Browse

In the United States, approximately one in five women experiences rape during college, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students experience sexual violence at higher rates than their peers. Given this context, many colleges are working to better prevent and address these assaults. This book takes up this social problem—how organizations talk about and respond to sexual violence—and considers it in proximity to a persistent theoretical dilemma in the academic field of organizational communication: How are organization and violence related, and what does that relationship have to do with communication? Guided by feminist new materialist and intersectional theories, the book examines one public U.S. university known for responding well to sexual violence. It focuses on the processes and policies that require most faculty and administrators, along with student–employees, to report sexual violence to designated campus offices, per federal laws Title IX, the Clery Act, and the Violence Against Women Act. Unfortunately, the university’s interventions in sexual violence reinforce other violent systems. The book illustrates the negative consequences of considering communication to be either separate from the physical world or indistinguishable from it. It also details problems with the notion that only individuals enact violence. Through its focus on two core ideas—communication and agency—the book encourages scholars to avoid wholly constructivist or realist arguments, and it shows the importance of questions about power and difference in organizational scholarship on posthumanism and materiality. The book concludes with suggestions for how U.S. universities can look “beyond the rapist” to generate more robust interventions in sexual violence.

How do women claim rights against violence in India and with what consequences? By observing how women navigate the Indian criminal justice system, Roychowdhury provides a unique lens on rights negotiations in the world’s largest democracy. She finds that women interact with the law not by following legal procedure or abiding by the rules but by deploying collective threats and doing the work of the state themselves. They do so because law enforcement personnel are incapacitated and unwilling to enforce the law. As a result, rights negotiations do not necessarily lead to more woman-friendly outcomes or better legal enforcement. Instead, they allow some women to make gains outside the law: repossess property and children, negotiate cash settlements, join women’s groups, access paid employment, develop a sense of self-assurance, and become members of the public sphere. Capable Women, Incapable States shows how the Indian criminal justice system governs violence against women not by protecting them from harm but by forcing them to become “capable”: to take the law into their own hands and complete the hard work that incapable and unwilling state officials refuse to complete. Roychowdhury’s book houses implications for how we understand gender inequality and governance not just in India but in large parts of the world where political mobilization for rights confronts negligent and incapacitated criminal justice systems.

This book argues that the rampant hate-filled attacks against women online are best understood as patterned resistance to women’s political voice and visibility. This abuse and harassment coalesces into an often-unrecognized form of gender inequality that constrains women’s use of digital public spaces, much as the pervasive threat of sexual intimidation and violence constrain women’s freedom and comfort in physical public spaces. What’s more, the abuse exacerbates inequality among women, those from racial, ethnic, religious, and/or other minority groups, are disproportionately targeted. Drawing on in-depth interviews with women who have been on the receiving end of digital hate, Credible Threat shows that the onslaught of epithets and stereotypes, rape threats, and unsolicited commentary about their physical appearance and sexual desirability come at great professional, personal, and psychological costs for the women targeted—and also with underexplored societal level costs that demand attention. When effective, identity-based attacks undermine women’s contributions to public discourse, create a climate of self-censorship, and at times, push women out of digital publics altogether. Given the uneven distribution of toxicity, those women whose voices are already most underrepresented (e.g., women in male-dominated fields, those from historically undervalued groups) are particularly at risk. In the end, identity-based attacks online erode civil liberties, diminish public discourse, limit the knowledge we have to inform policy and electoral decision making, and teach all women that activism and public service are unappealing, high-risk endeavors to be avoided.

In recent years, feminists have turned to digital technologies and social media platforms to dialogue, network, and organize against contemporary sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. The emergence of feminist campaigns such as #MeToo, #BeenRapedNeverReported, and Everyday Sexism are part of a growing trend of digital resistances and challenges to sexism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. Although recent scholarship has documented the ways digital spaces are often highly creative sites where the public can learn about and intervene in rape culture, little research has explored girls’ and women’s experiences of using digital platforms to challenge misogynistic practices. This is therefore the first book-length study to interrogate how girls and women negotiate rape culture through digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps. Through an analysis of high-profile campaigns such as Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and the everyday activism of Twitter feminists, this book presents findings of over 800 pieces of digital content, and semi-structured interviews with 82 girls, women, and some men around the world, including organizers of various feminist campaigns and those who have contributed to them. As our study shows, digital feminist activism is far more complex and nuanced than one might initially expect, and a variety of digital platforms are used in a multitude of ways, for many purposes. Furthermore, although it may be technologically easy for many groups to engage in digital feminist activism, there remain emotional, mental, or practical barriers that create different experiences, and legitimate some feminist voices, perspectives, and experiences over others.

‘Maids’ have become an inseparable part of the daily lives of ‘middle-class’ urban households in India. Despite the fact that increasing numbers of poor women are joining this profession, very little has been written about them, especially the part-time domestic workers, each of whom services a number of households at a time. They are not accorded their rightful status as workers either by the employers, their own families, the government or the traditional trade unions. Isolated in the privacy of employers’ homes, the problem of recognizing their work or organizing them is the same one as for women isolated in their own homes. Another important reason is that most such women are rendered voiceless by their social location: unlettered; staying in ‘illegal’ settlements; migrants; working to survive; performing ‘feminine’ work, both paid and unpaid, and both devalued. This book is, therefore, about making the unheard heard. It draws from personal narratives of part-time women domestic workers residing in two slum settlements of Kolkata, who speak about their work, lives, dreams, and despairs. By moving between the workplace and the homes of the workers, this book makes a departure from general accounts of labour and instead talks about labouring lives. The book also discusses public policy and politics which have historically neglected this section of workers as well as the recent efforts to give them visibility and voice.

This book discusses the case of Dadaji Bhikaji against Rukhmabai, his twenty-two year old wife. Dadaji filed the suit against his spouse when, after eleven years, she refused to live with him as per the Hindu marriage law. The book looks at all aspects of the lawsuit, including the reactions of the people towards the argument of Pinhey and Rukhmabai’s defiance in consenting to live with her husband. It looks at the role of the British during the court proceedings and highlights some details of Rukhmabai’s life that could reveal some psycho-social factors that gave her the strength to rebel. It is important to note that this book is written using a radical-feminist stance.

What happens when activists who usually oppose each other work to advance similar goals? This book re-conceptualizes models of social movements’ relationships with each other and develops a new framework for understanding relationships that are neither coalitions nor countermovements. Rich, empirically grounded case studies of opposition to pornography, child sexual abuse policy, and the Violence Against Women Act show how feminists and conservatives engaged with the issues and with each other, the differences between their approaches, and both their points of overlap and their power struggles. Each case illustrates a different type of relationship: an adversarial yet collaborative interaction around pornography; a narrow, issue-specific, and politically neutral opposition to child sexual abuse; and an ambivalent alliance confined to the policy arena for the Violence Against Women Act. Focusing on activism targeting the federal government from 1980 to 2013, the book draws on a unique, in-depth dataset, including transcripts of Congressional hearings and movement documents, to analyze interpretive processes within the state. Activists constructed frames that enabled cross-ideological support, dealt with the reputational risk of appearing to consort with the enemy, and sometimes compromised or de-emphasized controversial goals in favor of areas of commonality. In the end, feminists and conservatives influenced policy and culture to different degrees in the three case studies, depending on their relative power. Frenemies draws powerful lessons about both the benefits and risks of collaboration across ideological difference.

Teenagers in the United States hear mixed messages about sexuality from the people and institutions around them. These social norms are important for understanding teen sexuality because they shape teens’ sexual behaviors and because the negative sanctioning of norm violators affects teens’ lives. Struggles over norms and enforcement around teen sexuality are also a major cultural battleground in U.S. society today. Based on 133 in-depth interviews with college students and teen mothers and fathers, this book reveals teenagers’ fascinating and complicated social worlds of communication and silence, rules and inconsistencies, control and evasion, hidden behaviors and threatened reputations. The book develops theoretical tools for understanding norms and social control in ways that attend to social inequalities and emphasize conflict and change. Teen sexuality norms come in internally conflicting sets that regulate teenagers’ behaviors, emotions, public portrayals of behaviors, and sanctions. These norm sets and teens’ behaviors look very different from one community to the next. Norm enforcers—such as families, peers, schools, and communities—strategize to gain control over teens’ behaviors using informal social sanctions like gossip and exclusion and formal communication such as sex education, but teens strategize to keep control over their own behaviors. Most eventually seek to violate sex norms while evading negative sanctions. This book helps us understand why teen sexuality norms are sometimes effective and sometimes ineffective. It contributes to research in social psychology, adolescence, and the life course, and its findings are relevant for improving sexual and reproductive health policy.

Universities are unlikely venues for grading, branding, and marketing gendered beauty, bodies, poise, and style. Nonetheless, thousands of college women have sought not only college diplomas but campus beauty titles and tiaras throughout the twentieth century. The cultural power of beauty pageants continues into the 21st century as campus beauty pageants, especially racial/ethnic pageants and pageants for men, have soared in popularity. Tice asks how, and why, does higher education remain in the beauty and body business and with what effects on student bodies and identities. She explores why students compete in and attend pageants as well as why campus-based etiquette and charm schools are flourishing. Based on archival research and interviews with contemporary campus queens and university sponsors as well as hundreds of hours observing college pageants on predominantly black and white campuses, Tice examines how campus pageant contestants express personal ambitions, desires, and, sometimes, racial/political agendas to resolve the incongruities of performing in evening gowns and bathing suits on stage while seeking their degrees. Tice argues the pageants help to illuminate the shifting iterations of class, race, religion, region, culture, sexuality, and gender braided in campus rituals and student life. Moving beyond a binary of objectification versus empowerment, Tice offers a nuanced analysis of the contradictory politics of higher education, feminism and post-feminism, empowerment, consumerism, race and ethnicity, class mobility, and popular culture on student bodies and cultures, the making of idealized collegiate masculinities and femininities, and the stylization of higher education itself.

This is a book about unprecedented families—networks of strangers linked by genes, medical technology, and the human desire for affinity and identity. It chronicles the chain of choices that couples and single mothers make—how to conceive, how to place sperm donors in their family tree, and what to do when it suddenly becomes clear that there are children out there that share half their child’s DNA. Do shared genes make you family? Do children find anything in common? What becomes of the random networks that arise once the members of the families of donor siblings find one another? Based on over 350 interviews with children and parents from all over the United States, Hertz and Nelson explore what it means to children to be a donor sibling and what it’s like to be a parent who discovers four, six, or even a dozen children who share half the DNA of one’s own child. At the heart of their investigation are remarkable relationships woven from tenuous bits of information and fueled by intense curiosity. The authors suggest that donor siblings are expanding the possibilities for extended kinship in the United States.

Is Vladimir Putin macho, or is he a “fag”? this book investigates how gender stereotypes and sexualization have been used as tools of political legitimation in Putin’s Russia. Despite their political polarization, regime allies and detractors alike have wielded traditional concepts of masculinity, femininity, and homophobia as a means of symbolic endorsement or disparagement of political leaders and policies. By repeatedly using machismo as a means of legitimation, Putin’s regime opened the door to the concerted use of gendered rhetoric and imagery as a means to challenge regime authority. Sex, Politics, and Putin analyzes the political uses of gender norms and sexualization in Russia through the lens of three case studies: pro- and anti-regime groups’ activism aimed at supporting or undermining the political leaders on their respective sides; activism regarding military conscription and patriotism; and feminist activism (including the dramatic performances by Pussy Riot). Arguing that gender norms are most easily invoked as tools of authority-building when widespread popular acceptance of misogyny and homophobia exists, this book also examines the ways in which sexism and homophobia are reflected in Russia’s public sphere. Exploration of this subject sheds light on Russia’s sociopolitical dynamics and on the use of gender norms as part of the legitimation strategies employed by regimes in power and by their political opponents.

Women now receive more college degrees than men, and enter the workforce with better job opportunities than ever before. Indeed, the wage gap between men and women has never been smaller. So why does the typical woman have only 36 cents for every dollar of wealth owned by the typical man? How is it that never-married women working full-time have only 16% as much wealth as similarly situated men? And why do single mothers have only 8% of the wealth of single fathers? The first book to focus on the differences in wealth between women and men, this is an accessible examination of why women struggle to accumulate assets, who has what, and why it matters. The book draws on the most comprehensive national data on wealth and on in-depth interviews to show how differences in earnings, in saving and investing, and, most important, the demands of care-giving all contribute to the gender-wealth gap. It argues that the current focus on equal pay and family-friendly workplace policies, although important, will not ultimately change or eliminate wealth inequalities. What the book calls the “wealth escalator”—comprised of fringe benefits, the tax code, and government benefits—and the “debt anchor” must be the targets of policies aimed at strengthening women's financial resources. The book proposes a number of practical suggestions to address the unequal burdens and consequences of care-giving, so that women who work just as hard as men will not be left standing in financial quicksand.

What does it mean for men to join with women as allies in preventing rape and domestic violence? This book, based on life history interviews with men and women antiviolence activists aged twenty to seventy, explores the strains and tensions of men’s work as feminist allies in preventing sexual assault and domestic violence. The book examines the experiences of three generational cohorts: a “movement cohort” of men who engaged with antiviolence work in the 1970s and early 1980s, during the height of feminist antiviolence mobilizations; a “bridge cohort” who engaged with antiviolence work from the mid-1980s into the 1990s, as feminism receded as a mass movement and activists built sustainable organizations; and a “professional cohort” who engaged from the mid-1990s to the present, as antiviolence work has become embedded in community and campus organizations, nonprofits, and the state. Across these time periods, stories from life history interviews illuminate men’s varying pathways—including men of different racial/ethnic and class backgrounds—into antiviolence work. The book explores the promise of men’s violence prevention work in high schools, college sports, fraternities, and the U.S. military. The book also sheds light on the strains and tensions of such work—including the ways male privilege is reproduced in feminist spheres—and explores the ways that men and women navigate these tensions.

Why do so many men in the United States refuse to dance? The answer reveals a great deal about masculinity, sexuality, and race. The book examines the past as well as the present. Drawing on research in sources ranging from military planning documents to boys’ fiction along with interviews, and participant observation, this book analyzes how dance became associated with women rather than men, youths but not adults, and people of color but not whites. The book traces the history of dancing men from1900 when white upper class men were expected to be good dancers, through dance crazes of the 1910s, U.S.O.-sponsored dances during World War II, the stifling climate of the Cold War period, the exuberant release of the 1960s, and the racial fracturing of music and dance cultures of the 1970s. Interviews with Asian, black, Latino, and white, men, aged eighteen to eight-six regarding their childhood, adolescence, and current experiences with dance, reveal how norms of sexuality, masculinity, and cultural assumptions regarding racial identities encourage some men to dance and discourage others. By focusing on dance, an activity that many current definitions of masculinity seem to exclude, the book provides a window on processes of masculine embodiment and racial formation.

This book is an attempt towards a fresh understanding of the political economy of women’s work in India and its relationship with the Indian state. The study critically analyses the concept and politics of work, worker, and women workers. The politics of the ‘social’, social welfare, and social policy is defined very close to how the public and the private are defined. There is an extension of the domestic into the public in the context of women workers in the social welfare schemes like the honorary workers. The study analyses the history and politics of work and women’s work in the Indian context through a case study of honorary workers in the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme. The book examines how women figure in the state’s social welfare policies, making a link between the politics around women’s work and social welfare policies. It contributes towards a better understanding of the broader political framework constructed by the political economy of the state within which women’s work gets defined as honorary. The study examines the complexities around the weakening of social sector services with the withdrawal of state support under globalization coinciding with the need and demand for expansion of the horizon of state welfare schemes and programmes like the ICDS and its anganwadis. With more and more women especially from poor or lower-middle-class background employed in new social welfare schemes where the form of work is defined as voluntary social service, the book brings into attention the issue of further marginalization and exploitation of women workers especially from the lower or middle class by the Indian state.

Billed as an emerging transnational industry, the commercial surrogacy arrangement is more than mere commerce. It involves the birth of kin and relationships that include cross-cultural dialogues and conflicts between forms of reproduction and birthing. The process of making kin is fraught with different forms of negotiations regarding biology, nurture, pregnancy, and parenthood. This book engages with the idea of emerging forms of families and meanings of kinship in a transnational world through ethnographic research, kinship, gender studies, and science and technology studies. The ethnography draws from a context that is enmeshed in the local–global politics of reproduction, and the engaging and ongoing debate regarding ethics and morality in the sphere of reproductive rights. Drawing from conversations with foreign couples coming to India to hire Indian surrogates through Indian fertility clinics, lawmakers, and clinicians, this book looks at the politics of foreign gay couples seeking families through surrogacy in India, identity giving processes to the babies born to foreign couples, the clinicians understanding of kinship, the networks of commerce and agents, and the ways in which the surrogate and her husband positions itself within the arrangement. The mapping of transnational commercial surrogacy in its processual, dynamic representation—from the choice of the arrangement, to the pregnancy and finally to the birth of the child—is done in broad stages. This book aims to present an important ethnographic picture of a complicated, controversial practice such as commercial surrogacy by focusing on its relevance for kinship and our understanding of interpersonal relationships at large.

The female homosexual in South Asia is not always a visible lesbian person. She is often a figuration of an act that challenges hegemonic ideas of gender and female subjectivity. This lesbian femininity can be found in many socio-cultural conversations, defamiliarizing and subverting normative ideas of female monogamy, compulsory motherhood, asexuality, celibacy, and compliance. A nuanced reading of contemporary literary and cinematic texts from India and its diaspora, this work traces the histories of the ‘(un)familiar’ lesbian in the homophobic realm around us. Focusing on representations and legacies of such femininities, the book shows how female same-sex socialities and female same-sex love straddle terrains both familiar and unfamiliar, arguing that homosexuality and heterosexuality are not in opposition but in a state of constant dialogue with each other.

‘Farmers’ suicides’ have largely been framed through official suicide statistics, and they have been explained in terms of agrarian production-related crisis across geographies. Based on ethnographic work in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh, this book offers a qualified challenge to such explanations. First part of the book describes local transformations that are taking place in interconnected domains of production, consumption, and social relationships. The attempted transition from a century-long involvement in rain-fed groundnut cultivation to groundwater-irrigated horticulture, which is being actively promoted by a pro-market state, has aggravated production-related risks in this fragile ecological zone. The book then explains how production risks contribute to causing anomic frictions amongst local small and middle farmers who aspire to adopt refined lifestyles and consumption practices. Emergent ideas of individualism, competitiveness, and status inequality are stressing familial roles and bonds. A key argument advanced here is that these local processes, their subjective experiences, and the manner in which they are acted upon, are all mediated by the local ideology of masculinity. Against the background of new social and economic processes, the second part of the book suggests that officially certified cases of ‘farmers’ suicides’ are not always marked by ‘farm-related’ economic factors in an objective and uniform manner. In other words, the entire process of production of official statistics of suicide is socially organized. The book concludes by suggesting that ‘farm-related suicides’ relate to the wider field of rural suicides through new ideas and practices around individual and family honour, status inequality, and dignity.

This book presents the oral testimony of Subhashini (1914–2003), the woman head of a well-known Arya Samaj institution devoted to women's education in rural north India. Subhashini's narrative unfolds a story, within a sea of stories, which has remained silent in the dominant historical discourse. Her memory evokes contrasting images of violence, martyrdom, and Partition. Not 1947 but 1942 — the year of her father's ‘martyrdom’ — is recalled as a violent rupture in her memory. Partition is a moment of celebration, revenge, divine retribution, empathy, remorse, tragedy, and fear. Translating Subhashini's oral testimony, the author recreates the memory of a colonial subject, living in postcolonial times, as a historical narrative. Moving beyond a historical event and well-established historical facts, Violence, Martyrdom and Partition is a parallel history of events and non-events, memory and history, testimony and experience. The book also includes photographs of Subhashini and a map of the Rohtak District and Dujana State.