Gender and Agency

Gender and Agency PDF 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.

Gender and Agency

Gender and Agency PDF Author: Lois McNay
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745667872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book

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.

Gender, Agency, and Coercion

Gender, Agency, and Coercion PDF 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.

Gender and Sexual Agency

Gender and Sexual Agency PDF Author: Heather Albanesi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780739134986
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Gender and Sexual Agency considers how heterosexual Latin American, Asian American, and Caucasian American youth negotiate sexual encounters. In particular, this book examines sexual agency, exploring the question of why some young people assertively pursue what they want in a sexual encounter, while others go along with sexual activity they do not want. By comparing both young men and young women, Heather Powers Albanesi offers a unique perspective on how an individual's emotional experience of gender informs his or her willingness to exercise sexual agency. Using interviews to support her theoretical argument, Albanesi offers profiles of eleven different types of sexual agency, ranging from having strong convictions about their sexual decisions to abdicating responsibility to their partner. As the expressers of sexual agency, the voices of these youth from primarily working-class backgrounds come through to take us into their sexual decisions as they understand and experience them within the context of their lives. Ultimately, regardless of the decision, the book shows that it is young people's experience of gender that both shapes and allows them to make sense of these sexual choices. Book jacket.

Gender, Agency and War

Gender, Agency and War PDF Author: Tina Managhan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136454527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
This book traces practices of militarization and resistance that have emerged under the sign of motherhood in US Foreign Policy. Gender, Agency and War examines this discourse against the background of three key moments of American foreign policy formation: the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, the Gulf War of the early 1990s, and the recent invasion of Iraq. For each of these moments the author explores the emergence of a historically specific and emblematic maternalized mode of female embodiment (ranging from the ‘hysterical’ antinuclear protester to the figure of ‘Supermom’), in order to shed light onto the various practices which define and enable expressions of American sovereignty. In so doing, the text argues that the emergence of particular raced, gendered, and maternalized bodies ought not to be read as merely tangential to affairs of state, but as instantiations of global politics. This work urges an approach that rereads the body as an ‘event’ – with significant implications for the ways in which international politics and gender are currently understood. This book will be of much interest to students of gender politics, critical security studies, US foreign policy and IR in general.

Women Out of Place

Women Out of Place PDF Author: Brackette Williams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135234833
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
These essays investigate the links between agency and race with regard to constructions of masculinity and femininity among radical groups resisting varied forms of political and economic domination. ********************************************************* * Building on the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, literary critics, and feminist philosophers of science, the essays in Women Out of Place: the Gender of Agency and Race of Nationality investigate the links between agency and race for what they reveal about constructions of masculinity and femininity and patterns of domesticity among groups seeking to resist varied forms of political and economic domination through a subnational ideology of racial and cultural redemption.

Reclaiming Female Agency

Reclaiming Female Agency PDF Author: Norma Broude
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520242521
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
'Reclaiming Feminine Agency' identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship & offers 23 essays on artists & issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s & after.

Rethinking Agency

Rethinking Agency PDF Author: Sumi Madhok
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317809548
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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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.

Herself an Author

Herself an Author PDF Author: Grace S. Fong
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824831861
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"Grace Fong has written a wonderful history of female writers’ participation in the elite conventions of Chinese poetics. Fong’s recovery of many of these poets, her able exegesis and elegant, analytical grasp of what the poets were doing is a great read, and her bilingual presentation of their poetry gives the book additional power. This is a persuasive and elegant study." —Tani Barlow, author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism "In this quietly authoritative book, Grace Fong has brought a group of women poets back to life. Previously ignored by scholars because of their marginal status or the inaccessibility of their works, these remarkable writers now speak to us about the sensualities, pains, satisfactions, and sadness of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Professor Fong—a superb translator of Chinese poetry, prose, and criticism—has rendered the works of these women in a way that is true both to our theoretical concerns and theirs." —Dorothy Ko, author of Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding "Professor Fong approaches the poetry of Ming-Qing upper-class women as a social-cultural activity that allowed these women to manifest their agency and assert their own subjectivity against the background of virtual and actual networks of fellow female poets. As the distillation of more than ten years of research by one of the leading scholars in this field, this work is a timely contribution that eminently deserves our attention. Given the inclusion of translations of some of the texts discussed, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to the reading of women’s poetry of the Ming-Qing period." —Wilt Idema, Harvard University Herself an Author addresses the critical question of how to approach the study of women’s writing. It explores various methods of engaging in a meaningful way with a rich corpus of poetry and prose written by women of the late Ming and Qing periods, much of it rediscovered by the author in rare book collections in China and the United States. The volume treats different genres of writing and includes translations of texts that are made available for the first time in English. Among the works considered are the life-long poetic record of Gan Lirou, the lyrical travel journal kept by Wang Fengxian, and the erotic poetry of the concubine Shen Cai. Taking the view that gentry women’s varied textual production was a form of cultural practice, Grace Fong examines women’s autobiographical poetry collections, travel writings, and critical discourse on the subject of women’s poetry, offering fresh insights on women’s intervention into the dominant male literary tradition. The wealth of texts translated and discussed here include fascinating documents written by concubines—women who occupied a subordinate position in the family and social system. Fong adopts the notion of agency as a theoretical focus to investigate forms of subjectivity and enactments of subject positions in the intersection between textual practice and social inscription. Her reading of the life and work of women writers reveals surprising instances and modes of self-empowerment within the gender constraints of Confucian orthodoxy. Fong argues that literate women in late imperial China used writing and reading to create literary and social communities, transcend temporal-spatial and social limitations, and represent themselves as the authors of their own life histories.

Gender, Space and Agency in India

Gender, Space and Agency in India PDF Author: Anindita Datta
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000176797
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This volume explores the links between gender, space and agency in India. It offers fresh perspectives and frameworks within which these links can be analyzed across diverse geographical contexts in India. The chapters in this volume are based on field studies which showcase how agency is gendered. The volume examines how gender and agency are fashioned by a multitude of everyday contexts, socio-economic processes, policy interventions and geographic phenomenon and manifest in diffusion of education, decentralization of politics, rising social inequalities, poverty, green revolution, mechanization of agriculture and even drought. This book will be of interest to researchers, teachers and practitioners of human geography, social and cultural geography, and those interested in geographies of gender. It will also be helpful for policy makers interested in the issues of gender and development in India.

Gender in the Mirror

Gender in the Mirror PDF 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.