Author: Kay Schaffer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135091420
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
What does it mean to read from elsewhere? Women Writers in Postsocialist China introduces readers to a range and variety of contemporary Chinese women’s writing, which has seen phenomenal growth in recent years. The book addresses the different ways women’s issues are understood in China and the West, attending to the processes of translation, adaptation, and the grafting of new ideas with existing Chinese understandings of gender, feminism, subjectivity, consumerism and (post) modernism. By focusing on women’s autobiographical, biographical, fictional and historical writing, the book engages in a transcultural flow of ideas between western and indigenous Chinese feminisms. Taking account of the accretions of social, cultural, geographic, literary, economic, and political movements and trends, cultural formations and ways of thinking, it asks how the texts and the concepts they negotiate might be understood in the social and cultural spaces within China and how they might be interpreted differently elsewhere in the global locations in which they circulate. The book argues that women-centred writing in China has a direct bearing on global feminist theory and practice. This critical study of selected genres and writers highlights the shifts in feminist perspectives within contemporary local and global cultural landscapes.
Author: Hui Faye Xiao
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 029580498X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
As state control of private life in China has loosened since 1980, citizens have experienced an unprecedented family revolution—an overhaul of family structure, marital practices, and gender relationships. While the nuclear family has become a privileged realm of romance and individualism symbolizing the post-revolutionary “freedoms” of economic and affective autonomy, women’s roles in particular have been transformed, with the ideal “iron girl” of socialism replaced by the feminine, family-oriented “good wife and wise mother.” Problems and contradictions in this new domestic culture have been exposed by China's soaring divorce rate. Reading popular “divorce narratives” in fiction, film, and TV drama, Hui Faye Xiao shows that the representation of marital discord has become a cultural battleground for competing ideologies within post-revolutionary China. While these narratives present women’s cultivation of wifely and maternal qualities as the cure for family disintegration and social unrest, Xiao shows that they in fact reflect a problematic resurgence of traditional gender roles and a powerful mode of control over supposedly autonomous private life.
Author: Anyi Wang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1942242476
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
Author: Pranab Panday
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317372638
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 150
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Book Description
Economic development in the poorest countries often makes better progress when women become involved in, and take a lead in, development projects. Encouraging women’s involvement, however, is often a major difficulty in societies where traditionally women’s status has been inferior and where women are expected to be domestic and passive. This book, based on extensive original research, considers major projects undertaken by non-governmental organisations in Bangladesh to encourage women’s participation. The book identifies the factors which motivated women to be active, discusses how women achieved the level of capacity and knowledge to enable them to serve their communities appropriately, assesses the major difficulties and recommends how empowerment projects can be improved in future. The book concludes that established institutions and traditional customs are often the greatest barrier to women’s participation.
Author: Margaret Alston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317684850
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Bangladesh is by no means a high emitter of carbon, but it is nevertheless one of the countries most critically affected. There is a significant risk of damage to lives and livelihoods due to climate change in the form of cyclones, flooding and storm surges, and slow-onset impacts such as droughts, sea level rises and river basin erosion. Moreover, Bangladeshis are especially vulnerable as a high proportion of people live in extreme poverty. This book assesses the impact of climate change in Bangladesh, and presents the findings of a three-year, in-depth study undertaken at village level in different districts of the country. It examines national policies, contrasting them with what is actually happening at village level. It outlines the impact of climate change on livelihood strategies and health, and focuses particularly on the impact on gender relations, showing that although women have a significant role to play in helping communities cope with the effects of climate change, cultural customs and practices often work against this. The book argues for, and puts forward policy proposals for, recognising women’s active contribution and supporting gender equality as a critical strategy in global adaptation to climate challenges.
Author: Heike Paul
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839459737
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
This new go-to reference book for global melodrama assembles contributions by experts from a wide range of disciplines, including cultural studies, film and media studies, gender and queer studies, political science, and postcolonial studies. The melodramas covered in this volume range from early 20th century silent movies to contemporary films, from independent ›arthouse‹ productions to Hollywood blockbusters. The comprehensive overview of global melodramatic film in the Lexicon constitutes a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners of film, teachers, film critics, and anyone who is interested in the past and present of melodramatic film on a global scale. The Lexicon of Global Melodrama includes essays on All That Heaven Allows, Bombay, Casablanca, Die Büchse der Pandora, In the Mood for Love, Nosotros los Pobres, Terra Sonâmbula, and Tokyo Story.
Author: Derek Hird
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888455850
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
The Cosmopolitan Dream presents the broad patterns in the transformations of mainland Chinese masculinity over recent years, covering both representations (in film, fiction, and on television) and the lived experiences of Chinese men on four continents. Exposure to transnational influences has made Chinese notions of masculinity more cosmopolitan than ever before, yet the configurations of these hybrid masculinities retain the imprint of Chinese historical models. With the increasing interconnectivity of markets around the world, the hegemonic mode of manhood is now a highly mobile transnational business form of masculinity. However, the fusion of this kind of cosmopolitanism with Chinese characteristics has not diminished the conventional class and gender privileges for educated men. On the other hand, the traditionally prized intellectual masculinity in Chinese culture, which did not hold commerce in high regard, has reconciled with today’s business values. Together these factors shape the outlook of the contemporary generation of Chinese elites. At the same time globalization has increased the cross-country mobility of blue-collar Chinese men, who may possess a masculine ideal that is different from their white-collar counterparts. Therefore it is important to examine various types of masculinity with the recent, reform-era mainland Chinese migration. The migrant man—whether he is a worker, student, pop idol, or writer (all cases studied in this volume)—could face challenges to his masculinity based on his race, class, intimate partners, or fatherhood. The strategies adopted by the Chinese men to reinvent their masculine identities in these stories offer much insight into the complex connections between masculinity and the rapid socioeconomic developments of postsocialist China. “The Cosmopolitan Dream provides a rich and multidisciplinary window into how Chinese masculinities are both shaping and being shaped by a new era of globalization, one in which circulations of Chinese capital, images, and people play an ever more important role. This is an insightful and engaging work that makes important contributions to the study of media, gender, migration, and globalization more broadly.” —John Osburg, University of Rochester “A pioneering contribution toward understanding transnational Chinese masculinities. Covering both imagined representations and the actual experience of migrating Chinese men, this volume is definitely greater than the sum of its parts in conveying the contents and significance of cosmopolitanism to Chinese masculinities.” —Harriet Zurndorfer, Leiden University
Author: Kabita Chakraborty
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317378504
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
This book, based on extensive, original research, details the changing lives of youth living in slum communities (bustees) in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Using young people’s own photos, art and narratives, the book explores how Muslim girls and young women are contributing to, and impacted by, changing youth culture in India. We are invited into the risky world of mixed-sex dance taking place in clandestine spaces in the slums. We join young people on their journeys to find premarital romance and witness their strategic and savvy risk taking when participating in transgressive aspects of consumer culture. The book reveals how social changes in India, including greater education and employment opportunities, as well as powerful middle class Muslim reform discourses, are impacting youth the very local level. More than just fantasy we see that Bollywood is an important role model which young people consult. By carefully negotiating risks and performing multiple identities inspired by modernity, globalization and, most of all, Bollywood culture, young people actively participate in a changing India and disrupt dominant discourses about slum youth as poor victims who are excluded from social change.
Author: Sallie Yea
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113500823X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
Based on in-depth ethnographic work, this book presents a study of Filipinas trafficked to South Korea, focusing on women who entered South Korea as migrant entertainers and subsequently became deployed in exploitative work environments around US military bases there. It contributes to the extension of our knowledge about human trafficking in the Asian region through an exploration of the experiences of more than 100 women who took part in the study. The book challenges many of the accepted understandings about "trafficking victims" and unravels the implications of these narrow understandings for the women themselves. It explores the ways women negotiate trafficking largely outside of the emerging formal anti-trafficking framework, and explains how new community formations and social networks emerge crafted by the women themselves to manage and overcome their vulnerabilities in migration.
Author: Annie Pohlman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131781794X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
The Indonesian massacres of 1965-1966 claimed the lives of an estimated half a million men, women and children. Histories of this period of mass violence in Indonesia’s past have focused almost exclusively on top-level political and military actors, their roles in the violence, and their movements and mobilization of perpetrators. Based on extensive interviews with women survivors of the massacres and detention camps, this book provides the first in-depth analysis of sexualised forms of violence perpetrated against women and girl victims during this period. It looks at the stories of individual women caught up in the massacres and mass arrests, focusing on their testimonies and their experiences of violence and survival. The book aims not only to redress the lack of scholarly attention but also to provide significant new analysis on the gendered and gendering effects of sexual violence against women and girls in situations of genocidal violence.
