Gendered Power Structures
Location: AgC231.1 (upper floor).
Programme:
Friday (October 9)
15:00-15:30 Nancy Konvalinka (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid, Spain): Embodied Inheritance. The Clash between Gender-Equal Inheritance and a Gender-Differentiated Division of Work in a Spanish Village Today
15:30-16:00 Nelson Turgo (Cardiff University, Wales, UK): Of 'Housebounds' and Wives: Changes in Socio-economic Roles and Gender Identities in a Philippine Fishing Community.
16:00-16:30 Laura Stark (University of Jyväskylä): Imagining a world without gender: a closer look at primary sex characteristics as useful markers for inequality
Saturday (October 10)
09:00-9:30 Evi Haggipavlu (European University, Cyprus): The Social Contract and its Shadows
09:30-10:00 Tam, Siumi Maria (The Chinese University of Hong Kong): Changing Femininity and Ethnicity in Transnational Migration: Nepalese Women in Hong Kong
10:00-10:30 Jen Kennedy (Binghamton University, USA) & Liz Linden: Distinguishing Patriarchies in Feminism: Making Ourselves Visible
10:30-11:00 Pan, Shu-Man (National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan) & Yang, Jung-Tsung (National Taipei University, Taiwan): Beyond Heterosexual Imaginary: Lesbian battering
11:00-11:30 İlhan Yıldız (Yuzuncu Yil University, Ankara, Turkey): Violence against women: belief and tradition
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Approved participants in alphaphetical order
Haggipavlu, Evi: The Social Contract and its Shadows
This paper—focusing on the intersectionality of oppression--traces the philosophical roots of the exploitation of foreign female workers in Cyprus, and locates in classic social contract theories the moral and political foundation for the treatment of certain groups of people as “non-human sub-persons.” Behind its abstract façade, and despite its claims to objectivity the contract is shown to be very concrete, presupposing a world divided into superior and inferior races, genders, sexual orientations and classes. The exclusion of sub-persons and the inhuman treatment they receive “makes sense” when thought from the perspective of the critiques levelled against classic contract theory. The taken for granted ideal notions of “personhood”, “equality” and “morality” as they depend on their shadows, are but projections of assumptions buried deep in the hearts and minds of the signatories of the ideal social contract. From this perspective, the logic of exclusion inherent in the agreement among “persons” takes shape; at its core it is, at the same time, an economically, sexually, heterosexually and racially restricted pact that can only appear in its ideal form by standing on and pushing its negative aspect deeper into the shadows. The shadows are as important to it as its positive side. Only in the warped fantasyland of a masculine/capitalist/white/straight mind can there be room for imagining that it is morally permissible for “black housemaids” and “Russian prostitutes” to be placed on shelves for sale next to other commodities.
Kennedy, Jen & Linden, Liz: Distinguishing Patriarchies in Feminism: Making Ourselves Visible
While of course we recognize that patriarchy is endemic to capitalist culture, we also find evidence of patriarchy within the power structures of feminism itself. The continued dominance of certain feminist languages and practices employed in the 1960s and 1970s is evidence of this fact. Recently we have been told, by a number of prominent feminists from various generations, that feminism is dead. We are troubled that this is their perception when we see so much life in it still. In an effort to recuissitate feminist discourse, we have organized a number of public experiments to explore the question, “what does feminism look like today?” So far these experiments have taken place at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and Art-in-General, all in New York City. At the “Why Gender?” conference, we will present a paper that explores the contradictions and strengths implied by this critique of inflexibility as a patriarchal blind spot in feminism. It has become nearly impossible to talk about contemporary feminism in a way that doesn’t tie it to an historical moment. It is ironic that today we find ourselves hampered by the richness of our language at hand, which has not been diverted from its historical roots and imperatives. It is a strange paradox that this richness has become our present poverty, anchoring us in a patriarchal inflexibility preventing us from moving forward. We must teach ourselves to be critical of the tools we have inheirited and to adapt them to our conditions to make them useful to us now; what we cannot adapt we should reinvent, making a new feminist lexicon customized to suit our moment, flexible enough to incorporate the next.
Konvalinka, Nancy: Embodied Inheritance. The Clash between Gender-Equal Inheritance and a Gender-Differentiated Division of Work in a Spanish Village Today.
Throughout most of the 20th century, gender-equal inheritance and the gender-differentiated division of work practiced in one Spanish village combined to join men’s and women’s inheritance and work on the family farm. Toward the end of the century, changing economic conditions and the mechanization of farming transformed the shape and parameters of the Bourdieu-type social field. People’s decisions, in this new context, exacerbated the gendered division of work to the point that many men remained on the farm, embodying positions as farmers, while many women left for urban contexts, in an extreme embodiment of their positions as auxiliary, mobile help. As a result, the main tenet of the inheritance system, an equal share for every son and daughter, has come into conflict with another deep-seated cultural tenet that the land belongs to whoever works it. In a time of economic crisis, this clash between legal-moral inheritance law and the moral force of use-rights is causing unease and concern among some brothers and sisters regarding their future inheritance. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in a Leonese village between 1988 and 2001, I will describe the situation regarding inheritance and the division of work during the first half of the 20th century and the changes brought about by emigration from the 1950s to the early seventies, in order to concentrate on the transformations at the end of the century. The centrality of gender as an analytical axis will become clear as brothers and sisters envision a new potential for conflict over inheritance.
Pan, Shu-Man & Yang, Jung-Tsung: Beyond Heterosexual Imaginary: Lesbian battering
The problem of domestic violence has been well discussed by feminists in past decades either in Taiwan or in western countries. These discussions have been largely centered on marital relationships in which men are viewed as perpetrators and women as helpless victims. For feminists, domestic violence (marital violence or intimate partner violence) is essentially seen as a consequence of patriarchal society in which men enact power over women through a variety of violence such as verbal, emotional, and physical. Obviously feminist interpretations on domestic violence invariably depend upon the heterosexual imaginary deployed in a variety of hetero-normative assumptions which has put some limitations on interpretations on the phenomenon of domestic violence, particularly on women’s violence against their intimate partners. Different voices and perspectives on interpreting the phenomenon of intimate partner violence and providing services for female victims have been raised within feminist scholars. Feminists also begin to examine issues other than marital violence. However, these studies primarily focus on prevalence and type of intimate partner violence rather than the nature of intimate relations with the same sex, and therefore could not bring reflections on feminist thought. In Taiwan, both issues on domestic violence and service programs for victims have been significantly limited to hetero-normative assumptions, this, in turn, lead to other oppressions toward victims of intimate partner violence by the same sex. Thus, this paper, based on in-depth interviews with 14 lesbians and 2 NGO activists, aims to explore the phenomenon of lesbian battering and its nature of intimate relations.
Tam, Siumi Maria: Changing Femininity and Ethnicity in Transnational Migration: Nepalese Women in Hong Kong
This study looks at the interface of gender and ethnicity as they articulate the social-cultural existence of Nepalese migrants in Hong Kong. Based on data from participant observation and in-depth interview with three generations of Nepalese women, the paper focuses on how selfhood and tradition are understood and utilized in the construction of a transnational community, and seeks new directions in the applicability of ethnographic research in the highly mobile world today. To the extent that first and second generation Nepalese women were marginalized both by the predominantly Chinese society and by their own patriarchal Nepalese community, their identity was seen to be transnational travelers. But simultaneously the second and third generation migrants felt a sense of belonging to Hong Kong their birthplace, demanding citizenship rights to education, employment, healthcare, and social welfare, so they were effecting a fundamental transformation to settlers. In addition, while women to a large extent participate in the constitution and reproduction of a transnational patriarchal system in Hong Kong and in Nepal, they were also active agents in making changes and in fact increasingly seen to be challenging the legitimacy of traditional male-centered relationships. Thus we need to rethink the use of traditional linear models—while they point out the realities of oppression for many migrant women, they have not been able to explain the complexities of women migrants as both travelers and settlers, and the diversity and constant re-negotiations of gender roles and statuses. It is important to take into consideration the major decisions in different stages of the women’s lives, whether and how their gender roles have changed over the generations, and to re-examine these same female existences that have been important building blocks of a transnational network.
Turgo, Nelson N: Of 'Housebounds' and Wives: Changes in Socio-economic Roles and Gender Identities in a Philippine Fishing Community.
The paper is part of a bigger ethnographic study of a fishing village in the Philippines. The over-all claim of the paper is that in understanding changes in socio-economic role, gender dynamics and concomitantly, the allocation of power in a community (and in this study, a fishing community), one has to look into the intertwining, overdetermined and conflicted relationship of geographical scales (the local, the national and the global). Doing so would provide researchers a contextual placing of social changes within the continuum of a community that is both a political cartography and a geographical imaginary. In the first section of this paper, I make a short account of the economic changes in the Philippines for the past 20 years. This is not an exhaustive narrative, though. What I would like to accomplish in this part is the connection between the national economic re-structuring and the local economy of Dulo, a fishing community in the southern Philippines. This connection provides a context for the re-drawing of socio-economic roles of men and women in the community. The second part talks about the general conception about the “appropriate” roles of men and women in the fishing community. Here, I draw from my interviews and observation in the community. As what will be clear later, what is dominantly perceived is entirely different from what is locally practiced. In this paper, I also try to review some literatures about the sexual division of labor in the Philippines, generally and fishing communities like Dulo, specifically. For the third part, I provide a substantive accounting and discussion of on-going transformation and negotiation in the socio-economic roles of men and women in Dulo. I explain the politics of negotiation, avowal and disavowal of expected and negotiated socio-economic roles as they are played out in the daily lives of people in the community. I point out the “usurpation” and “territorial incursion” of men into women’s work as fish sellers and speak about the tension and gender-bending acts men had to perform in order to insinuate themselves into a work generally perceived as feminine. I also look into the emergent role of women as economic providers in the community which in so many ways re-framed household politics in the community. In the re-mapping then of socio-economic roles in Dulo, I make a claim about local dynamics and global and national labor structural constraints as factors in the on-going transformations in gender roles in rural communities as a whole.
Yıldız, İlhan: Violence against women: belief and tradtion
The object of this paper is to improve societal understanding of the role of religion, in general, to the phenomenon of violence against women, and the role of Islam in particular. In this pursuit the paper asks the following questions: In what way is religion used to encourage and justify abuse? In what way is it used to successfully prevent and stop abuse? Are there general principles that translate across all cultures? How do these principles manifest themselves in the case of religion? By finding the answers to these questions, the paper seeks to help society develop successful strategies to protect women from violence.
Last update 5.10.2009.
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