Late-career international migration and reproductive work. A comparison between Peruvian and Ukrainian women in the Southern Europe

Research on the relationship between reproductive work and women´s life trajectories including the experience of labour migration has mainly focused on the case of relatively young mothers who leave behind, or later re-join, their children. While it is true that most women migrate at a younger age, there are a significant number of cases of men and women who move abroad for labour purposes at a more advanced stage, undertaking a late-career migration. This is still an under-estimated and under-researched sub-field that uncovers a varied range of issues, including the global organization of reproductive work and the employment of migrant women as domestic workers late in their lives. By pooling the findings of two qualitative studies, this article focuses on Peruvian and Ukrainian women who seek employment in Spain and Italy when they are well into their forties, or older. A commonality the two groups of women share is that, independently of their level of education and professional experience, more often than not they end up as domestic and care workers. The article initially discusses the reasons for late-career female migration, taking into consideration the structural and personal determinants that have affected Peruvian and Ukrainian women’s careers in their countries of origin and settlement. After this, the focus is set on the characteristics of domestic employment at later life, on the impact on their current lives, including the transnational family organization, and on future labour and retirement prospects. Apart from an evaluation of objective working and living conditions, we discuss women’s personal impressions of being domestic workers in the context of their occupational experiences and family commitments. In this regard, women report varying levels of personal and professional satisfaction, as well as different patterns of continuity-discontinuity in their work and family lives, and of optimism towards the future. Divergences could be, to some extent, explained by the effect of migrants´ transnational social practices and policies of states.

[ARTÍCULO RETRACTADO] Masculinidad y feminidad: división errónea de la persona: aportaciones desde la Didáctica de la Lengua

En este texto mostramos como la masculinidad y la feminidad son construcciones sociales, atendiendo a los sexos (diferencia biológica) del ser humano. Las personas influidas por su cultura han hecho suyas las creencias, ideas, estereotipos, correspondientes a un sexo u otro. Así se establecen dos mundos distintos, contrarios, la masculinidad relativa al varón y la feminidad en relación con la mujer. Ambos mundos se presentan de forma muy distinta, marcando mucho las diferencias y el perfil de persona dependiendo de su sexo. De esta forma los varones tienen que ser fuertes, valientes, agresivos, fogosos, conquistadores y dedicados a su profesión. Por el contrario, las mujeres deben ser comprensivas, amables, cariñosas, trabajadoras, buenas madres y esposas y dedicadas a su familia. Nosotros optamos por la persona sin diferencia de sexo, por la igualdad de oportunidades, por deconstruir los estereotipos de masculinidad y feminidad, creando un ser único, una persona que da igual su sexo, un ser humano capaz de ser y hacer sin límites, porque nuestras diferencias biológicas no son determinantes para que mujeres y varones se desarrollen en igualdad de oportunidades.

Des activités physiques et sportives pratiquées par les femmes au Québec : Témoignages et collections (1880-1974)

Ce mémoire porte sur la pratique du sport et de l‟activité physique par les femmes au Québec entre 1880 et 1974, par l‟étude de la collection d‟objets sportifs du Musée de la civilisation, le dépouillement de catalogues commerciaux et d‟autres documents d‟archives, ainsi que l‟analyse de contenu de témoignages oraux recueillis par la chercheure et tenus dans le cadre du projet « Vivre sa ville : Québec au XXe siècle » du Laboratoire d‟ethnologie urbaine. L‟utilisation de ces trois sources de données permet de faire ressortir les modalités d‟insertion des femmes dans la pratique sportive. Les normes et les pratiques du sport féminin seront abordées notamment en ce qui a trait à l‟hygiène, à la morale chrétienne, aux installations et aux organisations sportives.

The politics of masculinity and/as emotion: Walt Whitman's celebration of male intimacy in the first person

This article sets out to demonstrate how the exclusive equation of emotions with femininity is a cultural and historical construction. It analyzes the close, though often veiled, relationship between masculinity and sentiment in American culture and history, especially with a view to demonstrating the political potential of men’s emotions to transform the existing social order. The argument is that friendships and emotional attachments between men could contribute not only to enriching men’s emotional lives but also, and above all, to erasing sexism, racism, and homophobia from our societies. It is argued that men’s friendships with other men might play a fundamental role in promoting greater social equality, as a number of Walt Whitman’s poems, all of them written in the first person, will help illustrate.

Wondrous transformations: rereading and rewriting wonder in contemporary anglophone and francophone fairy tales

This thesis compares contemporary anglophone and francophone rewritings of traditional fairy tales for adults. Examining material dating from the 1990s to the present, including novels, novellas, short stories, comics, televisual and filmic adaptations, this thesis argues that while the revisions studied share similar themes and have comparable aims, the methods for inducing wonder (where wonder is defined as the effect produced by the text rather than simply its magical contents) are diametrically opposed, and it is this opposition that characterises the difference between the two types of rewriting. While they all engage with the hybridity of the fairy-tale genre, the anglophone works studied tend to question traditional narratives by keeping the fantasy setting, while francophone works debunk the tales not only in relation to questions of content, but also aesthetics. Through theoretical, historical, and cultural contextualisation, along with close readings of the texts, this thesis aims to demonstrate the existence of this francophone/anglophone divide and to explain how and why the authors in each tradition tend to adopt such different views while rewriting similar material. This division is the guiding thread of the thesis and also functions as a springboard to explore other concepts such as genre hybridity, reader-response, and feminism. The thesis is divided into two parts; the first three chapters work as an in-depth literature review: after examining, in chapters one and two, the historical and contemporary cultural field in which these works were created, chapter three examines theories of fantasy and genre hybridity. The second part of the thesis consists of textual studies and comparisons between francophone and anglophone material and is built on three different approaches. The first (chapter four) looks at selected texts in relation to questions of form, studying the process of world building and world creation enacted when authors combine and rewrite several fairy tales in a single narrative world. The second (chapter five) is a thematic approach which investigates the interactions between femininity, the monstrous, and the wondrous in contemporary tales of animal brides. Finally, chapter six compares rewritings of the tale of ‘Bluebeard’ with a comparison hinged on the representation of the forbidden room and its contents: Bluebeard’s cabinet of wonder is one that he holds sacred, one where he sublimates his wives’ corpses, and it is the catalyst of wonder, terror, and awe. The three contextual chapters and the three text-based studies work towards tracing the tangible existence of the division postulated between francophone and anglophone texts, but also the similarities that exist between the two cultural fields and their roles in the renewal of the fairy-tale genre.

Gender and diversity in the workplace : Introduction to the special issue

Research on gender and diversity has taken longer than usual to develop in Portuguese academia. Different explanations can be provided for the apparent lack of interest in these matters. Comparative cultural studies have depicted Portuguese culture as scoring high on femininity (Hofstede, 1991). «Femininity pertains to societies in which social gender roles overlap» (p. 82) and it may have an influence on people’s attitudes towards ‘the other’ and the role of men and women in the organisation, and in shaping the individual’s behaviour and attitudes towards equality and diversity. On the other hand, Portuguese society likes to portray itself as a homogenous society (Cabral-Cardoso, 2002). Taken together, these factors may partly explain why gender and diversity issues have failed to make it to the top of research agendas in Portuguese academia. The limited number of papers included in this special issue and focusing on the Portuguese context still reflects that state of affairs.

The everyday life of the revolution: gender, violence and memory

The ‘heroic life’ or the life of the revolutionary is one that resists or even seeks to transcend the everyday and the ordinary. The ‘banal’ vulnerabilities of everyday life, however, continue to constitute the unseen, often unspoken background of such a heroic life. This article turns to women’s memories of everyday life spent ‘underground’ in the context of the late 1960s radical left Naxalbari movement of Bengal. Drawing upon recent published memoirs and my own field interviews with middle class female (and male) activists, I outline the ways in which revolutionary femininity was imagined and lived in the everyday life of this political movement. I focus, in particular, on the gendered and classed nature of political labour, the gendering of revolutionary space, and finally, the extent to which everyday life in the ‘underground’ was a site of vulnerability and powerlessness, especially for women. I also signal how these memories of interpersonal conflict and everyday violence tend to remain buried under a collective mythicisation of the ‘heroic life’.

Hombres y masculinidad ¿un cambio de modelo?

En las últimas décadas hemos asistido a un importante impulso en las investigaciones centradas en el análisis de las masculinidades. Este hecho no es casual y se debe fundamentalmente a dos razones. Una de carácter político, relacionada con el cuestionamiento de una sociedad representada exclusivamente en términos masculinos. Una segunda razón de carácter científico, ¿si la feminidad debía ser explicada por qué no la masculinidad? Ambas razones han incidido en la desnaturalización de una supuesta masculinidad de carácter universal y en la profusión de investigaciones tendentes a desvelar: las formas sociales de construir a los hombres, los mecanismos de reproducción del poder inscritos en los cuerpos, los desiguales modelos sociales en torno a lo masculino, las relaciones de dominación que se producen entre hombres y mujeres, y entre los propios hombres. Este cuestionamiento teórico de “lo masculino” ha estado muy vinculado al papel de los movimientos sociales y especialmente del feminismo y los movimientos de liberación sexual, que han jugado un papel central en la redefinición del papel de hombres y mujeres, y por tanto en la búsqueda de nuevas alternativas a los modelos tradicionales, también entre los propios hombres. En las páginas siguientes nos aproximaremos precisamente a la noción de masculinidad y masculinidades, incidiendo en su carácter relacional y cambiante, así como en sus distintas significaciones.

"If God hadn't invented woman men would have had to do so" - construction of female identities in Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford

The subject of the thesis is Parade's End (1924–1928) by Ford Madox Ford. The thesis focuses on the portrayal of female identities and femininity in the context of societal changes in the beginning of 1900s and also uses two of Ford's essays about gender and women's rights as background. The construction of female identities is discussed via different themes. The themes are marriage, divorce and infidelity; motherhood, modernity and emergence of new gender identities in post-World War I environment, and polyamory as a solution for adulterous practices and empty, unhappy marriages. Parade's End portrays superficially modern female identities, but ends up enforcing women's role as mother and traditional femininity. However, the novel suggests that the strict gender boundaries are starting to fracture after WWI. This is depicted by portraying the men representing new masculinity as feminised and emphasising androgyny and boyishness when discussing representations of new femininity.

Ghost Tree Social

GHOST TREE SOCIAL tells a coming out story of sorts. In terms of style, many of the poems are short, imagistic lyrics, though some are extended catalogues. Specific natural images—lakes, rivers, and snow—are often contrasted with cultural markers. The imagistic poems are thinking through the work of Sylvia Plath. The catalogue poems shift between diaristic, narrative, and critical modes, responding to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and the essays of Edouard Glissant. Voice-driven fragments disrupt the more traditional lyric poems. The fragments fall between formal lyrics like confetti from a gay club’s rafters; or the fragments hold the lyric poems in bondage. The lyric poem then re-signifies as form through resonances with the other discursive and poetic form of the fragment. Following critical writers such as Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, the re-signification of lyric form reflects the need for new signs for self and community organized queerly as opposed to more typical binary categories—man or woman, living or dead, rich or poor, white or black—where the first term is privileged and the second term often denigrated.

Fault Line

FAULT LINE examines the fragile humanity connected to the themes of sexuality, violence, addiction, family dynamics, and death. The book is not broken into sections; rather, as poems build upon one another to explore a narrative arc, FAULT LINE tracks a single speaker’s experience from girlhood to the verge of independent womanhood. The speaker employs formal structures such as the prose poem, sestina, and particularly the list poem to examine the fluidity of inner experience and also the culture at large while challenging the narrow definitions of femininity and masculinity. FAULT LINE works to not only address the question of blame but also the literal breaks in lines of poetry. By looking at a single speaker’s struggle, the book, like life, is both humorous and horrifying.

The Ultimate Secrecy: Feminist Readings of Masculine Trauma in Vietnam War Literature

It is a widely acknowledged and often unquestioned fact that patriarchy and its modes of behaviour and social organization favour the appearance of trauma on the weakest (and defenceless) members of society: women. In the last decades, trauma seems to have taken the baton of typically female maladies such as 19th c. hysteria or 20th c. madness. Feminists in the 20th c. have long worked to prove the connection between the latter affections (and their reflection in literary texts) and patriarchal oppression or expectations of feminine behaviour and accordance to roles and rules. With Trauma Studies on the rise, the approach to the idea of the untold as related to femininity is manifold: on the one hand, is not trauma, which precludes telling about one’s own experience and keeps it locked not only from the others, but also from ourselves, the ultimate secrecy? On the other hand, when analyzing works that reflect trauma, one is astounded by the high number of them with a female protagonist and an almost all-female cast: in this sense, a ‘feminist’ reading is almost compulsory, in the sense that it is usually the author’s assumption that patriarchal systems of exploitation and expectations favour traumatic events and their outcome (silence and secrets) on the powerless, usually women. Often, traumatic texts combine feminism with other analytical discourses (one of the topics proposed for this panel): Toni Morrison’s study of traumatic responses in The Bluest Eye and Beloved cannot be untangled from her critique of slavery; just as much of Chicana feminism and its representations of rape and abuse (two main agents of trauma) analyze the nexus of patriarchy, new forms of post-colonialism, and the dynamics of power and powerlessness in ethnic contexts. Within this tradition that establishes the secrecies of trauma as an almost exclusively feminine characteristic, one is however faced with texts which have traumatized males as protagonists: curiously enough, most of these characters have suffered trauma through a typically masculine experience: that of war and its aftermath. By analyzing novels dealing with war veterans from Vietnam or the Second World War, the astounding findings are the frequent mixture of masculine or even ‘macho’ values and the denial of any kind of ‘feminine’ characteristics, combined with a very strict set of rules of power and hierarchy that clearly establish who is empowered and who is powerless. It is our argument that this replication of patriarchal modes of domination, which place the lowest ranks of the army in a ‘feminine’ situation, blended with the compulsory ‘macho’ stance soldiers are forced to adopt as army men (as seen, for example, in Philip Caputo’s Indian Country, Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story or Ed Dodge’s DAU: A Novel of Vietnam) furthers the onset and seriousness of ulterior trauma. In this sense, we can also analyze this kind of writing from a ‘feminist’ point of view, since the dynamics of über-patriarchal power established at the front at war-time deny any display of elements traditionally viewed as ‘feminine’ (such as grief, guilt or emotions) in soldiers. If trauma is the result of a game of patriarchal empowerment, how can feminist works, not only theoretical, but also fictional, overthrow it? Are ‘feminine’ characteristics necessary to escape trauma, even in male victims? How can feminist readings of trauma enhance our understanding of its dynamics and help produce new modes of interaction that transcend power and gender division as the basis for the organization of society?

Metamorfoses: identidades e papéis de género. Um estudo com Transhomens

Este estudo, de carácter exploratório, tem o objetivo de perceber como se processam as (re)aprendizagens dos vários papéis de género em transhomens, atendendo aos processos de adaptação ao nível social, comportamental e da perceção de si na (re)construção da identidade. Para a concretização deste trabalho, recorreu-se à recolha de informação, através de uma estratégia metodológica qualitativa e utilizou-se um questionário analisado através do método de análise de conteúdo, segundo Laurence Bardin (1979). Participaram neste estudo 20 transhomens (pessoas cujo sexo designado no registo de nascimento foi feminino, mas que se identificam com o género masculino). As principais conclusões sugerem que existem mudanças ao nível dos sentimentos, perceção de si, comportamentos, identidade de género e relação com o corpo que resultam do processo de redesignação sexual. Verifica-se que as aprendizagens e pressões para a conformidade aos estereótipos de género resultam por vezes em comportamentos intencionais na construção das feminilidades e masculinidades. Verifica-se também a consciencialização destas intencionalidades, bem como uma progressiva libertação desses comportamentos e dos constrangimentos a eles associados, o que resulta numa apropriação e autoidentificação de si mais liberta, consequentemente de uma vida mais feliz. Esperamos com este trabalho contribuir para o conhecimento e visibilidade das identidades trans, em específico dos transhomens, na tentativa de desconstrução de estereótipos sociais; Metamorphoses: Identity and Gender Roles. A Study with Transmen Abstract: This study of exploratory nature aims to understand the process of (re)learning the various gender roles in transmen, in relation to the social and behavioural processes of adaptation and self-perception in the (re)construction of identity.To do this work, we gathered information, outlined a qualitative methodological strategy and used a survey using the content analysis method according to Laurence Bardin (1979). 20 transmen participated in this study (people whose sex assigned at birth registration was female but identify with the masculine gender). The main findings suggest that there are changes in the level of feelings, self-perception, behaviour and relation with the body that result from sex reassignment process. It appears that the learning and pressures for conformity to gender stereotypes sometimes result in intentional conduct compliance in the construction of femininity and masculinity before and after the sex reassignment process. You can also verify the awareness of these intentions, as well as a gradual release of these behaviours and constraints associated with them, which results an appropriation and self-identification of himself more free, thus a happier life. We expect this work to contribute to the knowledge and visibility of the trans people, in particular the transmen in an attempt to deconstruct social stereotypes.

Masculinidad y feminidad: ¿De qué estamos hablando?

Recibido 15 de marzo de 2012 • Corregido 04 de octubre de 2012 • Aceptado 07 de noviembre de 2012A continuación se presentan diversas ideas creadas alrededor del tema de la masculinidad y feminidad. El objetivo es esclarecer dichos conceptos desde un punto de vista crítico y de género sensitivo, en un lenguaje sencillo. El fin es que la información sea accesible a una mayor cantidad de personas; eso, sin menoscabar la importancia de transmitir las ideas desde un carácter académico y científico. Por tanto, se busca aclarar el carácter de ambos conceptos en la construcción de su identidad, principalmente para el hombre que cimienta su identidad a partir del rechazo de lo que es femenino. Se trata de mostrar cómo dichas construcciones son atravesadas por diversos mandatos sociales que se expresan según la cultura en la que se desarrollen; además, se plantea el reto de la educación para deconstruir estereotipos ligados a los géneros.