Rural women and local economic development in south-west Victoria

In the 1990s, the appearance of women in leadership roles in local economic development organisations in small south-west Victorian towns heralded a change in gender relations in rural Australia. This paper contributes to an understanding of this process by investigating the actions and motives of women in leadership roles in small rural towns in south-west Victoria. The paper begins by establishing a framework of analysis based upon a notion of ‘paradigms in progress’. The argument is that in an increasingly interconnected world broader economic, social and political concerns encroach upon local cultures. In this process, older social paradigms or popularly accepted models for how the world works are either transformed, discarded or replaced on different levels. The different levels to which this paper refers are the macromodels of patriarchy, the mesomodels of economic development and the micromodels of leadership. It is the way that these levels intersect and how they are being changed that informs the explanation of women and leadership in south-west Victoria. The paper applies this framework to an analysis of interviews with 15 women in small towns in south-west Victoria. The paper concludes that women in the south-west have been able both to feminise the politics of local economic development as well as reposition the feminine in local social discourses.

(Re)Constructing Men`s Interests

Do men have too much to lose to be reliable allies with women in challenging patriarchy? This article addresses this question by exploring feminist views about the “man question” and reflecting on a dialogue in a pro-feminist electronic discussion group about whether it is men’s interests to change. It challenges the viewthat men, as individuals, have objective interests that arise as a consequence of being men in a patriarchal
society and argues that while men may construct interests toward their own material well being, they may also construct ideal interests that are formed by support for more abstract principles. It is thus suggested that men formulate a sense of having particular interests and that they behave on the basis of this formulation. The implications of this view for reconstructing men’s interests toward support for feminism are discussed.

Who wears the pants? The (multi) cultural politics of 'The sisterhood of the travelling pants'

Novels that prioritise the connectedness and strength of girls’ friendships without employing the pervasive trope of “mean girls”—those who typically divide in order to conquer other girls—are potentially empowering in their refusal to perpetuate limited and binary accounts of adolescent femininity. While Ann Brashares’ cult novel (now film), The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005a; originally 2002) appears to be representative of this textual shift, underpinning the overt call to value girls’ relationships is a deeply conservative, assimilationist narrative that relies on an acceptance of traditional patriarchal values. This article analyses the ways in which the novel appropriates “multicultural difference” to valorise, sustain and naturalise the central position and authority of patriarchy in the lives of young girls, regardless of their cultural heritage.

The other mother : Neil Gaiman's postfeminist fairytales

This article enacts as psychoanalytic analysis of Neil Gaiman's junior novel Coraline and graphic novel The Mirror Mask in order to position these two highly regarded children's texts in the postfeminist landscape of contemporary western world patriarchy. The interpretation concatenates the stories of the two female protagonists of these novels, Coraline and Helena, as exemplars of maturational stages in identity formation that demonstrate the ways in which feminine roles are currently circumscribed.

Commercial sex work, survival sex, sexual violence and HIV/AIDS prevention in Arumeru District, Arusha region Of Tanzania

Objective: To examine the knowledge and practices about HIV/AIDS among female Tanzanian commercial sex workers (CSWs) and assess the contextual dynamics that prevent safer sexual behaviours.

Method: The study used mixed methods and was implemented in two phases. Phase one assessed the knowledge and practices about HIV/AIDS among CSWs. Data were obtained with 54 CSWs, who were selected by using a snowball sampling approach. Semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with the CSWs were undertaken to allow the research participants to describe and discuss their lived realities as they perceive and experience them. In phase two, three discrete focus group discussions, each comprising 6-10 women, were carried out with 26 of the 54 CSWs who were interviewed in phase one.

Results: There was exploitation and inequity in the women's lives due to the multiple and overlapping oppressions of poverty and patriarchy. Sexual violence was framed, legitimised and reinforced by structural and cultural inequities. Such exploitation impacted not only on CSWs' lives as sex workers, but on their previous and/or simultaneous lives as mothers, wives, girlfriends and daughters. The women practised ‘survival sex’ as CSWs and/or sexual partners of men, and experienced sexual violence from their clients/partners. This violence was either culturally legitimised within a patriarchal framework or manifested itself as ‘displaced aggressive sex’ by men experiencing marginalisation in socio-economic spheres.

Playing the Agnes : Hester Thrale-Piozzi and Frances Burney

Guided by the feminist intention of reasserting the importance of neglected female writers, I have used this work to re-examine the lives and texts of eighteenth-century diarists Hester Thrale-Piozzi and Frances Burney. Adopting an interdisciplinary methodology, I draw on both literary and non-literary material to examine the effect of familial and social patriarchy in eighteenth-century England. Using the diaries, journals and letters of Hester and Frances, I ask why female conformity to masculine domination was expected, and how violence was used to extract subserviant behaviour from women. Beginning with gossip, and encompassing social, editorial and physical abuse, I use the medical profession's manipulation of female vulnerability to exemplify the way society legitimates violence to ensure female ductility. Moving beyond this physical aspect, I then examine the psychical, and question the existence of a ‘self’ which is vulnerable to external manipulation. By diverging from the influence of Freudian psychology, and developing a form of Jungian feminism, I propose the existence of an essential female Self which transcends the constraints of societal expectations and physical violence. In this work, both Hester and Frances emerge as physically and psychically strong entities who were forced to adopt socially conformist personae to survive.

The continued importance of a feminist analysis: gendered inequalities visible through a critique of Howard government policy on domestic violence

This paper argues that feminist analyses remain crucial to any critical analysis of social policy. From the outset, it needs to be said that we are not suggesting that other critical analyses are less important, such as anti-racist analysis, for example (Dominelli 2002a, 2002b). We also acknowledge the significance of intersectionality theory which identifies the ways in which race and racism may compound gender inequality to shape experiences of oppression or privilege (Mullings & Schultz 2006; Weber 2006). Having said this, in this paper we argue that feminist analyses remain as important as ever, in challenging dominant patriarchal/capitalist discourse currently informing social policy in Australia.

As a counter discourse, feminism puts women’s experiences and the unequal relationships of patriarchy at the forefront of analysis, highlights gender inequalities entrenched in social institutions and policy, and draws attention to the organisation of society along gender specific lines and the inequalities resulting from the relegation of women to the private sphere (Dominelli 2002a).

Specifically, we will demonstrate that the Howard government’s policy responses to the issue of family violence have reflected a renewed attack on previous gains made by women, and exemplify a neo-liberal, neo-conservative approach to social policy that demands a critical feminist analysis. Given the recent federal election, it seems particularly timely to reassert the importance of a feminist analysis of social policy and to direct the attention of the new federal government towards reversing recent trends to de-politicise violence towards women.

We are in danger

Genre films are constructed out of narrative patterns and plot points that involve or are predicted on crisis, on danger. This is the logic of much if not all mainstream genre cinema: drama has to take place for there to be a story to be told, and for pleasure and identification to be arrested and enthused. Forms of threatening disequilibrium can be personal, domestic, familial, local, external, supernatural and murderous; a way of life can be threatened as well as life itself. There are ideological dimensions at play; the crisis threatens to destabilize patriarchy, heterosexuality, social norms and expectations. Feelings and modes of affect are set in dangerous motion as the crisis unfolds. Trouble may emerge from a wayward or transgressive family member, or it may arrive in town on horses, stagecoaches, trains, cars, spaceships, and on the wind and in the water. The main (and minor) characters in the film are at the center of this storm, and that places viewers at the epicenter of the danger, also. The genre film places us all in danger. The genre film, then, has phenomenal, phenomenological and bio-political potential as a site of cognitive, ideological and carnal endangerment.

José Lins do Rego e a modernização da economia açucareira

Analysis of the northeastern sugar economy insertion on the modernization process of these economy based on the José Lins do Rego literary Discourse. In order to do so, there were used the literary works Fogo Morto, Menino de Engenho, Bangüê and Usina as study objects. Throughout the prosecution of a exploratory and documental bibliographic research it was identified that, in the cited literary works, there are three specialties corresponding to the main scenarios of the plots, the Santa Fé and Santa Rosa mills and the Bom Jesus mill factory. We have conceived the mills as main charachters, since all stories deployment corresponds to the other charachters reactions to the many forms that the specialties are, or not, affected by the modernization. Therefore, the narratives in Fogo Morto, Menino de Engenho, Bangüê and Usina reaffirm the viability of the literary discourse application as a source for the construction of the sociological interpretation of the northeastern sugar economy process of modernization in the end of 19th century and beginning of the 20th century

Sob a égide de Afrodite: o espaço feminino em O Despertar, de Kate Chopin

Departing from the theoretical principle of the feminine text as a palimpsest that holds subtextual meanings which, in permanent interaction with the textual surface, disarticulate the oppositional and hierarchical backgrounds of patriarchy, this essay intends to offer a general overview on the narrative instance of space in The Awakening, the most important work by Kate Chopin one of the highlights of Realism in the United States, with the intention to show how the space is itself plenty of and at the same time disseminates into the other narrative elements some inter-dictions to gainsay patriarchy. We intend, in this perspective, to develop an analysis of the space and its subtextual inter-relationships displayed in the symbolic implications of the water, the sea, the circle, and the feminine subjectivity awakening of the work's protagonist.

A dupla poética do silêncio: uma análise de Fogo morto e Cartilha do silêncio.

This research presents a reading of the poetics of silence in the profile and actions of characters in Fogo morto, by Paraiba s novelist José Lins do Rego and Cartilha do silêncio, by Sergipe s writer José Francisco Costa Dantas. As a starting point, we intend to demonstrate, through analysis, how the traditional issue of patriarchy, installed in rural areas of Northeast Brazil, live their momentum of rise and decline in different social spaces within narratives. This article shows how man lives tensions caused by the socio-political changes that will gradually be deployed in their environment due to the process of transition from traditional to modern life. From this perspective, this reading encourages a critical reflection on the social space of the mills and farms at the time of their rise and decay, as well as the various gender relationships between the feminine and the masculine world. The analysis indicates that all the changes both in family and social space unfold a world of silent variants and this paper takes as its theoretical basis the concept of silence built from the reflections of Eni Puccinelli Orlandi (2002), Barros Lourival Holland (1990 ), Luiz Costa Lima (1974) and Marisa Simons (1999).

Lei Maria da Penha em Natal / RN: limites e possibilidades no combate à violência de gênero contra a mulher

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior

Mulher não vale nem um real : patriarcado nas letras das músicas de forró

Patriarchy is a dominating system that establishes male power in social relations as the social-ideological system and the structuring element of several ways of men‟s domination on gender social relations, on organization of social life, on private relations, and on political decision spaces. In this study we enlarge our reflection about patriarchy from the analysis of Forró lyrics, more specifically the variation known as stylized. Of late decades, it is a kind of music that has been receiving a large acceptance all over the national territory, making use of everyday expressions that propagate and make apology to many forms of discrimination, oppression and violence against women. We emphasize that over this study 14 Forró lyrics were analyzed of different styles besides stylized, like the traditional and the double meaning ones. However, we dwelled on the content analysis, particularly in three Stylized Forró lyrics, they are: Tapa na Cara (2008) by Saia Rodada Band; Mulher Roleira (2004), Aviões do Forró Band; and Bomba no Cabaré (2007), Matruz com Leite Band. In order to make a critical analysis of the elements in the lyrics content, we support ourselves on the theoretic-methodological references of the dialectical materialism, a method that allowed us to get closer to the totality of the reality that includes the popular involvement of the analyzed lyrics in a qualitative way. In that sense, we hold onto the theoretic-methodological categories: gender social relations, patriarchy, violence against women, ideology and cultural industry. As from the lyrics compilation, they were arranged by theme, we classified and analyzed the content, which allowed us to comprehend the messages in the lyrics, beyond the text shows at first sight. Today, there are many mechanisms of propagation and perpetuation of patriarchal ideology. A very relevant mechanism of this phenomenon is the sexual violence. The violence against women is a form to propagate and keep sexism, which may occur in different ways, like physical, psychological, sexual, patrimonial and social. Through our study we established that the propagation of the violence against women as being something natural and banal, giving reinforcement to the asymmetric construction of gender relations that priorizes male to the detriment of female. This banalization is perhaps, one of the strongest allies of this phenomenon‟s perpetuation, that affects women all over the world from different social classes

Mídia e gênero: análise crítica da violência contra a mulher no telejornalismo

This thesis is consisted of a theoretical and empirical study about the treatment given by media, particularly on telejournalism, to violence against women. It aims to analyze and reflect about the role of media, particularly television, on the process of reproduction of patriarchy system of gender on the context of Brazilian society, from content and narrative news about crimes committed against Andreia Rodrigues and Eliza Samudio. In light of the critical perspective, we seek to apprehend the particularities of patriarchy as a system of domination and subjugation of women, and also reveal the involvement of traditional means of media on reproduction and maintenance of inequality between men and women. To apprehend that reality, we had as guidance a critical social theory, grounded in historical-dialectical materialism which enabled us to apprehend the phenomenon under investigation actually enrolled in a dynamic and contradictory reality. The research had qualitative approach. We appeal to the specialized literature of the area from classical and contemporary authors. We conducted a content analysis of categorized matters, and interviews with individuals involved in issues of gender and / or communication. The critical examination of the matters indicated that television journalism is permeated by the contradictions inherent in social life, means that states and restates the ideology of ruling classes, their values and worldviews, but also express conflicts and social demands. The study revealed that prevails on television playing stereotypes and gender inequalities. We could also see that violence against women gets a sensationalist overblown approach and with no insights on the social relations that determine and base it.