Author: Victoria Goddard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113458573X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
In response to global change, people create new opportunities and conditions, and in their responses they are influenced by both gender and age. In Gender, Agency and Change the contributors illustrate the complexities involved in the constitution and performance of agency. Such agency may be reflected in strategies of accommodation and adaption that can nevertheless produce new institutional arrangements. Alternatively, they may be directed towards the outright rejection of these processes. The cases examined in this volume explore the ways in which different subjects engage in the reformulation of spaces, roles and identities, redefining the boundaries between, and the content of, the 'public' and the 'private'. The examples also provide an account of how gendered discourses are deployed to convey new meanings, a new sense of place and time, confirming or challenging ideas of 'tradition' and 'modernity'. This collection will be of particular interest to students of anthropology and gender studies.
Author: Ana María Muñoz Boudet
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 082139892X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
Based on focus groups and interviews with nearly 4,000 women, men, girls, and boys from 20 countries, this book explores areas that are less often studied in gender and development: gender norms and agency. It reveals how little gender norms have changed, how similar they are across countries, and how they are being challenged and contested.
Author: Lois McNay
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745667872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
This book reassesses theories of agency and gender identity against the backdrop of changing relations between men and women in contemporary societies. McNay argues that recent thought on the formation of the modern subject offers a one-sided or negative account of agency, which underplays the creative dimension present in the responses of individuals to changing social relations. An understanding of this creative element is central to a theory of autonomous agency, and also to an explanation of the ways in which women and men negotiate changes within gender relations. In exploring the implications of this idea of agency for a theory of gender identity, McNay brings together the work of leading feminist theorists - such as Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser - with the work of key continental social theorists. In particular, she examines the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Ricoeur and Cornelius Castoriadis, each of whom has explored different aspects of the idea of the creativity of action. McNay argues that their thought has interesting implications for feminist ideas of gender, but these have been relatively neglected partly because of the huge influence of the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan in this area. She argues that, despite its suggestive nature, feminist theory must move away from the ideas of Foucault and Lacan if a more substantive account of agency is to be introduced into ideas of gender identity. This book will appeal to students and scholars in the areas of social theory, gender studies and feminist theory.
Author: S. Madhok
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137295619
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 455
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Book Description
Drawing on recent feminist discussions, this collection critically reassesses ideas about agency, exploring the relationship between agency and coercion in greater depth and across a range of disciplinary perspectives and ethical contexts.
Author: Sumi Madhok
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131780953X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
This book proposes a new theoretical framework for agency thinking by examining the ethical, discursive and practical engagements of a group of women development workers in north-west India with developmentalism and individual rights. Rethinking Agency asks an underexplored question, tracks the entry, encounter, experience and practice of developmentalism and individual rights, and examines their normative and political trajectory. Through an ethnography of a moral encounter with developmentalism, it raises a critical question: how do we think of agency in oppressive contexts? Further, how do issues of risk, injury, coercion and oppression alter the conceptual mechanics of agency itself? The work will be invaluable to research organisations, development practitioners, policy makers and political journalists interested in questions of gender, political empowerment, rights and political participation, and to academics and students in the fields of feminist theory, development studies, sociology, politics and gender studies.
Author: Diana Tietjens Meyers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190208333
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Harmful, culturally prevalent imagery of feminine sexuality, beauty, and motherhood constrains women's self-determination. Gender in the Mirror proposes alternative imagery of feminine sexuality, beauty, and motherhood and advances an account of feminist discursive politics that takes on the challenge of neutralizing patriarchal imagery.
Author: Judith Kegan Gardiner
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252064180
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
"A major contribution in women's studies and in other disciplines dealing with issues of agency. The authors raise issues that are very important . . . and they raise them as they must be raised--by bridging theory and action." -- Kathryn Pine Addelson, author of Moral Passages: Toward a Collectivist Moral Theory Both the women's liberation movement and those who have studied it characterize agency as the capacity to make change in individual consciousness, personal lives, and society. The seventeen contributors to Provoking Agents explore whether--and how--feminist theory, writing, and other social practices can help readers move beyond seeing women as a powerless group to effecting changes in their own lives and, ultimately, becoming social activists. Topics in this multi-disciplinary collection range from maternal surrogacy to writing, from consciousness-raising to AIDS activism, from pornography to local organizing
Author: Deborah Simonton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136275029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
This innovative new book is overtly and explicitly about female agency in eighteenth-century European towns. However, it positions female activity and decisions unequivocally in an urban world of institutions, laws, regulations, customs and ideologies. Gender politics complicated and shaped the day-to-day experiences of working women. Town rules and customs, as well as police and guilds’ regulations, affected women’s participation in the urban economy: most of the time, the formally recognized and legally accepted power of women – which is an essential component of female agency – was very limited. Yet these chapters draw attention to how women navigated these gendered terrains. As the book demonstrates, "exclusion" is too strong a word for the realities and pragmatism of women’s everyday lives. Frequently guild and corporate regulations were more about situating women and regulating their activities, rather than preventing them from operating in the urban economy. Similarly corporate structures, which were under stress, found flexible strategies to incorporate women who through their own initiative and activities put pressure on the systems. Women could benefit from the contradictions between moral and social unwritten norms and economic regulations, and could take advantage of the tolerance or complicity of urban authorities towards illicit practices. Women with a grasp of their rights and privileges could defend themselves and exploit legal systems with its loopholes and contradictions to achieve economic independence and power.
Author: Momin Rahman
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745633773
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
This new introduction to the sociology of gender and sexuality provides fresh insight into our rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and our understanding of masculine and feminine identities, relating the study of gender and sexuality to recent research and theory, and wider social concerns throughout the world.
Author: Angela McRobbie
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1446200345
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
In this trenchant inquiry into the state of feminism, Angela McRobbie breaks open the politics of sexual equality and ′affirmative feminism′ and sets down a new theory of gender power. Challenging the most basic assumptions of the ′end′ of feminism, this book argues that invidious forms of gender re-stabilisation are being re-established. Consumer and popular culture encroach on the terrain of so-called female freedom, appearing supportive of female success, yet tying women into new post-feminist neurotic dependencies. With a scathing critique of ′women′s empowerment′, McRobbie has developed a distinctive feminist analysis that she uses to examine socio-cultural phenomena embedded in contemporary women′s lives: from fashion photography and the television ′make-over′ genre to eating disorders, body anxiety and ′illegible rage′. A turning point in feminist theory, The Aftermath of Feminism will set a new agenda for gender studies and cultural studies.
