence of men can be in shaping the lives and experiences of women and children. The research contributes to an understanding of the experiences that influence women’s housework, health and engagement in remunerative work. The understanding of these experiences should add to the knowledge of poor women’s livelihoods as shaped by the temporary work migration of their male counterparts. The arguments are illustrated by ethnographic examples from life history interviews undertaken with women in rural West Bengal, India.
Virtanen, Ira: “Definite differences. I just don’t know what they are”. Men’s views on gender in emotional talk and social support
Discussing the challenges of life and receiving support in interaction with close people increases individuals’ capability to cope with problems, and even improves their physical health. However, men have been claimed to provide more sensitive support to women than to men. It has also been argued that men hesitate to grant room for emotional display of themselves or others, especially those of other men. This paper discusses men’s perceptions on emotional talk, and aims to depict the meanings men give to gender in supportive communication. The empirical material was gathered with qualitative, semi-structured interviews (N = 25) with Finnish men, ages 21 to 67 (M = 41). The results showed that men gave various meanings to talking about emotions with men and women. According to the respondents, the variation was mostly based on individual and relational differences, believed cultural norms, and in some cases, biological sex differences. Listening, matter-of-fact talk and humour were perceived as central features of men’s supportive communication. Even though talk is a valued part of men’s support, nonverbal communication plays a substantial role in supportive interaction. Finnish cultural ways of supporting others and the views on the influence of gender are further discussed.
Last update 5.10.2009.
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