Teaching boys in neoliberal and postfeminist times: Feminization and the question of re-masculinization in the education system and policy field

This paper focuses on teaching boys, male teachers and the question of gendered pedagogies in neoliberal and postfeminist times of the proliferation of new forms of capitalism, multi-mediated technologies and the influence of globalization. It illustrates how a politics of re-masculinization and its reconstitution needs to be understood as set against changing economic and social conditions in which gender equity comes to be re-focused on boys as the ‚new disadvantaged‘. This re-framing of gender equity, it is argued, has been fuelled by both a media-inspired backlash discourse about ‚failing boys‘ and a neo-positivist emphasis on numbers derived primarily from standardized testing regimes at both global and national levels. A media-focused analysis of the proliferation of discourses about ‚failing boys‘ vis-a-vis the problem of encroaching feminization in the school system is provided to illuminate how certain truths about the influence of male teachers come to define how the terms of ensuring gender equity are delimited and reduced to a question of gendered pedagogies as grounded in sexed bodies. Historical accounts of the feminization of teaching in the North American context are also provided as a basis for building a more informed understanding of the present, particularly as it relates to the contextualization of policy articulation and enactment regarding the problem of teaching boys. In light of such historically informed and critical media analysis, it is argued that what is needed is a more informed, evidenced based policy articulation of the problem of teaching boys and a more gender sensitive reflection on the politics of masculinities in postfeminist times. (DIPF/Orig.)

Der Zusammenhang von Männlichkeitskonstruktionen mit der Lern- und Leistungsmotivation bei Jungen. Ergebnisse einer empirischen Studie

Wenn pädagogische Institutionen u.a. über ihren Auftrag definiert werden, möglichst erfolgreiche Lern- und Bildungsprozesse ihrer Zielgruppe zu organisieren (und in diesem Sinne Leistung zu produzieren haben), so bedeuten Diagnosen einer Abhängigkeit der Leistung von der Geschlechtszugehörigkeit eine empfindliche Infragestellung der Qualität der Institution. Schule als pädagogische Institution kategorisiert Schüler_innen entlang der Lernerfolge und Leistungen, die sie erbringen. Seit durch die Ergebnisse internationaler Schulleistungsvergleiche die Kategorisierungen von Schüler_innen als leistungsstärker bzw. -schwächer wieder verstärkt mit ihrer Kategorisierung als Mädchen und Jungen in Zusammenhang gebracht werden, scheint es nahe zu liegen, geringere Schulerfolge von Jungen pauschalisierend mit ihrem Junge-Sein an sich in Verbindung zu bringen. Hier interveniert der Beitrag der AutorInnen zum Zusammenhang von Männlichkeitskonstruktionen mit der Lern- und Leistungsmotivation bei Jungen. Der Artikel stellt das Freiburger Jungeninventar vor, ein Instrument, das auf der Basis qualitativer Rekonstruktionen differenzierbarer Männlichkeiten entwickelt wurde und diese nun auch quantitativ und in Kombination mit anderen Variablen erfassbar macht. In ihrer Studie, in der das Freiburger Jungeninventar in Verbindung mit Instrumenten zur Erfassung von Lern- und Leistungsmotivation zum Einsatz kommt, zeigen die Autor_innen Zusammenhänge auf, die die Bedeutung der Vielfältigkeit von Männlichkeitskonstruktionen für schulisch institutionalisiertes Lernen unterstreicht. (DIPF/Orig.)

Viral Bodies: Uncontrollable Blackness in Popular Culture and Everyday Life

Viral Bodies: Uncontrollable Blackness in Popular Culture and Everyday Life maps rapidly circulated performances of Blackness across visual media that collapse Black bodies into ubiquitous “things.” Throughout my dissertation, I use viral performance to describe the uncontrollable discursive circulation of bodies, their behaviors, and the ideas around them. In particular, viral performance is employed to describe the complicated ways that (mis)understandings of Black bodies spread and are often transformed into common-sense beliefs. As viral performances, Black bodies are often made more visible, while simultaneously becoming more opaque. This dissertation examines the recurrence of viral performances of Blackness in viral videos online, film, and photography/images. I argue that viral performances make products that reinscribe stereotypical notions of Blackness while also generating paths of alterity—which contradict the normalized clichés and provide desirable possibilities for Black performance. Viral Bodies forges a new dialogue between visual and aural technologies, performance, and larger historic discourses that script Black bodies as visually (and sonically) deviant subjects. I am interested in how technologies complicate the re-presentation of images, ideas, and ideologies—producing a necessity for new decipherings of performances of Blackness in popular culture and everyday life.

Dramaturgia do aqui e agora: presença, recepção e sentido no corpo do ator

The actor is an actor during all the phases of creation and development of his character. (S) He goes beyond the moment of interpreting. In this sense, in her (his) daily life, the actor may use her (his) potential to extract from reality the necessary elements for the work of creation. This is a theoretical research which focus on the concept of presence in the actor s work, stretching the concept beyond the scene, encompassing different components such as the body, the word, the silence, the technique and the acting as the actor s stance in regards to his own reality. The objective of such stance is to integrate him (her) self in the environment, balancing his (hers) inner life with the outside life flow. To reach this objective, the research drew theoretical resources from the concept of presence in the actor s work according to BROOK, BARBA, GROTOWSKI and MNOUCHKINE and the studies on reception theory in ISER, 1996; GUMBRECHT, 2010. Thus, the dialogue between reader and actor high lights both as receivers in this work. A practical description of a street theater Kamchàtka show, featured by the Kamchàtka Company is used as an example of the research on the presence. The elements localized in this show are: play, listening, word, silence, meaning, relationship with here and now and the effects of the said presence

Development Begins at Home: Women and the Domestic Economy in Brazil, 1945-1975

A number of historians of twentieth-century Latin America have identified ways that national labor laws, civil codes, social welfare programs, and business practices contributed to a gendered division of society that subordinated women to men in national economic development, household management, and familial relations. Few scholars, however, have critically explored women's roles as consumers and housewives in these intertwined realms. This work examines the Brazilian case after the Second World War, arguing that economic policies and business practices associated with “developmentalism” [Portuguese: desenvolvimentismo] created openings for women to engage in debates about national progress and transnational standards of modernity. While acknowledging that an asymmetry of gender relations persisted, the study demonstrates that urban women expanded their agency in this period, especially over areas of economic and family life deemed "domestic." This dissertation examines periodicals, consumer research statistics, public opinion surveys, personal interviews, corporate archives, the archives of key women’s organizations, and government officials’ records to identify the role that women and household economies played in Brazilian developmentalism between 1945 and 1975. Its principal argument is that business and political elites attempted to define gender roles for adult urban women as housewives and mothers, linking their management of the household to familial well-being and national modernization. In turn, Brazilian women deployed these idealized roles in public to advance their own economic interests, especially in the management of household finances and consumption, as well as to expand legal rights for married women, and increase women’s participation in the workforce. As the market for women's labor expanded with continued industrialization, these efforts defined a more active role for women in the economy and in debates about the trajectory of national development policies.

É preciso ter coragem: um estudo das narrativas de mulheres na política

É na busca por compreender a inserção e participação de mulheres na política partidária na contemporaneidade que esta dissertação, situada na linha de pesquisa Culturas, Linguagens e Utopias, tem como objetivo analisar as narrativas de vereadoras de municípios que estão localizados na região sul do Rio Grande do Sul no período de 2009-2012. O corpus de análise constitui-se de entrevistas individuais semiestruturadas com as onze vereadoras participantes a partir da metodologia de investigação narrativa. Partindo das contribuições dos Estudos Culturais e de Gênero em suas vertentes pós-estruturalistas procurou-se problematizar alguns discursos e práticas que emergiram nas narrativas com base nas contribuições da análise do discurso de Michel Foucault. Assim, verificou-se que a representação cultural das mulheres neste campo político está fundamentada em concepções essencialistas do gênero feminino como a sensibilidade. Isso vem provocando discussões na ciência política e nos estudos de gênero a partir de termos como política de ideias, política de desvelo que discutem a presença das mulheres em decorrência ou não desses atributos. O fato é que esses discursos vêm instituindo diferenças na participação de homens e mulheres na política e constituindo formas de ser mulher na política partidária e de fazer política diferenciada das dos homens de forma menos “dura”, “rígida”. Ao debruçar-se na inserção das mulheres nessa esfera pública constatou-se uma trajetória marcada pelas noções de público e privado que impediu ao longo de nossa história a participação das mulheres no campo político e o desenvolvimento de sua cidadania. Além disso, nas narrativas das vereadoras fica evidente que as mulheres não foram constituídas para participarem do que hoje é um direito seu: a esfera pública de decisão da política. Isso foi constatado a partir do convite que foi feito para a candidatura pelos partidos que a partir das cotas partidárias procuraram mais significativamente por mulheres para concorrer. Também se observou neste estudo o capital político de ingresso das mulheres nessa esfera: o capital familiar, capital dos movimentos sociais e capital de ocupação em cargos públicos. Quanto a participação das mulheres no cotidiano de seus mandatos identificamos a dificuldade de ser mulher e política na atualidade. As negociações com os partidos e os colegas, a conciliação entre a família e a vida pública; os focos de atuação dedicados as áreas sociais e nesse destacamos mais significativamente a educação. Por fim, o que pretendemos foi desconfiar da máxima “lugar de mulher não é na política” e conhecer as trajetórias e histórias de mulheres que cotidianamente entre conflitos e disputas lutam pelo seu lugar na esfera pública, pelo exercício de sua cidadania.

Pytanie o pamięć. Relacje autobiograficzne więźniów obozów koncentracyjnych

This book consists of two main parts. The first part offers a basic methodological introduction, presenting a concise but multifaceted overview of current problems of collective memory. The second part contains a set of interviews with former prisoners of concentration camps carried out by the authors. The research was conducted by Paweł Greń and Łukasz Posłuszny and focuses on issues of collective and cultural memory illustrated by individual life experiences of concentration camps prisoners. The field of oral history serves as the framework of analysis and narrative inquiry as its research tool. Interviews and additional research materials were collected by the authors and are not available in previous publications, making this work a precious supplement to the current scholarly body of knowledge and achievements in the discipline of memory studies. According to the authors, current historical and literary publications provide an incomplete picture of the WWII and its aftermaths for survivors, because descriptions of the war and imprisonment in the camp play still a dominate role in narratives. The importance of these issues in autobiographies is unquestionable and highly needed to create a common identity among generation of prisoners, though authors often wanted to perceive the fate of individuals in a broader perspective – including the periods before and after the war. Hence, interviews stressed personal experiences and their understanding over time by former prisoners. The interviews covered many topics on life before, during and after the camp – among them daily and neutral routines, but also difficult matters. The latter were connected on the one hand with traumatic events or harsh memories and emotions, and on the other hand with less extensively highlighted threads of prisoners’ lives - such as issues of the body and sexuality – and their dependence on particular representation or narrative. The authors are convinced that the book serves not only as a record of past remembered by eyewitnesses, but it also depicts their accounts in wider contexts and discourses, which expose specific dimensions of told and written stories. In the book Questions for Memory one examine the approach proposed by young scholars. Interviews were conducted from 2009-2011, seventy years after the end of the second world war, and this initiative was the result of questions and doubts of the authors from the existing literature. They also wanted to use the unique opportunity to meet with eyewitnesses and record their stories, because when they pass away we will irretrievably lose the possibility to listen to them and to pose sensitive questions. The majority of the interviewees were prisoners of KL Auschwitz-Birkenau, and their experiences differed greatly from each other based on social background and specific experience in the camps as well as their post-camp and postwar life. Aside from persons whose stories are already well known and open, readers will hear the stories of those who spoke only reluctantly and very rarely, or who had remained silent until the present author’s research. Qualitative differences between interviews occurred on the level of established relationship and atmosphere of trust, which varied according to circumstances and individual character and personality. For P. Greń and Ł. Posłuszny, each interviewed person is equally and highly valued due to the collected material and the personal experience of the meetings. Among the ten interviews placed in the book, seven of them are the stories told by women. Their testimonies exemplify realities of everyday prisoners’ existence and gravitate towards mirroring specifically feminine perspectives of imprisonment. For women, crucial problems stemmed from experiences of body that intertwine with suffering, feeling of shame and humiliation. Early discussions on holocaust literature and issues of representation that shaped the Polish narrative and collective memory imposed imperatives of silence on certain topics. A solution for reconciling heroic and inhuman deeds in stories with completely human physiology was impossible and improper for many years. There were also questions about life after, ways of dealing with a trauma or reflections on the present time. During conversations the authors attempted to come closer to something distant and incomprehensible for their generation and for people who did not experience the camps. Despite the fact that there have been seventy years of dealing with these events in literature, art, drama, film, memoirs and scientific works, the past still breeds more questions than answers. The book Questions for Memory serves as an example of this phenomenon.

Lothar Böhnisch/Reinhard Winter: Männliche Sozialisation. Bewältigungsprobleme männlicher Geschlechtsidentität im Lebenslauf. Weinheim/München: Juventa 1993 [Rezension]

Rezension von: Lothar Böhnisch/Reinhard Winter: Männliche Sozialisation. Bewältigungsprobleme männlicher Geschlechtsidentität im Lebenslauf. Weinheim/München: Juventa 1993, 232 S.

Girls’ education in Djibouti: an holistic approach in response to the ideolog y of development

International audience

El cuerpo como artefacto: tecnologías médicas, anatomopolítica y resistencia

En este artículo se defiende la tesis de que hay un giro importante en el biopoder anatomo-político de finales del siglo XX y comienzos del XXI. Este giro consiste en la aparición de diferentes tendencias culturales que comprenden el cuerpo humano como un artefacto que puede usarse para manifestar resistencia al poder. Para ello, estas tendencias se sirven de las tecnologías médicas como un medio para diseñar el cuerpo de acuerdo con una intención particular que permita cumplir cierta función elegida de antemano por quien identifica ese cuerpo como propio.

(De-)Thematisierung von Geschlecht. Rekonstruktionen bei Studierenden der Erziehungs- und Bildungswissenschaften

Wie wird Geschlecht von Studierenden der Erziehungs- und Bildungswissenschaften rezipiert? Wie stehen die Studierenden zu Geschlechterfragen? Ausgehend von der Beobachtung, dass das Interesse an Geschlechterfragen zum Teil als individuelle, zudem etwas anachronistische Neigung erscheint, rekonstruiert diese empirische Studie u.a., welchen Einfluss das Studium des spezifischen Fachgebietes auf die Studierenden hat. Zudem wird deutlich, dass die studentische (De-)Thematisierung von Geschlecht auch maßgeblich von rhetorischen Modernisierungsprozessen und gesellschaftlichen Verdeckungszusammenhängen beeinflusst wird. (DIPF/Verlag)

The Demobilized Body: Transgressions of Personal Space and Political Participation

Grounded in the intersection between gender politics and electoral studies, this dissertation examines the demobilizing effects of violations of personal space (in the form of domestic violence, control over mobility, emotional abuse, and sexual harassment) on the propensity to vote. Using quantitative methods across four survey datasets concerning Lebanon, the United States, Morocco, and Yemen, this research concludes that cross-regionally, familial control over mobility reduces the propensity to vote among women. Conversely, mechanisms of empowerment such as education and employment increase the propensity to vote.

Vidas à margem : relações de gênero, etnia e espaço na narrativa afro-brasileira contemporânea

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Letras, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Literatura, 2016.

Estrutura de organizações sociais: adaptação aos projetos sociais ou às pressões institucionais?

This is a study concerning in the structure of non governmental organizations, based on the institutional theory. It aims to understand the relation among structure, social projects and environmental influences, analyzing if there is coherence with project social or expresses adaptation to the institutional pressures of the environment. It introduces as theoretical support for the themes, studies about institutional theory and social structure. The research is descriptive and exploratory; it also applies to a study of case, based on the technical procedures. From the research universe, that was compound by non governmental organizations from Natal, RN, Brasil, it was chosen the Casa Renascer, a non governmental organization that works with the combat to the violence and sexual exploration of children and teenagers. The data collection process employed includes documental research, observations and semi structured research devices, guided by the organizational process proposed by Serva (1996) and by the institutional theory. The collected data were qualitatively treated. The analysis was divided into three parts, following the research matters. The social project characterization demonstrated that the organization went by three main phases. The first one, characterized by focus in women and girls education and health; the second shows the emphasis on girls in social risk situation, with preventive approach; and the last one, characterized by victims assistance of violence and sexual exploration. From the analysis using the institutional theory mechanisms, the results showed that exists coherence between structure and environmental influences, but a weak coherence between structure and social projects. It indicates as main determinant of the structure, an aspect forgotten by the institutional theory, the power. It was observed the presence from normative, coercive and mimetic mechanisms, highlighting normative influences

A Feminist Affective Turn for Public Relations: Mothers, Passionate Publics, and the Childhood Vaccine Debate

This project proposes a feminist intervention in how affect and publics are theorized in public relations research. Drawing from extant literature, I argue that public relations theories of affect and publics have been apolitical and lack depth and context (Leitch & Motion, 2010a). Using the context of the online childhood vaccine debate, I illustrate several theories and concepts of the new feminist affective turn, as well as postmodern theories of affect, relevant to public relations research: (a) Public Feelings, “ugly” feelings, agency, and community (Cvetkovich, 2012; Ngai, 2007); (b) passionate politics (Mouffe, 2014); (c) postmodern assemblages, biopower, and body politics (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; Foucault, 1984); (d) affective facts and logics of future threats (Massumi, 2010); and (e) affective ethics (Bertleson & Murphie, 2010). Scholarship in the areas of public relations, risk, feminist and postmodern affect theory, and the vaccine debate provided theoretical grounding for this project. My research questions asked: How is feminist affect theory embodied by mothers in the vaccine debate? How do mothers understand risks as affective facts in the vaccine debate (if at all)? What affective logics are used by mothers in the vaccine debate (if any)? And, What are sources of knowledge for mothers in the vaccine debate? Multi-sited online ethnographic methods were used to explore how feminist affect theory contributes to public relations research, including 29 one-on-one in-depth interviews with mothers of young children and participant observation of 15 online discussions about vaccines on parenting websites BabyCenter.com, TheBump.com, and WhatToExpect.com. I used snowball sampling to recruit interview participants and grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) to analyze interview and online data. Results show that feminist affect theory contributes to theoretical and practical knowledge in public relations by politicizing and contextualizing understandings of publics and elucidating how affective facts and logics inform publics’ knowledge and choices, specifically in the context of risk. I also found evidence of suppression of dissent (Martin, 2015) and academic bias in vaccine debate research, which resulted in cultures of silence. Further areas of study included how specific contexts such as motherhood and issues of privilege and access affect publics’ experiences, knowledges, and choices.