Gender and the Local-Global Nexus, Volume 10: Theory, Research, and Action (Advances in Gender Research)

GENDER AND THE LOCAL-GLOBAL NEXUS: THEORY, RESEARCH, AND ACTION

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ADVANCES IN GENDER RESEARCH Series Editors: Vasilikie Demos and Marcia Texler Segal Recent Volumes: Volume 1: Theory, Methods and Praxis – Edited by Marcia Texler Segal and Vasilikie Demos, 1996 Volume 2: Cross-Cultural and International Perspectives – Edited by Vasilikie Demos and Marcia Texler Segal, 1997 Volume 3: Advancing Gender Research Across, Beyond and Through Disciplines and Paradigms – Edited by Vasilikie Demos and Marcia Texler Segal, 1998 Volume 4: Social Change for Women and Children – Edited by Vasilikie Demos and Marcia Texler Segal, 2000 Volume 5: An International Feminist Challenge to Theory – Edited by Vasilikie Demos and Marcia Texler Segal, 2001 Volume 6: Gendered Sexualities – Edited by Patricia Gagne´ and Richard Tewksbury, 2002 Volume 7: Gender Perspectives on Health and Medicine: Key Themes – Edited by Marcia Texler Segal, Vasilikie Demos with Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld, 2003 Volume 8: Gender Perspectives on Reproduction and Sexuality – Edited by Marcia Texler Segal, Vasilikie Demos with Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld, 2004 Volume 9: Gender Realities: Local and Global – Edited by Marcia Texler Segal and Vasilikie Demos, 2005 ii

ADVANCES IN GENDER RESEARCH VOLUME 10

GENDER AND THE LOCAL-GLOBAL NEXUS: THEORY, RESEARCH, AND ACTION EDITED BY

VASILIKIE DEMOS University of Minnesota-Morris, Minnesota, USA

MARCIA TEXLER SEGAL Indiana University Southeast, Indiana, USA

Amsterdam – Boston – Heidelberg – London – New York – Oxford Paris – San Diego – San Francisco – Singapore – Sydney – Tokyo JAI Press is an imprint of Elsevier

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JAI Press is an imprint of Elsevier The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, UK Radarweg 29, PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, The Netherlands 525 B Street, Suite 1900, San Diego, CA 92101-4495, USA First edition 2006 Copyright r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Science & Technology Rights Department in Oxford, UK: phone (+44) (0) 1865 843830; fax (+44) (0) 1865 853333; email: [email protected]. Alternatively you can submit your request online by visiting the Elsevier web site at http://elsevier.com/locate/permissions, and selecting Obtaining permission to use Elsevier material Notice No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein. Because of rapid advances in the medical sciences, in particular, independent verification of diagnoses and drug dosages should be made British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-0-7623-1312-9 ISBN-10: 0-7623-1312-9 ISSN: 1529-2126 (Series) For information on all JAI Press publications visit our website at books.elsevier.com Printed and bound in The Netherlands 06 07 08 09 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: GENDER AND THE LOCAL-GLOBAL NEXUS – THEORY, RESEARCH, AND ACTION Vasilikie Demos and Marcia Texler Segal THINKING OF GENDER IN A HOLISTIC SENSE: UNDERSTANDINGS OF GENDER IN SULAWESI, INDONESIA Sharyn Graham Davies

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VARIATIONS IN MASCULINITY FROM A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE Edwin S. Segal

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IS THERE A NEED TO (UN)GENDER THE PAST? Denise Pahl Schaan

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YOUNG PEOPLE’S ATTITUDES TO GENDER ISSUES: ASIAN PERSPECTIVES Chilla Bulbeck

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A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SEX ROLE IDEOLOGY IN CANADA, MEXICO AND THE UNITED STATES Richard J. Harris, Juanita M. Firestone and Paul J. Bryan

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THE ‘‘FREE UNIVERSITY OF WOMEN.’’ REFLECTIONS ON THE CONDITIONS FOR A FEMINIST POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE Paola Melchiori

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SPY OR FEMINIST: ‘‘GRRRILA’’ RESEARCH ON THE MARGIN Elizabeth L. Sweet

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MARKETING SOCIAL CHANGE AFTER COMMUNISM: THE CASE OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN SLOVAKIA Magdalena Vanya

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LIFE HISTORY AS NARRATIVE SUBVERSION: OLDER MEXICAN WOMEN RESIST AUTHORITY, ASSERT IDENTITY, AND CLAIM POWER Tracy B. Citeroni

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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SUBJECT INDEX

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INTRODUCTION: GENDER AND THE LOCAL-GLOBAL NEXUS – THEORY, RESEARCH, AND ACTION With Volume 10, Gender and the Local/Global Nexus: Theory, Research and Action, a milestone has been reached in Advances in Gender Research. When we began to work on Volume 1 (Segal & Demos, 1996) of the series, we called for papers that advanced knowledge of gender theoretically, methodologically and in practice. That volume subtitled, ‘‘Theory, Methods and Praxis,’’ contains six papers exploring trans-genderism, love and gender stratification, gender issues among African Americans, women’s liberation and strategies for social change. With the exception of one, each article focuses on advances in gender knowledge culturally relevant to North America. Our concern after completing the first volume of the series was to expand the identification of advances in gender knowledge beyond western culture and, especially, the culture of the United States. Volume 2 (Demos & Segal, 1997) features papers presented at Research Committee 32, Women and Society, of the International Sociological Association and containing an implicit or explicit critique of the western paradigm. Since Volume 2, virtually every volume of the series pays some attention to issues of gender outside of North America and Europe, and nine of the ten papers in Volume 9 (Segal & Demos, 2005) involve the consideration of gender in places outside the United States. Volume 10 has in common with Volume 1 a focus on theory, research and action. It differs from the first volume in its multidimensional representation of time and place as context for the study of gender. Clearly, since 1996, and beginning with the 1999 protests in Seattle, Washington against the policies of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other economic institutions, people throughout the world have become sensitive to the social and cultural implications of economic vii

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globalization. Saskia Sassen (2004, p. 274) addresses the relationship between globalization, local communities and gender. She notes (2004, p. 274): Both in global cities and in survival circuits, women emerge as crucial economic actors. It is partly through them that key components of new economies have been built. Globalization allows links to be forged between countries that send migrants and countries that receive them; it also enables local and regional practices to go global.

The papers in Volume 10 have as background a world in which the local/ global connection is salient. They examine gender and its implications for feminist action within this setting. The papers fall into three overlapping categories. The first category, theory, involves the theoretical consideration of gender across place and time. The second, research, reveals cultural differences in attitudes toward gender, and the third, action, concerns the feminist implications of gender as hierarchy. Theory: The concept of gender across place and time. Three papers explicitly address the theoretical conceptualization of gender with respect to the impact of place and time. Sharyn Graham Davies ‘‘Thinking of Gender in a Holistic Sense: Understanding of Gender in Sulawesi, Indonesia,’’ Edwin S. Segal’s ‘‘Variations in Masculinity from a Cross Cultural Perspective’’ and Denise Pahl Schaan’s ‘‘Is There A Need to (Un) Gender the Past?’’ All three reveal how the conceptualization of gender affects our observations. Graham Davies and Segal are both concerned with the effect of imposing a western bipolar view of gender in places where it is defined more fluidly, while Schaan considers the effect of using contemporary definitions of gender to understand the past in archaeological studies. Graham Davies argues that the western bipolar one-way relationship between gender and sexuality has led to the marginalization of sexuality in Feminist or Women’s Studies and of gender in Queer Studies. She notes that there is no one-way relationship between the two; rather, they interplay. Segal makes two critical points (1) the western bi-polar conception of the sex-gender-sexuality system is spreading and (2) its adoption has resulted in the loss of flexibility in our understanding of human diversity throughout the world. Graham Davies and Segal both take up the problem of the ‘‘emic versus etic’’ or insider versus outsider distinction in examining gender. The emic perspective is that of the insider, the individual who is a part of and a participant in the culture examined. The etic perspective belongs to the outsider, the person who observes, but is not a part of or a participant in the relevant culture. Historically and typically, the etic position has been a ‘‘western’’ position and the emic a ‘‘non-western.’’

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Both Graham Davies and Segal discuss the complex implications for the conceptualization of gender posed by the distinction and reveal that for any particular culture there is not just one emic or etic perspective, but a number. In addition both are concerned that gender not be seen as separate from other variables. Graham Davies argues that gender is a ‘‘holistic’’ concept composed of many parts including biological and sexual, and Segal views gender as a part of a ‘‘sex-gender-sexuality’’ system. Schaan’s paper serves to caution us further. She argues that a troublesome conflation of Gender Studies with Feminist Studies in archaeology has led to a distorted analysis of the past. She notes that Gender Studies involves a consideration of gender as a cultural phenomenon while Feminist Studies involves a consideration of gender as hierarchy and that the conflation of the two results in creating a bias toward the western, agency, individual, equality view of the past. Thus, when this view is used to guide research, it can create a misreading of the past. Research: Data-based differences in gender. Chilla Bulbeck in her article ‘‘Young People’s Attitudes to Gender Issues: Asian Perspectives’’ and Richard J. Harris, Juanita M. Firestone and Paul J. Bryan in ‘‘A Comparative Analysis of Sex Role Ideology in Canada, Mexico and the United States’’ use survey data to identify actual gender attitudes across different cultures. Bulbeck finds support for expected cultural differences in gender attitudes between South Australians and Asians, while Harris et al. find a more nuanced pattern of gender attitudes among people of Canada, Mexico and the United States than might be expected. Bulbeck compares South Australians with Asians from six countries with respect to four sets of attitudes: same sex relations, role reversal between wife and husband, pornography and sharing housework. She finds that the Australians have a ‘‘choice and individualism orientation’’ while the Asians have a ‘‘collectivity and obligation orientation.’’ Harris et al. find that Mexicans are likely to be more conservative than Canadians and Americans from the United States in their sex role ideology, but they also show the difference is only slight, and that ‘‘machismo’’ is associated with being male more in the United States and Canada than in Mexico. Further, they note that age, political ideology and school finishing age are more predictive of sex role ideology than is nation. Action: Feminism and change. Paola Melchiori’s ‘‘The ‘Free University of Women.’ Reflections on the Conditions for a Feminist Politics of Knowledge,’’ Elizabeth L. Sweet’s ‘‘Spy or Feminist: ‘Grrrila’ Research on the Margin,’’ Magdalena Vanya’s ‘‘Marketing Social Change after Communism: The Case of Domestic Violence in Slovakia’’ and Tracy B. Citeroni’s

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article, ‘‘Life History as Narrative Subversion: Older Mexican Women Resist Authority, Assert Identity and Claim Power’’ address the feminist implications of theory and research for social action and change. Both Melchiori and Sweet focus on the production and integration of feminist knowledge in academia. Melchiori, a founder of the Free University of Women in Milan, Italy, traces the emergence of this feminist institution from the late 1970s and early 1980s trade unionist movement, which culminated in an agreement allowing employees to attend 150 hours of classes on Marxist thought and class consciousness paid by their employers. At first, the classes were attended by men. In time women began taking and retaking the classes, and they along with their feminist teachers lost interest in Orthodox Marxism, and turned to the pursuit of embodied self-knowledge. By 1986, the Free University of Women in Milan was established. Melchiori notes that the students and their teachers recognized the misogynist basis of disciplinary knowledge and discovered that they could suspend the masculine in a setting where they interacted with other women. She explains that the women were able to see that knowledge is not neutral. In addition, she points to the women’s recognition of the mother figure as a reflector of women’s own knowledge across the generational divide. Sweet’s paper reveals greater challenges to the production of feminist knowledge than does that of Melchiori. In it, Sweet compares academic experiences she had as a feminist scholar and teacher. Her paper begins dramatically with her experience teaching an economic development course at a university in Omsk, Russia. While there, and as result of papers written by her students, Sweet was investigated by the FSB (the successor to the KGB, the intelligence agency of the former Soviet Union). The FSB complained that Sweet’s students had obtained incorrect information about firms in Omsk and that this jeopardized the economic stability of the area. The media learned about the incident and Sweet became headline news with her story ‘‘Spy or Feminist?’’ Because authorities decided Sweet was not a threat, but only a ‘‘feminist,’’ she could continue to do the work she wanted to do. In recounting this experience as well as others she had in the United States and Mexico, Sweet reveals ways in which feminists are marginalized in academia. Further, she argues that paradoxically this very marginalization provides feminists with opportunities to exercise their will, and do their work, thereby promoting change. Vanya addresses the problem of employing western strategies to promote feminist change in Eastern European countries. Focusing on the ‘‘Every Fifth Woman,’’ campaign in the newly–independent Slovakia, Vanya traces

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the emergence of domestic violence as an issue on the discursive and the institutional levels. In order to comply with the terms of western funding, a coalition of women referring to themselves as ‘‘Every Fifth Woman’’ (the frequency of domestic abuse in Slovakia) was formed. Again in compliance with the requirements of funding, the women staged a media campaign to sensitize the populace about the issue. The public relations consultant acting in accord with western patterns urged the women to pare down their complex feminist stance on domestic violence to simple language that could be easily communicated through the media. Vanya observes that as a result of the media campaign, domestic violence was criminalized, but attitudes toward domestic violence remained unchanged. Unlike the effect of such campaigns in the west, Slovakia’s history of anti-statist and anti-government resistance meant that ‘‘lip service’’ was given to changes in discourse while local attitudes remained untouched. Vanya explains the attitudinal failure of the ‘‘Every Fifth Woman’’ as a result of two ‘‘gaps’’: discursive and strategic. On the discursive level, complex feminist ideas were never adequately communicated to the populace; on the strategic level, the campaign was a ‘‘topdown’’ affair, one which never had grass roots support. Vanya shows how the uncritical application of imported strategies and the strings attached to western funding led to the failure of a campaign in Eastern Europe. The themes of theory, research and action overlap in the various articles. Graham Davies, Segal and Schaan clearly point to some of the research implications of gender, a major one being the misinterpretation of other cultures or the past. Bulbeck and Harris et al., too, reveal the interaction of theory and research as they discuss differences in attitudes toward sex role ideology, gender and related concepts. To the extent that theory and research about gender reveal gender inequality or injustice – a social problem, the papers also imply the need for feminist action and change. Further, Melchiori, Sweet and Vanya reveal that feminist action cannot be isolated from theory and research. Perhaps the paper that most clearly speaks to the interrelationship of theory, research and action is that of Citeroni. Citeroni argues that the non-positivistic narrative use of life history provides a means of discovering how older Mexican women represent or show resistance to the patriarchal construct of identity and that story telling is a form of powerful democratic resource. The life histories show that while older Mexican women may be stereotyped as ‘‘sages’’ or ‘‘servants’’ to their families, they are most concerned about their autonomy.

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Looking back over a decade of developing this series, we are pleased with our efforts as they are reflected in Volume 10. The papers in this volume advance gender research in a number of ways. They aptly demonstrate the complex relationships among theory, research and feminist social action; they remind us that gender research is not always synonymous with feminist research and that even feminist research is not about women alone, and they situate gender research and action in time and place. While all the authors are western-trained scholars, explicit in some papers, implicit in all, are both applications and critiques of western assumptions about sex, gender and sexuality categories and attitudes, western scholarship and western paradigms for social action. We believe ability to reflect and revise, to apply and augment, is a crucial advance in our scholarship, one that bodes well for the next decade.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editors would like to say goodbye to our previous editorial support team, Ann Corney and Joanna Scott, whose encouragement and assistance gave us sustenance, and to extend greetings to J. Scott Bentley. We would also like to thank our families and to welcome Marcia’s grandson Joseph Louis Block who was born as we were completing the work on the volume.

REFERENCES Demos, V., & Segal, M. T. (Eds). (1997). Advances in gender research: Cross cultural and international perspectives (Vol. 2). New York, NY: Elsevier (JAI). Sassen, S. (2004). Global cities and survival circuits. In: B. Ehrenreich & A. R. Hochschild (Eds), Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy (pp. 254–275). New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company. Segal, M. T., & Demos, V. (Eds). (1996). Advances in gender research: Theory, methods and praxis (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Elsevier (JAI). Segal, M. T., & Demos, V. (Eds). (2005). Advances in gender research: Gender realities: Local and global (Vol. 9). New York, NY: Elsevier (JAI).

Vasilikie Demos Marcia Texler Segal Editors

THINKING OF GENDER IN A HOLISTIC SENSE: UNDERSTANDINGS OF GENDER IN SULAWESI, INDONESIA Sharyn Graham Davies ABSTRACT Based on eighteen-months of fieldwork in Sulawesi, Indonesia, this paper advances two arguments concerning gender. First, it contends that gender is a concept of great significance in Sulawesi. Unlike some observers who have undervalued the centrality of gender in the region by asserting that factors such as social status are more salient in daily life than gender, this paper argues that gender actually underscores other factors such as status considerations. The second argument the paper advances is that gender in Sulawesi is a holist concept resulting from various compositions of biology, subjectivity, sexuality, performativity, and ideology. A multitude of amalgamations are possible and so gendered identities transcend binary constructions. As such, Sulawesi acknowledges a variety of gendered identities. Using ethnographic data to examine how these various aspects contribute to an individual’s gender identity, this paper reveals the importance of gender in Sulawesi, and introduces a holistic way of thinking of gender.

Gender and the Local-Global Nexus: Theory, Research, and Action Advances in Gender Research, Volume 10, 1–24 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-2126/doi:10.1016/S1529-2126(06)10001-6

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CONTEXTUALIZING SULAWESI The archipelagic nation of Indonesia consists of 17,000 islands straddling the equator, half of which are inhabited. It is the world’s fourth most populous country with 240 million citizens, and with 85 percent adhering to Islam, it is the largest Muslim nation in the world. Indonesia has over 300 ethnic groups, speaking more than 500 languages and dialects. The orchidshaped island of Sulawesi is located in the center of the Indonesian archipelago, north of Bali and to the west of Kalimantan. South Sulawesi is home to the Bugis ethnic group who comprise over three million people. Bugis are renowned seafarers (Ammarell, 1999; Pelras, 1996), and have undertaken extensive migrations to various parts of Asia (Acciaioli, 1989; Anderson, 2003). While fishing provides a livelihood for many Bugis, farming and cultivation are also important daily activities. Most Bugis identify as Muslim and Sengkang, the area where I did my fieldwork, boasts a high percentage of people who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca. While the influence of Islam is strong, daily customs and practices continue to be inflected with more traditional ones. As a popular saying goes: Makassar people (the southern neighbors of Bugis) hold tight to religion; Bugis people hold tight to adat (traditional customs and practices) (cf. Graham, 2004c).

THE IMPORTANCE OF GENDER IN SULAWESI In order to appreciate the holist nature of gender, it is necessary to understand the importance of the concept of gender in Bugis society. Unfamiliar with the Bugis gender system, observers are wont to miss many of the ways in which gender is articulated. There is no indigenous term equivalent to ‘‘gender’’ – gender is used in academic discourse, and increasingly in the public arena, and jenis kelaminan is used to describe genitalia. Moreover, neither the Bugis nor Indonesian languages have a gender specific singular third person pronoun to differentiate women and men. For some, the sarong, that long strip of cloth wrapped around the body and worn by men and women, does not gender the body as do pants and skirts (Kennedy, 1993, p. 3). For others, the relative lack of body and facial hair, and the more uniform height of men and women blur gender distinctions. Furthermore, Bugis women are not marked by rituals such as foot-binding, scaring, tattooing, or full clitoridectomies, which serve to signal the transition to womanhood in some other societies (Atkinson, 1982, p. 257). Gender may not initially seem significant because women and men appear to enjoy

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relatively equal status (cf. Errington, 1990; Pelras, 1996; Reid, 1988). An early traveler to the region indeed noted this. The women appear in public without any scandal; they take active concern in all the business of life; they are consulted by the men on all public affairs, and frequently raised to the throne, and that too when the monarchy is elective. (Crawfurd, 1820, p. 74)

These factors do not serve, however, as evidence of what Geertz (1973), referring to Bali, calls a ‘‘unisex society’’ (pp. 417–418, fn.414). Rather, an emic understanding and examination of gender reveals that gender is a clearly highlighted concept in Bugis South Sulawesi; gender is just not articulated in ways that a person from elsewhere might easily recognize. As Errington (1990, p. 5) asserts: I am not arguing that the differences between men and women are, in fact, highly marked socially in island Southeast Asia; actually, I think they are not – if they are contrasted with differences in certain other parts of the world rather than taken on their own terms. But within the societies themselves, subtle differences may be important as gender markers but may go unnoticed by observers.

Observers might miss the subtleties of gender, and they might also see other criteria of difference – such as origin, ethnicity, class, age, generation, and status – as more significant than gender and in the archipelago (e.g. Millar, 1983). For instance, neither the Indonesian nor Bugis languages have separate words for brother and sister. Rather, what is linguistically differentiated is whether the sibling is older or younger. This differentiation, based on relative age rather than sex, has been used as evidence to suggest that gender is subordinate to age as an organizational principle. I maintain, however, that in order to see how these aspects of difference actually operate, an understanding of the gender issues which underlie them is essential. For example, status is of central importance in Bugis society and struggles for status acquisition are highly contested (Millar, 1989). Yet, the path an individual follows to achieve, or loose, status is governed by strict gender considerations. When the importance of gender becomes clear, it is possible to appreciate gender holism. One way to see the importance of gender is by analyzing issues of social location (cf. Davies, 2006). While acknowledging that in Bugis society the gender system is highly elaborated and formal, Millar (1983) argues that it is not a master organizational principle because the significance of gender is lost in the struggle for status: y gender relations in Bugis society are almost entirely subordinate to a cultural preoccupation with hierarchical social location. Social location is an attribute of each individual and has far less to do with gender than with individual characteristics distributed without reference to gender. (p. 477)

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While not wanting to underestimate the importance of social location in Bugis society, I suggest that rather than being subordinate to social location, gender concerns actually circumscribe appropriate means by which individuals can gain or lose social standing. Indeed, Millar (1983) herself comments, ‘‘the gender system is constructed, and patterns of male–female behavior function, in accord with the overarching concern of the Bugis to learn and maintain their social locations’’ (p. 482). This indicates the importance of gender, even if it still considers status as the overarching concern. Indeed, nowhere are notions of idealized masculinity and femininity clearer than in struggles for social location – it is, after all, by exemplifying these ideals that individuals can achieve increased social standing. When status contestation occurs, challenges are made among men, or among women. As Chabot (1996) notes, social mobility ‘‘demands of the men that they be in a constant relation of opposition to other men,’’ not to women (p. 179). Similarly, when women are in competition, be it over seating arrangements at weddings or the style of clothing outfits, it is with other women. In cases where individual standing is being challenged, it is carried out among women, or among men. Womanhood is clearly defined in Bugis society, and exemplifying femininity enables a woman to move up the social ladder. Local and state discourses, and Islamic doctrines, actively promote ideals of womanhood. A woman is considered the embodiment of her family’s honor (Chabot, 1996). As such, she must be discrete and reserved in everything she does. The national government promotes the idea that a woman’s greatest achievement, and indeed her natural role, is as wife and mother. It is through pursuing these functions that a girl becomes a woman, and hence a legitimate and worthy member of the Indonesian nation-state (Suryakusuma, 1996). Dove-tailing with local and national discourses are the teachings of Islam. Islamic models of womanhood shape appropriate behavior for women. Muslim women are morally required to marry. Once married, a woman can legitimately bear children, an achievement which accords her a level of status and respect (Manderson, 1980). A woman is female-bodied, heterosexual, married, a mother, and dressed modestly and appropriately (e.g. her sarong is tucked-in rather than rolled down like a man’s). A woman acts demurely, speaks politely, is refined and reserved, and identifies and is identified as, a woman. What being a man means is also clearly defined in South Sulawesi, and the model must be adhered to in order for social status to be awarded. Local discourses assert that men embody and exude qualities such as self-discipline, reason, authority, physical strength, aggression, and are in control of

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their passions (Millar, 1983, 1989; Peletz, 1995, 1996). Men must protect their family’s honor (Chabot, 1996). Making extended voyages and returning home wealthy and wise contribute to the status of a man (Acciaioli, 1989). State ideology, coupled with school curricula (Parker, 1997), declares that men must be husbands and fathers, although, unlike women, men are not defined solely by these attributes. Islam compliments these models of manhood, and defines men as breadwinners who support and protect their family. A man is male-bodied, heterosexual, married, and a father. A man is assertive and aggressive and controlled. From this analysis we can see how gender is of significance in everyday Bugis life. There are thus very strict models of gender identity and what being a woman and a man means is clearly defined in Bugis society. Status is a highly contested and important aspect of Bugis culture, but it is underpinned by considerations of gender. Individuals who are unable to conform to these models are often located in a separate conceptual category. There is, then, a high degree of gender variance precisely because not everyone fits the normative models. In South Sulawesi, there are five gendered identities: makkunrai (woman), oroane´ (man), bissu (androgynous priests), calabai’ (transgendered males), and calalai’ (transgendered females) (cf. Graham, 2004a). It is gender holism which both forces multiple gender categories (e.g. if a female does not conform to the norms of womanhood she becomes other than a woman) and the multiplicity of genders which forces gender holism; a chicken and egg scenario. So what then is gender holism?

GENDER HOLISM Gender in Sulawesi can be thought of as a holistic concept made up of a variety of factors. Such an idea was first articulated to me by a friend named Eka, a calabai’ in hir late twenties.1 I published the following quote from Eka in an earlier article (Graham, 2004b) and reproduce it here as it is particularly illustrative of the variety of factors that constitute gender and the importance of viewing these factors in context. When I asked Eka what s/he sees as the most important factor in hir identifying as calabai’, s/he responded: It’s not like there’s just one thing, it’s like there are many things and they’re all important. You see if you pull this bit out and that bit out what are you left with? Just a bunch of pieces that really make no sense. It’s like one of those puzzles that don’t mean anything until you put all the pieces together. Then you can see what it is. When there are just scattered pieces lying around, what do they mean? Once you put it all together you can see what it is and then you can ask questions: Who put it together? Who made the pieces? But there is no point asking these questions until you see it all put together.

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Eka’s response gave me insight into how many Bugis conceptualize the gendered self; gender is a multi-faceted concept comprised of various intersecting factors. Taking onboard Eka’s advice, while it is possible to examine key constituents of gender, focus must remain on the fact that these constituents interact with numerous other elements in the development of gendered identities. The remainder of this article builds on an earlier paper (Graham, 2004b) and dissects these various constituents, including the significance of the body in forming a gendered identity, subjectivity and its relationship to the process of gendering, the role of performance in gender construction, and the relationship between sexuality and gender. Embodied Gender As Turner (1984, p. 1) notes, there is an obvious and prominent fact about human beings: they have bodies and they are bodies. Yet while all humans have bodies, the meanings attached to them, and the way they are integrated into the gender system, differ according to the society. In some societies, such as the Hua of Papua New Guinea, gender is determined by what bodies do. For instance, gender is distinguished through possession of menstrual blood, vaginal secretions, parturitional fluids, or semen. Children, premenopausal women, postmenopausal women who have had two or fewer children, and old men, are said to be figapa (an uninitiated person who is said to be ‘‘like a woman’’), whereas postmenopausal women who have borne three or more children are believed to have been defeminized and belong to the category kakora (like a man). Here gender is determined through bodily emissions and experiences. Moreover, gender is mutable for any one individual woman or man as she or he gets older and, for instance, has children (Meigs, 1990, pp. 99–112). In Melanesia, Herdt (1984) argues that masculine gender identity is reached through ritualized homosexuality whereby men inseminate boys so they can obtain this fluid which initiates manhood. Gender is thus constituted through the flow of substances. Hoskins (1990) argues that for the Kodi of West Sumba, Indonesia, gender is determined by modalities of movement: female is stable, unmoving; male is active, mobile. Moreover, individuals are also believed to contain female and male souls. In South Sulawesi, the body is also of great significance in respect to the formation of a gendered self. The biological sex of a baby is pronounced at birth, a factor verified by genitalia. Genitalia indicate the role an individual will later play in reproduction and it establishes future occupations and social limitations. For example, women are necessarily female and as such

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they are expected to give birth. This physiological fact means that a baby boy can never become a woman because to be a woman, one must necessarily be female. Similarly in order to become a man, one must necessarily be male. We see here, then, that the significance of the body in gender formation undermines the argument that it is only when we look at the experience of transgendered individuals that the importance of differentiating biological sex from cultural gender becomes evident (cf. Bolin, 1994; Shapiro, 1991; Stone, 1991; Wieringa & Blackwood, 1999, p. 17). Eri is in many ways exactly like a man. S/he dresses like a man, wears her hair short, establishes intimate relationships with feminine women, and is a DJ in the capital city of South Sulawesi – being a DJ is a particularly masculine job. Yet, Eri was born female. So when Eri goes to the mosque, even though most of society would see hir as a man, s/he must pray as a woman because s/he is biologically female. Similarly, Westphal-Hellbush (1997, p. 239) notes that mustergil (similar to calalai’) in Iraq have to pray as women or else their prayers will be of no consequence. One of Eri’s peers, Rani, reveals that although s/he too is calalai’ and therefore in many ways just like a man, s/he must pray as a woman because if s/he does not, God will not recognize hir and not hear hir prayers. Yulia, a calabai’ who arranges weddings in the town of Sengkang, was born male. S/he has contemplated medical procedures to feminize hir body. However, Yulia concedes that hir biological sex is enduring: ‘‘But you know, no matter how much silicon I get pumped into me, I will always be betrayed by this [points to hir Adam’s apple]. We [calabai’] can get breast implants, we can get our penis cut off and a hole made, but we can never get rid of this y because if we did we wouldn’t be able to talk.’’ Such accounts reveal that regardless of the extent to which an individual adopts characteristics of a particular gender, biology is never forgotten in respect to identity. As Whitehead (1981) notes for North America, ‘‘Even in the case of the berdache [two-spirit people] y the sheer fact of anatomic masculinity was never culturally ‘forgotten,’ however much it may have been counterbalanced by other principles’’ (pp. 86–87). I did not hear, however, Yulia, or any other calabai’, speak of being trapped in the wrong body. This differs from Murray’s (1999, p. 149) findings: I want to emphasize here that behavior needs to be conceptually separated from identity, as both are contextually specific and constrained by opportunity. It is common for young women socialized into a rigid heterosexual regime, whether in Asia or the West, to experience their sexual feelings in terms of gender confusion: ‘if I am attracted to women then I must be a man trapped in a woman’s body. (cf. Bolin, 1994; Stone, 1991)

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More in line with conceptions of gender in Sulawesi, Don Kulick (1998), who researched travesti (a subjectivity similar to calabai’) in Brazil, found, ‘‘Travesti consider that males are males and females are females because of the genitals they possess. God made a person male or female y what He did can never be undone – one can never change the sex with which one was born’’ (p. 193). While travesti believe this, Kulick (1998) notes that they also believe that, ‘‘even though God made a person irreversibly male or female by installing a particular set of genitalia, the different morphology of those genitalia allows for different gendered possibilities to be explored and occupied’’ (p. 193). In a similar way, calabai’ acknowledge that they have a male body and that God intended them to have a male body. It is, in effect, impossible therefore to be trapped in the wrong body. This may explain in part how some calabai’ can be very devout Muslims and make the pilgrimage to Mecca – indeed, I heard some people, including calabai’, wonder how calabai’ could be committing a sin when this is how God made them, with a male body and a calabai’ constitution. It should be noted, though, that when calabai’ make the pilgrimage to Mecca, they must go dressed as men. Moreover, after they become a Haji, a sexual relationship with a man is considered especially immoral. In practice, however, calabai’ Haji maintain relationships with men, often with no overt negative sanctions applied to them – see Peletz’s (1995, 1996) analysis of the differences between official and practical responses. While at times performativity theory is helpful in elucidating the concept of gender in South Sulawesi (as we will see shortly), at other times it is not particularly applicable. For instance, performativity theory does not allow for recognition of the importance of the body in notions of gender. While Butler recognizes that there must be ‘‘some kind of necessity’’ that accompanies bodily functions (e.g. feelings of pleasure), bodies only become visible within gendered regulatory schemas. It is these schemas that produce the ‘‘domain of intelligible bodies’’ (Butler, 1993, p. xi). Butler (1993) argues that we need these schemas because the body does not make sense on its own: ‘‘to claim that sex is already gendered, already constructed, is not yet to explain in which way the ‘materiality’ of sex is forcibly produced’’ (p. xi). However, because she disputes the physical basis of the ‘‘materiality of sex,’’ ‘‘Butler cannot escape the impression that she sees a person’s gender identity as almost an artificial and dispensable phenomenon’’ (Wieringa & Blackwood, 1999, p. 14). Although fundamental, the body on its own does not form a gendered subjectivity in South Sulawesi, partly because of the specific conception of the body. Male and female are recognized as the two main bodily forms, but

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they are not conceived of as polar extremes. The theory of sexual dimorphism is too simplistic and, as Grosz (1991, pp. 34–36) suggests, bodies can be seen on a continuum, displaying various amalgamations of male and female physical qualities. Other scholars have also suggested a multiple sex paradigm. For instance, Martin and Voorhies (1975, p. 86) propose that, ‘‘physical sex differences need not necessarily be perceived as bipolar.’’ A respected Bugis man, Pak Hidya, affirms this: ‘‘Real women are here [he drew a line and pointed to one end] and real men are here [he pointed to the other end]. And then you have calalai’, calabai’ and bissu spread out along this line. Because they aren’t at the ends [of the continuum], they have different characteristics (sifat).’’ Following this conceptualization, although Yulia and Pak Hidya are both male they are considered to occupy different positions on the gender continuum. Instead of proposing a gender continuum, some Bugis speak of the physical body as being constituted through various amalgamations of male and female. Pak Rudin, a local Islamic leader, considers that, ‘‘calalai’ have an x-factor (faktor-x). It’s a physiological (fisiologi) thing. While their sex (kelamin) is female, inside they are not like other women. They are different. They have some male aspects.’’ A Bugis man of noble descent, Puang Nasah, claims, ‘‘Calabai’ are not men (bukan laki-laki) but their sex organ (kelamin) is male y they have a different genetic make-up. I don’t know what men are, maybe XY [chromosomes]? Well, if so, calabai’ are XXY. But then some may be more woman than man, and then they would be XYY.’’ This understanding of the body allows for the possibility of various compositions. It also promotes awareness of androgyny. Bissu (transgendered priests) are envisaged as the perfect embodiment of female and male attributes; this is how they get their potency. Indeed, there is a range of literature concerning androgyny in Asia, specifically attesting to its power and potency (Andaya, 2000; Anderson, 1972, p. 14; Errington, 1989, p. 12, 1990; Graham, 1987; Hoskins, 1990; Nanda, 1990, pp. 20–32; Peletz, 1996, p. 4; Scharer, 1963, pp. 18–23). One well-known tale in South Sulawesi involves the sacred plough, which bissu guard. The sacred plough is used to sow the first crop of every season and the only one who can lower it from its resting place is someone of the opposite sex to the plough. Not knowing the sex of the plough, bissu have thus been entrusted with this role because they are a mix of both male and female; if the plough is male, then the bissu can be female, or vice versa (cf. Chabot, 1996, p. 191). This discourse of complementarity is fundamental to understanding Bugis notions of the body. Because the body is believed to be constituted by

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complementary elements, all individual compositions differ. So whereas Minangkabau society acknowledges only two sexes, which result in two genders (Blackwood, 1999), Bugis society acknowledges varying degrees of femaleness and maleness. This acknowledgment conditions notions of gender. For instance, the idea of being trapped in the wrong body is not useful in explaining Bugis gender variance. A female who exhibits signs of masculinity is not thought of, or thinks of hirself, as a man trapped in the wrong body. Rather, hir particular gender configuration means that s/he is a masculine female, a calalai’. In this discussion of gender and bodies in South Sulawesi, there are two key points. First, while we need to ‘‘suspend y all assumptions that gender is grounded in biological sex’’ (Kulick, 1998, p. 11) (i.e. a female necessarily becomes a woman), we need to acknowledge that the body is a fundamental factor in Bugis gender formation (i.e. a male will never become a woman). Notions attached to the body thus need to be disentangled and analyzed when examining Bugis gender identity. As Paul (1993) asserts, we need to move away from simplistic biological models which conflate biological, psychological, and social categories of sex, gender, and sexual behavior – this differs from Nanda’s (1994) findings in India where she concludes, ‘‘The term hijra also collapses the two different analytical categories of sex and gender; the Western social scientific distinction between these two terms is not part of Indian discourse’’ (p. 381). Second, while two primary forms of the body are acknowledged, male and female, physical sexes are not necessarily thought of as opposites in South Sulawesi. Rather, the body is considered to be a unique configuration of femaleness and maleness. Particular understandings of the body thus contribute to gender formation, and this allows insight into Bugis gender ideology. Subjectively Gendered Notions of subjectivity and spirituality combine with perceptions of the body in Bugis ideas of gender formation. Some literature does emphasize this point (e.g. Nanda, 1990, p. 99), but some scholars of gender (e.g. Butler, 1990, 1993) do not seem to take such notions under consideration. Islam forms a fundamental aspect of Bugis social and cultural life (Pelras, 1996, p. 4). It is not surprising, therefore, that many people identify fate (kodrat), destiny (nasib), and God’s will as key contributors to gender formation. A devout Muslim, Leena, notes, ‘‘Well I’m calalai’ because of God’s plan [which God] has for all of us, and that plan is for me to be calalai’. It’s my kodrat and you have to follow it.’’ Andi Tenri is a middle-aged calabai’

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and s/he reveals, ‘‘It’s part of God’s plan, you know, for me to be calabai’. It’s my kodrat. At one point or another, your kodrat must appear (i.e. the real you must come out).’’ Another calabai’ named Andu asserts, ‘‘This is my destiny (nasib) given to me by God.’’ To this statement Andu’s mother replied, ‘‘We never wished for a calabai’ child, but what can you do? It’s God’s will.’’ Such thoughts are not uncommonly expressed. I came to be calabai’ from birth. Also, when I got a bit older, I started playing with girls’ toys. It’s a fate (kodrat) given by God. I didn’t really want this life, well, I would never have chosen it, but it’s God’s will. I’m not one of those fake calabai’ you often see, that just decide to become calabai’ at a later stage in life. I am asli (the real thing). At first my parents were very angry, but after a while, when I started to earn a good income and be productive, well, they couldn’t be mad any longer. Besides, how can you change your kodrat? (Andi Enni)

In contrast, some people believe that fate can be challenged. A local religious leader (imam), Haji Mulyadi, reveals, ‘‘According to calabai’ they believe it’s their kodrat, but they say that because it’s their hobi (hobby). And because it’s their hobi, they can change it. Here is the proof y some calabai’ have kids! So you see their inner nature can change (sifat bisa berubah). Certainly their dominant nature is woman, but there is a way out. For instance, they can change their genitals (berubah kelaminannya).’’ Many informants also referred to having a particular spirit (jiwa) or soul (roh) which provoked their gender development. Cappa’ works in the city of Makassar as a DJ and s/he responded to my question of why s/he became calalai’ in this way: ‘‘I guess it’s this jiwa I have. I don’t really know (entalah), it’s just this jiwa.’’ For 23-year-old Tilly, ‘‘It’s just natural, it’s just me. Jiwa is also very important; you must have the jiwa calabai’.’’ Ance’, a calalai’, made reference to roh, revealing, ‘‘I always wanted to be like my brothers because I have this roh.’’ Haji Mappaganti, who is devoutly religious and made the pilgrimage to Mecca not too long ago, declares: I’ve known from when I was really little that I would be calabai’. I always wanted to wear women’s clothes and to play girls’ games and do everything like a girl. My behavior made my parents very angry, though. They would hit me and try to get me to be more manly. It didn’t work. I am like I am because I have this roh, and it can’t be changed.

What is emphasized in the above narratives is a force beyond the individual’s control, which has the power to direct their gender identity. For others, the driving factor is not so easily articulated. I don’t know how I know. I just have to be like this. I have no choice; I am forced (terpaksa). Even though my parents don’t, well they would rather, at least at first, that I was like a man, it’s just not me. I just have to be who I am, to be like this [calabai’], you know? (Sakir).

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Some informants express their assumption of a gender identity in terms of faktor x, which signifies something unknown. Maman states, ‘‘I have eight sisters. I was treated like a son since I was born. For me, becoming calalai’ was because of my parents and faktor x.’’ For Ellie, a calabai’ in hir late twenties, gender identity resulted from a combination of family influence and faktor x. I have six older brothers and I was chosen to be the daughter because my mother desperately wanted a girl. She used to dress me up in dresses, you know. I think I’m calabai’ half because of this upbringing, and half because of faktor x. I don’t really understand it though. I don’t think that I would be like this [calabai’] if my family, especially my mother, didn’t always treat me like a girl, you know, dress me like a girl, take me to the market, give me girls’ toys, tell me to play with the girls. But then if I didn’t have this faktor x, then my parents wouldn’t have made me calabai’. And even if I had this faktor x, but my parents treated me like a boy and expected me to be like a boy, then I probably wouldn’t be calabai’ either. So I guess it must be half and half, both factors have to be there.

Faktor x is used here as a way of articulating an anomalous internal dynamic which impacts on an individual’s gender development. Ellie and the others introduced above do not conform to hegemonic ideals prescribed to their body type. As such, they find ways to justify their appropriation of an alternative gender identity. Subjectivity and concepts such as fate and destiny are important in consolidating this identity. In instances where a particular influence cannot be expressed, the term faktor x is employed. Subjectivity and spirituality are thus used to reinforce and express gender identity. Performing Gender Writing of Gerai in Kalimantan, Christine Helliwell (2001) argues, ‘‘men and women are not understood as fundamentally different types of person: there is no sense of a dichotomized ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity.’ ’’ Rather, men and women are seen as having the same kinds of capacities and proclivities, but in differing degrees. For instance, men may be seen as braver and more knowledgeable about local law (adat), while women are seen as more persistent and more enduring. So while distinctions are made between women and men, the basis on which individuals are gendered is not derived from the character of their body (especially their genitalia). Rather, as Helliwell notes, gender ‘‘is understood as constituted in the differential capacity to perform certain kinds of work, a capacity assigned long before one’s bodily being takes shape’’ (Helliwell, 2001). For Gerai, then, gender is based on roles and occupations.

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For Bugis, too, roles and occupations contribute to gender identity. To be calalai’ is not merely a matter of deciding that one is calalai’. There are certain prescriptions which must be adhered to. Rani works as a blacksmith, a form of work which is considered extremely masculine and not suitable for women. Rani has also assumed the role of husband and father, thus reinforcing the notion that although s/he is female-bodied, s/he is not a woman. Performing these roles helps confirm hir identity as calalai’. In addition to roles and occupations, gender in South Sulawesi is determined in part according to how an individual acts. For instance, Idi, a 30-year-old man, reveals, ‘‘My friend is calabai’ and s/he was forced to marry a woman, but s/he is still calabai’ because of how s/he acts.’’ Moreover, Haji Mulyadi, states: Calabai’ are born with signs (tanda-tanda) of being calabai’. Look at Haji Bacco’, when s/he was at school s/he was already showing signs of being calabai’. They like to play with girls. They don’t like playing with boys. So their nature (sifat) has already developed. I guess then it’s a biological (biologis) thing, but also society has its influence.

Some narratives also include reference to individuals mixing stereotypical men’s and women’s behaviors. For instance, Jero’, a man of about thirty, notes: There are lots of different types of calabai’, and not only that, they have many different moods. For instance, a calabai’ can be walking down the street all, you know, girlish and giggly, but then if s/he gets hassled s/he will raise hir fists and get ready to fight y and if they need to fight to stand up for themselves then they will. So calabai’ have a feminine and a masculine side. Indeed, their name is waria, right, woman along with man (memang namanya waria toh, wanita sama pria).

Waria is an amalgam of two Indonesian words, wanita (woman) and pria (man), and it refers to a nationally recognized subjectivity similar to calabai’ (cf. Boellstorff, 2000, 2004). Jero’ points out here that calabai’ and waria are a mix of feminine and masculine attributes. Similarly, Puang Sulai, a highranking noble man states: Calabai’ are amazing (hebat) hey! Like Fitri [a local school teacher], s/he goes to school wearing trousers and is really strict with all the kids; yells at them and is pretty mean. Then s/he comes home, takes off hir trousers, puts on a skirt and make-up and doesn’t yell any more!

Dress and accessories also contribute to gender identity. For Ance’, an aesthetic reason for being calalai’ is given: ‘‘You know the real decider for me? It was clothes. I hate women’s clothing, they are so hot and tight and uncomfortable. I never wear baju bodo (traditional blouse), kebaya (traditional Malay dress), or even duster (a loose house-dress made from cotton).

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Yuck!’’ A bissu named Mariani signals hir identity by using male and female symbols in hir style of dressing. When on special occasions Mariani wears the potent (sakti) bissu clothing, s/he adorns it with flowers (a feminine symbol) and a kris (small knife, a masculine symbol). Furthermore, while to Western senses Santi’s style of dress (mini-skirt, tight T-shirt, heavy makeup) may reflect (hyper)femininity, in South Sulawesi such apparel is rarely worn by women. By dressing in this way, Santi reinforces hir identity as calabai’. In developing a gender identity, the roles one carries out, the behaviors one exhibits, the occupation one pursues, and the way in which one dresses, are all important contributing factors and must be acknowledged when thinking of gender in South Sulawesi. It is here that the assertions of performativity theorists, such as Judith Butler, is helpful. Drawing on the work of linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin (1955), Butler (1990, 1993) writes of the process of subject formation in terms of performativity, where enacting identities brings those identities into being, rather than expressing a predetermined being (cf. Kondo, 1997, p. 4). The notion of performativity allows us to examine dominant ideologies and the ways individuals emulate, modify, and resist these prescriptions in daily life. Interwoven into such discourses are ideas of acting out a particular role. For Butler, it is precisely the multiple factors, culturally and historically brought together and labeled (e.g. man, woman, calalai’, calabai’, bissu), that incite gender identities through the performative force of their repetition. According to Butler, there are no essential ‘‘masculine’’ or ‘‘feminine’’ characteristics, only phenomena (perhaps from other domains of life, such as tradition) that come to be labeled in gendered terms. An analysis of Bugis gender can thus confirm some aspects of Butler’s theories. For instance, many parts of Bugis gender can be deconstructed into ultimately ‘‘non-gender’’ factors. There are, however, dangers associated with placing too much emphasis on the visible performative aspects of gender vis-a`-vis other factors. While the wearing of certain clothes or behaving in a particular manner contribute to gender identity, these alone do not constitute a gendered identity in South Sulawesi. Moreover, visible affirmations of a particular gender do not tell the whole story. While hegemonic ideology presents ideal models for men and women, the fact that an individual conforms to this model does not mean they are passively reproducing it. Conversely, if calalai’ appear to emulate men in many respects (e.g. in dress and behavior), it does not follow that they are merely copying men; the fact that calalai’ are female is never forgotten and calalai’ use this to their advantage, and indeed, in many ways, calalai’ actively subvert ideal masculinity (cf. Graham, 2001).

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As such, Butler’s work on gender performativity is helpful only to a point when analyzing Bugis gender. Butler (1990) underplays the agency of her subjects: ‘‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results’’ (p. 25). This line of thinking undermines any challenge individuals make to dominant gender discourse. Moreover, performativity theory does not take into account an individual’s conscious gender development because it argues that individuals are merely copying an already written script. Employing this repertoire of performativity is dangerous, therefore, because individuals may be portrayed as inauthentic, as copying heterosexual norms and heterosexuality – as in the case of butch-femme subjectivities, (cf. Murray, 1999) – or as merely role playing. As Eves (2001) argues, in this context the language of performativity and play is harmful because it invites further dismissal and ridicule of alternative identities by painting them as mere reproductions. Performativity is useful in addressing some aspects of gender identity in South Sulawesi – for instance, it shows how dominant theories shape gender and it helps explain the way certain roles, occupations, behaviors, and dress contribute to Bugis gender identity. It does not acknowledge, however, the importance of the body in Bugis understandings of gender formation, or the central role factors such as religion, fate and destiny play. Performativity theory does not, therefore, provide for a comprehensive theoretical framework for the analysis of gender in South Sulawesi. Sexing Gender Another important factor in the formation of Bugis gender identity is sexuality and the sexual act. Sexuality may justify forms of behavior, or conversely, types of behavior may convince someone of their sexuality – the use of the term sexuality here refers to erotic desire, with whom individuals have sex, and the roles they may play in sexual encounters. As such, sexuality is a central component in gender formation in South Sulawesi (cf. Graham, 2004c; Oetomo, 1996). Until recently, around the 1980s, sexuality was largely dismissed by theorists as an important factor in the study of identity – researchers who paid attention to sexuality were often viewed with wariness. According to Vance (1991), the study of sexuality was not seen as a ‘‘legitimate area of study,’’ an attitude that cast doubt ‘‘not only on the research but on the motives and the character of the researcher’’ (p. 875). For instance, Evans-Pritchard published his article on ‘‘sexual inversion among the Azande,’’ which

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observed female same-sex relations, 40 years after his fieldwork (Blackwood & Wieringa, 1999, p. 40). Similarly, Van Lier, who had taken an interest in female same-sex relations in Surinam, stopped his interviews with women after he discovered that this topic was frowned upon by academics. His work would not be published for another 40 years (Blackwood & Wieringa, 1999, p. 40). More recently, Saskia Wieringa published short stories on her encounters with lesbians in Jakarta and Lima under a pseudonym partly ‘‘because of the lesbophobia in my institute and my work at large’’ (Wieringa, 1999, p. 209). Jeffery Weeks (1999) also recounts, ‘‘I was once warned by a well-meaning head of department that my academic career would go nowhere if I continued to write about sex [but then the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic made it] socially necessary to research and write about sexuality in a serious manner’’ (p. 11). Evident in the burgeoning array of literature on sexuality is how different societies view the relationship between gender and sexuality (Caplan, 1987). For instance, Unni Wikan (1977), who studied gender in Oman, concludes, ‘‘It is the sexual act, not the sexual organ, which is fundamentally constitutive of gender. A man who acts as a woman sexually, is a woman, socially’’ (p. 309). Similar conclusions are reached by Don Kulick (1997, 1998) who argues that in Brazil it is sexuality, or, more specifically, the sexual act, which determines one’s gender identity. Kulick is thus able to divide Brazilian society into men and not-men according to whether they engage in active/penetrative sex (which men do), or passive/receiving sex (which notmen do, i.e. travesti and women). This contrasts with Aarmo’s (1999) work on Zimbabwe and Elliston’s (1999) work on Tahiti where they assert that the construction of gender is not tied to sexed-body assignment, but that gender produces sexuality. Elliston (1999) argues, ‘‘Gender, then, is not contingent on or derived from sexual practices; rather, gender produces sexuality, or, more accurately, Polynesians conceptualize gender difference as productive of sexuality’’ (p. 238). In Bugis society, gender and sexuality are interwoven. Erotic desire and the roles an individual plays in sexual acts, are contributors to gender identity. Often sexual awakening can induce the development of an individual’s gender identity, as expressed below by two calabai’ in their thirties. When I kissed my girlfriend it felt like kissing a sister. It was just plain. I always admired men more, you know, but just to look at. I was arranged to be married but I really didn’t want to. I kissed a guy, you know, to see what it felt like. Enak (Delicious)! And then I knew that I wanted to be with men; to be like a wife (Yanti). I feel like I’ve always known that I was calabai’, but for a long time it was a feeling I couldn’t explain. I knew definitely in 1983 [at the age of twenty] because this was when my

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parents arranged my marriage to my first cousin, a girl from Bone´. But before the marriage went ahead, a number of boys came up to me and said I should try it with them to make sure. They said ‘try me first’. I said o.k. I was a little scared though, but as it happened I really liked it. It was good! So then I knew that I couldn’t marry this girl?(Yulia).

For Yanti and Yulia, sexual satisfaction guided their identification as calabai’. Calalai’, too, commonly reveal sexuality as a contributing factor in their gender formation. You know, the most important factor was influence from a linas [a feminine woman who is attracted to calalai’]. You see, I was chosen and seduced by a linas over a long time, and this is what made me become ill (sakit). Before, I wasn’t ill, I used to just act like a man (dulu saya tidak sakit, cuma gaya seperti lelaki). Then there was a linas who always approached me and wanted to be partners (pacaran). At first, when we became friends, I didn’t think about sex. The linas kept paying me lots of attention, but I was still scared because I still had feelings like a woman. I was still 16 then. But I was from a broken home and I really enjoyed all the attention I was getting. So finally I too became ill (saya ikut sakit) and became a hunter (calalai’) (Eri).

Eri’s eventual attraction to, and relationship with a linas may be seen as a continuation of hir masculine behavior, which was ‘‘like a man.’’ However, s/he still had feelings like a woman and so it was not necessarily an inevitable progression. Without the attention from a linas, Eri may not have developed a calalai’ identity. Indeed, as Murray (1997, p. 256) writes, ‘‘Although gender and sexuality may be distinguished analytically, they are far from being independent from each other. Indeed, outside the elite realm of academic gender discoursing, sexuality and gender generally are expected to coincide’’ (cf. Jackson, 1997, p. 168, 2000, p. 417; Murray, 1994, p. 60, 1995). Interesting comparisons can be made with Blackwood (1999, p. 186) who, while in West Sumatra, found herself slotted into a gender identity rather than the sexual identity she thought she occupied. Wieringa (1999) similarly found in Jakarta that her desire for women was not interpreted merely as erotic preference, but underscored, in the eyes of people around her, her entire gender identity. The connection between gender and sexuality is strong. Indeed the Mayor of Sengkang, the town where I lived, once said at a public speech, ‘‘Indeed you would not be waria (calabai’) if you did not like men’’ (‘‘Memang bukan waria kalau tidak suka sama pria’’). He signaled here that without a desire for men, calabai’ would not be calabai’. A calabai’ who likes women may be considered a fake calabai’: Some calabai’ like women, but they’re not real calabai’. Real calabai’ never like women. I am an authentic calabai’ (asli calabai’) because I’ve never liked women (Haji Mappaganti, devoutly religious calabai’).

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The roles an individual plays in sexual acts is an important contributor to gender identity. Wikan (1977, p. 309) writes, in Oman ‘‘the man who enters into a homosexual relationship in the active role, in no way endangers his male identity, whereas the passive, receiving homosexual partner cannot possibly be conceptualized as a man.’’ Kulick (1997, p. 574) asserts that it is the males who are anally penetrated who are usually ‘‘classified and named, not the males who penetrate them (who are often simply called ‘men’)’’ (cf. Johnson, 1997, p. 91). In Bugis society too, the role an individual plays in sexual encounters is a consideration in one’s gender identity, although certainly not to the same extent that it is in Oman and Brazil. Dilah, a calalai’, declares, ‘‘We don’t want to be penetrated. It’s like our role to penetrate our partners. You know y well, that’s how it works.’’ Women are sexually penetrated, according to Dilah, and one way s/he differentiates hirself from women is by being the one who penetrates, not the penetrated. Eka also notes, ‘‘Calabai’ are entered (dimasuk). Men are never entered. No!’’ Yulia, a calabai’, affirms this: ‘‘No, [my male partner] doesn’t want it like that [to be penetrated]. He just wants to enter me.’’ These narratives show that a clear link is made between gender identity and sexual behavior (cf. Johnson, 1997, pp. 91–93). It does not necessarily follow, however, that sexual roles determine gender, or, as Wikan (1997) found in Oman, ‘‘the receiving homosexual partner cannot possibly be conceptualized as a man’’ (p. 309). For instance, in Makassar, the capital city of South Sulawesi, men are increasingly requesting to be penetrated by calabai’ (cf. Kulick, 1997). As one informant, Takrim, a 30-year-old man, reveals: ‘‘Something very interesting is happening. Increasingly, men do not want to fuck (bo’ol) calabai’ or be sucked by calabai’, but to be fucked (dibo’ol) by calabai’ or to suck calabai’ until the calabai’ come (keluar) in their mouth.’’ In such cases, being sexually penetrated does not mean that a male can no longer be conceptualized as a man. Possibly one of the reasons that this does not endanger a man’s masculinity is that sexuality alone does not determine gender in South Sulawesi. Such examples reinforce the idea that gender identity is conditioned by sexuality, although it is not necessarily determined by sexuality (cf. Peletz, 1996, p. 123). In some respects, Western theory does not seem to prepare one particularly well for analyzing the interrelations of sexuality and gender. For instance, Peter Jackson (2000) argues, ‘‘The theoretical split between gender and sexuality, which is now institutionalized in the disciplinary divide between feminism/women’s studies and gay-queer studies, means that Western analysts are poorly equipped to understand gender/sex transformations

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at the global level’’ (p. 418). Pringle (1992) further articulates this division between discourses arguing, ‘‘The categories of sexuality and gender have a schizoid relationship. For much of the time they ignore each other completely, with the result that there is a large literature which treats sexuality as if gender barely exists and another literature on gender that ignores or marginalizes sexuality. Despite this, assumptions are constantly made about their connectedness’’ (pp. 76–77). We must, therefore, reconceive gender and sexuality in their inseparable relatedness rather than in their specific distinctiveness (cf. Jackson, 2000, pp. 418–420). Indeed, although rarely cited, Judith Butler is opposed to the idea that sexuality can be radically separated from the analysis of gender (cf. Osborne & Segal, 1994, p. 32). In this section, then, I have tried to avoid the assumptions of a Western theoretical split to show how, in Bugis society, sexuality impacts in various ways on an individual’s gender identity; often underpinning a gender identity, sometimes confirming a suspected gender identity.

CONCLUSION This paper has explored ways in which the salience of gender is revealed in daily Bugis life. Ideals of femininity and masculinity are clearly defined and reinforced through local and state ideology and Islamic discourse. It is through adhering to gender norms that individuals retain and improve their social location. While status is an overarching concern in Bugis society, it is underpinned by gender considerations. The importance of gender and the strictness of gender codes mean that if a person does not adhere to normative prescriptions, they may become seen as other than a woman, or as other than a man. The significance of gender, combined with the concept of gender holism, enables Bugis society to acknowledge five gendered categories. This paper also examined emic conceptions of gender and considered how individuals become gendered beings. Focusing on the relationship between bodies and gender it was seen that the body is an essential constituent of gender formation, although it does not solely define an individual’s gender identity. The paper also revealed that individual embodiment is made up of varying amounts of femaleness and maleness. The way in which subjectivity contributes to gender identity was discussed, affirming that value be given to personal narratives in accounting for the formation of gender identity. An examination of how gender is impacted by the roles individuals play, occupations they pursue, behaviors they enact, and self-presentation was also

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undertaken. Evidence was given of how exhibiting certain behaviors can mean that a male (or female) is not considered a man (or a woman). The paper also discussed discourses of sexuality, showing how erotic desire and the roles individuals play in sexual encounters contribute to gender identity. In thinking about gender in Bugis South Sulawesi, the central importance of gender and the variety of components that form gender identities need to be acknowledged and appreciated. Grasping these two points fosters a better understanding of how gender operates in the region. Emic understandings of gender in Sulawesi thus highlight the importance of gender and the multiplicity of gender identities, enriching our collective understanding of the vitality and complexity of gender.

NOTES 1. Calabai’ is an indigenous word used to describe male-born individuals who are in many ways more like women in their dress and behavior than like men (cf. Graham, 2004a). Calalai’ are female-born individuals who are like men in their dress and behavior (cf. Graham, 2001). Bissu are androgynous priests who arguably constitute a fifth gender in South Sulawesi (cf. Andaya, 2000; Graham, 2004a). Neither the Bugis nor Indonesian languages discriminate between gender, using instead the gender non-specific pronouns i/na and dia respectively. In this paper, I use hir and s/he to evoke a subjectivity outside the binary she/he, her/his. Hir and s/he also suggest an identity not reliant on moving from one normative gender to the other (cf. Blackwood, 1999; Wilchins, 1997). All informants’ names contained in this paper are pseudonyms. All conversations were conducted in Indonesian, with some segments in Bugis.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Tom Davies, Greg Acciaioli, Lyn Parker, and most especially the people I lived with in Sulawesi between 1999–2001, for helping me develop the ideas contained in this paper. I would also like to acknowledge the support I have received from the Auckland University of Technology, the University of Western Australia, the Australian National University, Hassanudin University, and a Huygen’s scholarship to conduct research at Leiden University and the KITLV in the Netherlands. Some of the data contained in this paper has previously been published (Graham, 2001, 2004b; Davies, 2006) and I thank the editors for granting permission to use this material.

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VARIATIONS IN MASCULINITY FROM A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE$ Edwin S. Segal ABSTRACT Most well-known conceptualizations of sex, gender and sexuality privilege one version or another of a Western European or North American bi-polar paradigm. However, such a focus ignores the ethnographic evidence for a larger range of sex–gender–sexuality constructs. This paper outlines parameters for known variations in cultural constructs of sex–gender– sexuality systems, and raises questions about contemporary trends in understanding sex, gender and sexuality. As a first step, and because the data are more plentiful, I focus on variations in cultural constructions of sex, gender and sexuality relevant to physiological males, leaving a thorough exploration of constructions relevant to physiological females for another paper. The contemporary spread of Western cultural hegemony, as well as some opposition to that model, has categorized many indigenous, multi-polar sex–gender–sexuality systems as either in need of modernization or simply not quite civilized. The result is a loss, not only of knowledge $

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Primavera 2002 conference, Texas A&M International University, Laredo, Texas, March 21–23, 2002 and the 15th World Congress of Sociology, Brisbane, Australia, July 7–13, 2002.

Gender and the Local-Global Nexus: Theory, Research, and Action Advances in Gender Research, Volume 10, 25–43 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-2126/doi:10.1016/S1529-2126(06)10002-8

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about human plasticity in this area, but also a loss of cultural flexibility in organizing and dealing with human biocultural variation. I am concerned here with two issues, both of which revolve around bipolar sex–gender–sexuality paradigms. First, is the spread of a generalized western hegemony, not only in areas of economics and politics, but also in other cultural domains. Second is the gradual (and sometimes not so gradual) shift, in some cultures, from a multi-polar gender framework to a more ‘‘modern’’ bipolar frame of reference. Both produce a ‘‘normalization’’ of the western model. As various cultures come to adopt a gender framework perceived as being more in line with that acceptable to the world’s hegemonic powers, they lose flexibility in understanding and dealing with variations within their societies. In addition, the ability of the social sciences to understand the dynamics of human sexuality and gender construction is lessened. Our theoretical frameworks are impoverished and our grasp of human potential is diminished. Even though it can be said that all cultures change all the time, or as Sahlins (1985) puts it, culture is, in part, a continuous process of interpretation and reinterpretation, there is still stability, both from the perspective of the participant (who may not be able to perceive the constant change) and the external observer. Some changes are more important and more salient than others. In either case, as we approach a body of cultural data, we need to consider the viewpoint from which the data have been assembled and constructed. If we adopt an emic point of view, the perspective of a culture’s participant, we will get one version of the phenomenon being examined. Given our contemporary understanding of variation within a culture, it is likely that there are several different etic perspectives to be found, some of which might even seem to be in contradiction. If we adopt an etic construct, the perspective of the analyst, we will find ourselves with yet another construction of the data, which again, may exist in contradiction to one or more of the emic perspectives. In the end, we can be sure that for any group of people, their cultural world is multiple and the various extant versions do not always center on any but the broadest, vaguest consensus. Ethnographic data, both emic and etic, indicate that a segment of the world’s cultures have developed gender paradigms that go beyond the western sense of two gender poles. At the current state of aggregated crosscultural material, we cannot say how many cultures (present or historical) contain more than two gender poles. The consequence is that we can only rely on impressionistic assessments.

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In the absence of such a definitive count, the impression produced by the extant literature is that multi-polar cultures usually deal with physiological females and physiological males differently. In general, morphological men are more likely to be seen as possibly fitting into more than one named, institutionalized position with a distinct gender construction and that morphological women are more likely to be seen as falling along a continuum of variations, all of which are considered womanly and feminine. The classic instance is the difference between the Manly Hearted Women among the Mandan and other plains Indians and the Berdache,1 also among North American plains groups. While morphological men might, as the result of a vision quest or other spirit visitation, occupy the separate berdache social position, Manly Hearted Women were still women, and might be valued even more highly than ‘‘ordinary’’ women.2 While some instances of women actively engaged in warfare can best be understood as gender role transformations, e.g., the ‘‘Amazon’’ warriors of 18th and 19th century Dahomey, others are indicative of the sort of gender transcendence illustrated by the Mandan (Jones, 1997) or Piegan (Edgerton, 2000) Manly Hearted Women. The point here is that, at least in these instances, physiological women did not cease being sociological women, while physiological men might cease being sociological men. There are two possible avenues to understanding this apparent phenomenon: (1) it is an accurate description of ethnographic reality and requires explanation. If this is the case, I expect that a robust socio-cultural explanation will be derived from a universal asymmetry in gender constructs (Quinn, 1977). (2) It is an artifact of a sex–gender asymmetry among field workers engaged in the appropriate research. Suggestive literature in this direction has a long history, stretching from Bowen (Bohannan) (1964) to Elliston (1999). Since these are not mutually exclusive, an accurate assessment of the reality probably lies between these possibilities. An additional complication rises from the fact that the extant literature does not always utilize the same definitions for concepts and terms. Given variations in how the terms are used in the literature, in this article I have adopted the following definitions. I use ‘‘sex’’ to refer to biological traits and ‘‘gender’’ to refer to the constructs that each culture associates with a biological trait complex. However, sex is not simply a matter of equipment or plumbing. Each culture also carries norms guiding the use of biological equipment. So that in fact we really have biological or morphological sex, cultural sex and gender. These three are linked, in each culture, in ways that produce a sex–gender–sexuality complex.

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Something more needs to be said about cultural sex. Much of traditional biology sees this facet of sex as facilitating reproduction, which is said to be the primary raison d’etre for biological sex. And in evolutionary terms that is probably an accurate construction. However, as DeWaal (1995) notes, there are at least two species, human beings and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), for whom sex (as I have defined it) regularly takes on non-reproductive functions. De Waal’s observations of bonobo behavior indicate sexual activity regularly used in what he refers to as ‘‘reconciliations,’’ behavior mending social fences in the aftermath of an altercation. Some of the activity is male initiated and heterosexual; some is female initiated and heterosexual; some is male initiated and same-sex oriented, and some is female initiated and same-sex oriented. He believes he has also observed ‘‘recreational’’ sex, but without speaking to the bonobos, it is a difficult determination to make with surety. However, with human beings the issue is quite different. We are faced with sexual behavior used in a variety of ways. There is, of course, reproductive sex, and because we can communicate with each other, we can be sure when sex is simply recreational. In addition, anthropological research like that of Herdt (1981) has clearly demonstrated another variety of cultural sex, one that is neither reproductive nor recreational, which might be termed ‘‘instrumental’’ sex. This category is easily open to a variety of subcategories; some like rape as an instrument of war are decidedly distasteful, others may be the stuff of various utopian fantasies, and yet others, like use of fellatio, documented by Herdt (1981), put sexual activities to the service of cultural ends that have little to do with overt eroticism. The point is not to embark on a terminological or taxonomic endeavor, but rather to simply make it clear that ‘‘simple’’ sex and sexual behavior among human beings are probably more varied and more complex than for any other mammal. Kath Weston (1993) has argued that gender cannot be defined with any precision, and she is right, if what we are looking for is a universal set of traits. However, if we adopt a culture-specific approach, then while the specifics of gender may vary from culture to culture, we can still maintain the general sense I have just outlined. The cultural gender construct consists of both signifying elements and performance elements. A person assumes the signifying elements, e.g., clothing or hairstyle, and exhibits the performance elements. While biological sex is something a person has, regardless of behavior, gender is seen only when it is performed or signaled. I begin with the biocultural perspective that is central to anthropology. Questions regarding the relative dominance of effects from biology or culture, popularly referred to as the nature–nurture debate, and academically

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as the essentialist–constructionist debate, ask impossible and sterile questions, and so provide scientifically useless answers. These debates also privilege a bi-polar view of the world. Human beings are both biological organisms and culture-bearing builders of societies. From that perspective, the appropriate paradigm for guiding study in this area is one based on the fact that biology and culture are two parts of an interacting human system. Everywhere, human beings are born genderless, but sexed in the basic mammalian pattern. Of course, a variety of genetic and hormonal anomalies occasionally occur. These range from different genetic structures, e.g., XXY and XYY, to other less clearly understood rare occurrences like androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which a genetically male fetus does not respond to the androgens released during gestation. The result is an apparently female infant with male genetics. However, until the second half of the 20th century and the discovery of the structure of DNA, these variations were not perceived as such. They were perceived primarily as the rare occurrence of one or another physiological peculiarity, or as is often the case with androgen insensitivity syndrome, may not have been noticed at all. Even in those societies currently making use of a variety of sophisticated biological tests of genetic structure and hormonal balance, it is possible to argue that most people continue to perceive these variations in terms of their effects on external appearances. The biological reality of the anomaly is not as important as its cultural placement. For example, the social and cultural location of intersexed individuals varies cross culturally. The Pokot, living in Kenya, respond to intersexed individuals as an extremely unfortunate occurrence, and frequently resort to infanticide (Edgerton, 1964). The Navajo classify such individuals as belonging to a third category that is neither male nor female (Hill, 1935). Most micro-cultures in United States culture tend to see such people as mistakes of nature and seek to correct the error. For the Pokot, there is no cultural place for those they call sererr, and those few who survive live on the margins of the society. Currently, United States macroculture also has no place for intersexed individuals, but tries to fit them into one of the two normatively accepted categories. Recently, at least in North America and Western Europe, the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) and the GenderPAC, both of which claim a membership including people who understand themselves as transsexual transgendered or intersexed, have been agitating for an end to the assumption that biologically intersexed people suffer from a malady (Turner, 1999). They have also urged an end to automatic consideration of sex reassignment surgery. Their’s is a vision of North American macro-culture as it might be.

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Their argument focuses on considering those we call intersexed as a third sex, relatively rare (ISNA claims approximately 1 in 2,000 births), but a normal human variation. However, it is still the case that the most frequent occurrence is to view children born with ambiguous genital structures as needing ‘‘treatment’’ so that they can fit into one of the two culturally accepted poles. Although both United States macro-culture and the Pokot can be said to have a bipolar view of sex and gender, the conceptualizations are still very different. For the Pokot, only those with the normatively appropriate morphological structures can be transformed into gendered children (and ultimately adults). For the U.S., a surgical transformation renders biologically anomalous individuals ‘‘fit’’ for the social and cultural transformation that will occur. Ultimately, in every culture there is a process by which genderless neonates are transformed into gendered children (or adults-in-training). In many instances, the announcement of biological sex and an associated gender status is the end of the story, for others it is not. It is also probably the case that there are individuals in all societies for whom the assignment of a sex–gender complex does not end with birth. Some cultures, such as portions of the U.S. and the Pokot, cited above, tend to organize their gender structures as rigidly defined bipolar systems. Others, such as Oman (Wikan, 1977, 1982) or Mohave (Devereaux, 1937), include more than two genders in their cultural system. For yet others, such as the Igbo in Nigeria (Amadiume, 1987, McCall, 1996), the boundaries between gender categories are flexible; there are circumstances under which women can be accepted as men, and others in which men can be accepted as women. A second process of gender transformation can often be discerned; one taking place some time after the first transformation has been started. For example, although physiologically intersexed individuals are recognizable at birth, and the Navajo place them in a third category, nadle, the Navajo also recognize a group of people they call those who pretend to be (or play the part of) nadle (Hill, 1935). These individuals come to their status after having begun socialization as masculine or feminine. Generally, we might think in terms of three axes of post-childhood gender transformation: one is of a temporary sort and has been long observed by a variety of writers. For example, Murray (2000), Bullough (1976) and many other writers have noted that rituals of license, such as carnival or Mardi Gras, or rituals of rebellion (cf. Gluckman, 1956) often provide room for transgressing gender norms. Murray is one of several writers who see this as an often-covert acceptance of homosexuality, but as Gluckman points out, it can be just the opposite. Regardless, a person engaging in a ritual of this

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sort does change gender temporarily. The same can be said of female impersonators, whether in Shakespeare’s plays, the film Victor Victoria, or a contemporary stage act. Much of Murray’s work is devoted to documenting variations in culturally acceptable sexual behavior. He tends to focus largely on variations in male behavior, promoting the basic thesis that wherever such variations are found they represent either a covert or an overt acceptance of homosexuality as a normal human occurrence. However, Gluckman’s analysis of the Zulu rituals he referred to as ‘‘rituals of rebellion,’’ suggests that a ritual focused on license to overtly change behavioral and signifying gender markers, may, in fact, represent an affirmation of ‘‘normally’’ acceptable behavior and a rejection of the behavior licensed by the ritual. His particular case study was of a yearly ceremony in which the Zulu king was reviled, and women dressed as men and men dressed as women. The overt point of the ceremony was that by having one day in which the king was badly treated and other, particularly sexual, norms were violated, the Zulu polity was strengthened in its ordinary cultural and political structures. Theoretically, this temporary transformation can be seen as parallel to linguistic and broader cultural code-switching phenomena. An individual possesses the linguistic and cultural knowledge necessary for assuming a position in more than one cultural or linguistic context, and switches from one to the other as social situations require. A second form of gender transformation is relatively rare (or at least rarely reported). In the course of an ordinary life cycle a person moves from one gender status to another. Among the Gabra in Kenya and Ethiopia, men, as they age, pass into a period in which they are said to be seen as women (Wood, 1999). In a slightly different vein, Turnbull (1986) argues that Mbuti in the Ituri Rainforest region of Democratic Republic of Congo are genderless until they marry. That is, they pass through childhood without a distinct gender identity and are transformed only later. There are two points to be made about the Gabra: (1) All men will eventually become d’abella, men who are women. It is a part of a man’s natural life cycle. (2) Although it is possible to talk of the Gabra as a bipolar culture, they represent yet another variation on that theme. Gabra do not seem to see polar opposites as discrete and separable, but as entangled with each other ... the d’abella, the men who are women y show that in them too, opposites come together in one place. (Wood, 1999, p. 166)

Like United States macro-culture, Gabra culture sees much of the world in terms of a set of polar opposites; however, in a variety of instances, the Gabra

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bring these opposites together in a symbolic unification. This creates a certain ambiguity that extends to Gabra descriptions of d’abella gender status. Wood (1999) makes an important distinction here. He recounts that he was told simply that d’abella ‘‘are women.’’ He emphasizes that he was not told that d’abella are ‘‘like’’ women, and that distinction is significant. On formal and ceremonial occasions people refer to them with feminine pronouns. ‘‘And elements of their dress and behavior and value in society are understood as feminine, as ‘‘belonging’’ to or ‘‘on the side’’ of women’’ (p. 175). On the other hand, they are also referred to as korma, bull camels, and they do not give up their masculinity; they continue to be linked to it even as they become d’abella. Essentially, instead of being liminal, standing between masculine and feminine, as North American Two Spirit People have been seen, d’abella are both at the same time. They unite the polar opposites in the status they acquire by growing older. The social location Gabra create for d’abella, containing both masculine and feminine elements, suggests a gender structure approaching that which Graham (this volume) calls holistic for the Bugis in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Mbuti, living in the Ituri Forest region of the Democratic Republic of Congo,3 represent a different model of gender transformation. Turbull (1986) argues that until marriage Mbuti have no gender. That is, they are not expected to behave in any particular ‘‘masculine,’’ ‘‘feminine’’ or other similar fashion. Although there is, as there must be, gender learning, it is not relevant to behavior until marriage. Under these circumstances, we could even say that marriage is a gender transformative event in the Mbuti life cycle in much the same way that it constitutes a transition to adulthood in many other cultures. The third form of gender transformation, the one I am most concerned with here, is a more or less permanent second transformation. I use the phrase ‘‘more or less permanent’’ because Wikan (1982) indicates that on occasion those whom she calls xanith4 choose to become xanith and then later choose to stop being xanith. A similar phenomenon has also been reported for people in the Society Islands (Elliston, 1999). This category contains examples from every continent, of people fitting a particular gender status that is not one of the Western World’s ‘‘big two.’’ This is also the category being referred to when people talk of a ‘‘third gender.’’5 Although we (western interpreters) tend to think in terms of an underlying biological predisposition for this form of gender transformation, the socalled (by European observers) Amazon warriors of 18th and 19th century Dahomey make a very different case. The female warriors of Dahomey are not the only instance of women being a regular part of the army to be found

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in either Africa or other parts of the world (Jones, 1997), but they are certainly the most famous and the best described, the only known instance of a standing army led by an elite regiment of female soldiers. (Alpern, 1998, Edgerton, 2000). They also illustrate the extent to which biology does not play a deterministic role in gender constructs. There may be a subtle interplay of biology, society and culture, as was certainly the case for the Amazons, but the idea that one domain drives developments in another has no ethnographic support. In that sense, these women provide an important body of ethnographic data illuminating issues that underlie any consideration of gender variations, male or female. The kingdom was well established by the end of the 17th century. By the 18th and 19th centuries, Dahomey, which was defeated by the French in 1892, was a major conquest state on the West African coast. Sandwiched, as it was between the more powerful empires of Oyo on the east (in what is now Nigeria) and Asante on the west (in what is now Ghana), Dahomey, in the three centuries of its independent existence, exhibited a number of unique features, some of which were associated with its deep involvement in an internal slave trade and plantation economy as well as slave trade directed to the demands of a variety of European traders. In contemporary terms, this was not an egalitarian system; it was a highly militarized state, so much so that Richard Burton referred to it as a ‘‘black Sparta’’ (Alpern, 1998). From our point of view it was a brutal state, but the opportunities for women were many. One of these was to join the ranks of the female warriors, who, at their peak, numbered in the thousands. Their ranks were filled by volunteers, conscripts and slaves (almost entirely war captives). All became part of organized military units whose reputation for excellence was almost legendary in the area. They regularly insisted that they had become men, or had become better than men. But the terms of reference were always to a bipolar sex–gender–sexuality system. As near as we can tell, any sort of biological underlayment was not universal to these warriors, but pride in military prowess, success and excellence were the salient criteria for the Amazons, living as they did, in a society that was patriarchal and also had many options for women beyond kinder, ku¨che and ku¨chen (Edgerton, 2000). The Amazons of Dahomey represent one location on the continuum of femininity that existed within that society. But more than anything else, they represent the extent to which cultural expectations direct cultural outcomes. The crux of the problem I want to address here can be seen in Donham’s (1998) discussion of Black South African male sexuality, which focused on

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the death of a Zulu man in 1993. In the course of his analysis he first cites Neil Miller, a journalist, describing an interview with Linda,6 the person Donham is discussing. Township gay male culture y revolved around cross-dressing and sexual role-playing and the general idea that if gay men weren’t exactly women, they were some variation thereof, a third sex. No one, including gay men, seemed to be quite sure what gay meant – were gay men really women? men? or something in between? .... (Miller, 1993, p. 14 cited by Donham, 1998, p. 7)

Donham goes on to note that ‘‘gay’’ was not actually the appropriate term at the time. In black township slang, the actual designation for the effeminate partner in a male same-sex coupling was stabane – literally, a hermaphrodite. Instead of sexuality in the Western sense, it was local notions of sexed bodies and gendered identities y that divided and categorized. (Donham, 1998, p. 7)

It is important to note that much of township sexuality in South Africa was conditioned by the strictures imposed by apartheid. We tend to think of that system as being largely a matter of racial segregation, but it was more. It focused on population control and the provision of cheap industrial labor, which was housed in single sex hostels. Although stabane may have been the appropriate term, and it may have had both connotations and denotations very different from Western concepts of sexuality, the distortions produced by apartheid obscured these differences, reducing them to little more than a variant of female impersonation and a specifically subordinate sexual role. While speaking of both Linda and Jabu, a friend of Linda’s with a penchant for women’s dress in a west African style, Donham approaches questions of point of view in understanding sex-gender-sexuality systems. His comment raises one other complication of theoretical significance. If it was gender that made sense to Linda and Jabu themselves ..., strangers in the township typically used sex as a classificatory grid. That is, both Linda and Jabu were taken by others as a biologically mixed third sex. Significantly, as far as I can tell, neither ever saw themselves in such terms. (Donham, 1998, p. 8)

Anthropology ordinarily utilizes a distinction between the cultural insider’s view (emic) and the external observer’s view (etic). We are faced here (and I suspect in many other instances) with two emic constructions of the same socio-cultural facts. In one, there is a category beyond what we usually think of as the ordinary two, and in the other there is not. Donham ends his analysis by noting that the collapse of apartheid has led to changes in the cultural constructions of a local sex–gender–sexuality system. Although he provides the requisite caveats, he also tends to see the

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process as a variety of ‘‘modernization’’ matching the ‘‘modernization’’ of the socio-cultural system that was apartheid. Given the artificial constraints created by apartheid, there is justification in this approach. However, considering a bipolar homosexual–heterosexual paradigm as more modern than other paradigms tends to obscure the range of human variation. It also tends to gloss over the two discrepant views of sex–sexuality variations he describes. In another context, similar discrepancies are reported by Kulick (1998) among travestis in Brazil. Kulick’s discussion of the travestis describes a group of genetically male people engaged as professional prostitutes. These men insist on their maleness and while preserving their male genitalia, also take female hormones or obtain silicon implants to enhance the femaleness of their external appearance. In terms of the framework used here, the travestis blur the lines between sex and gender, emphasizing the extent to which even physiological sex may be considered a cultural construct, at least in its non-reproductive aspects. In this way, travestis represent one resolution of issues created by individuals who see themselves as transsexual or transgendered. A similar phenomenon can be found in areas of Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand. However, the underlayment of Theravada Buddhism adds a few complicating dimensions. Even though Thailand’s gender structure is, at base, bipolar, the addition of beliefs in reincarnation and the transience of life, leads to a measure of acceptance for those termed kathoey (Taywaditep, Coleman, & Dumronggittigule, 2001). But the social construction of kathoey is also affected by these factors as well as by the impact of the contemporary, globally interactive world. In trying to understand the Thai system, it is important to remember that Thailand is the one portion of Southeast Asia that never came under control of European colonial regimes. The result is that the contemporary blending of European cultural elements with local cultural patterns is considerably more selective and involves fewer serious contradictions. Much of contemporary Thai society seems directed toward absorbing foreign cultural elements, often seen as being ‘‘modern,’’ into the existing cultural gender constructs, perceived as being ‘‘traditional’’ (Taywaditep et al., 2001). Traditionally, the term, kathoey, referred to people with indeterminate physical genitals. Today the label does not have clear referents. It can be used to refer to homosexual men and sometimes to those we might refer to as transgendered or transsexual. Even those who identify themselves as kathoey use the term in all this variety. There are also a series of more explicit terms, a few of which are phrases built around kathoey, for example, ‘‘long haired katthoey,’’ ‘‘kathoey dressing as a woman,’’ ‘‘third sex’’ and ‘‘second kind of woman’’ (Winter, 2002). Along with the Thai term translating as

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‘‘male-female,’’ there are also the English slang terms ‘‘ladyboy’’ and ‘‘ladyman.’’ All of these carry a connotation of not male, but also not quite female either. The linguistic sense of an additional gender that stands between masculine and feminine is unmistakable. Within this amorphously defined group, some, similarly to the Brazilian travesti, take hormones to enhance a female appearance, but few actually undergo surgery for sexual reassignment, although it is available in Thailand (Taywaditep et al., 2001). Kathoey fit several separate sub-categories within Western models, but none of these do justice to Thai cultural realities. Thai people mainly see the kathoey as either the ‘‘third gender,’’ or a combination of the male and female genders. Alternatively, they are also seen as a female gender, but of the ‘‘other’’ variety, as reflected in a synonym ying pra-phayt song, meaning ‘‘women of the second kind.’’ (Taywaditep, 2001, p. 37)

Basically, it seems that Thai people have tried to fit a second (or more) male gender into a basic Thai bipolar sex–gender–sexuality system. The result is a system that recognizes more than two gender positions, but accords prestige and status to only two. But even this is something of an oversimplification, for as Taywaditep et al. (2001) notes: Nevertheless, the kathoey have been a well-known category in the sexual and gender typology of the Thai culture. Children and adults can often identify at least one kathoey in every village or school. Despite their subtle ‘‘outcast’’ status, the village kathoey are often given duties in local festivities and ceremonies, mostly in female-typical roles such as floral arrangements or food preparation. The kathoey seem to have adopted the ‘‘nurturer’’ role prescribed to Theravada women, and ideas of female pollution (e.g., the touch taboo and fear of menstruation) are extended to the kathoey as well. Social discrimination varies in degrees, ranging from hostile animosity to stereotypic assumptions. Some of the assumptions are based on the idea that the kathoey are unnatural, a result of poor karma from past lives; other assumptions are typical of generalizations about women as a whole. (p. 37)

This cultural fuzziness, this lack of sharply delineated sex–gender–sexuality borders is also mirrored in the languages of Southeast Asia (Wong, 2003). Wong’s observation of linguistic complications is not surprising, but is not often incorporated in discussions of gender variations, and most assuredly is applicable beyond the confines of Southeast Asian languages. We need only ask questions about the proper pronouns to use for the Tewa kwido´ (see below) or the Omani xanith. Neither the social sciences nor English in any part of the world has developed a commonly accepted vocabulary for dealing with such circumstances. The other side of this problem can be phrased: What is the proper form of translation from a language with no gendered third person singular pronoun, e.g., Swahili into English? Again, there is no commonly accepted solution.

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In the Thai case, as Wong notes, the result is a set of multi-polar sex– gender–sexuality paradigms varying significantly from Western models. However, even keeping this stricture in mind, it is still possible to say that sex–gender–sexuality systems in Thailand represent a largely successful cultural effort to fit gender variations into a bipolar framework without violating either the basic bipolarity or the empirical existence of people who do not fit into a simple bipolar model. In a slightly different frame of reference, Murray (2000) tries to subsume all non-standard, non-heterosexual relationships under a model of three different types of homosexuality. Perhaps the most important starting point is to note that he changes the nature of the discourse from sex–gender– sexuality paradigms or even simply societal gender structures, to issues of sexual behavior. That is, he has, like most Western cultures, foregrounded behavioral sex as the most salient aspect to be examined. He proposes a tripartite typology: Age-structured, Gender Stratified and Egalitarian homosexualities as encompassing all of the ‘‘imaginable structurings of samesex sex’’ (2000, p. 1). It is also interesting to note the extent to which Murray’s book is also strongly androcentric, although it does give a few brief nods to same-sex sexual behavior among women. The result is a shift of focus from socio-cultural gender constructs to culturally mediated sexual activity. His entire book, which contains a wealth of carefully considered ethnographic material, is organized on the cultural definitions of who takes dominant or receptive positions. While a part of his data fits that construct, his model, which denies the possibility of gender constructs beyond masculine and feminine, cannot deal with instances such as that noted by Jacobs and Cromwell (1992), while exploring the cultural construction of, kwido´, a Tewa ‘‘third gender’’ category, one of those positions Williams (1992) would include under the general term berdache. In the course of her fieldwork, Jacobs was told a person could be homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual or trisexual. One of her male informants provided these definitions: homosexual—‘it means I have sex with other men’ heterosexual—‘means I have sex with women’ bisexual—‘means I have sex with women and men’ trisexual—‘means I have sex with women, men, and with Joe [pseudonym]’ [the Tewa kwido´]. (1992, p. 55)

A three or four gender system creates a more complex set of gender-based relationships than are contemplated by a system derived from northern

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European and North American constructs. It is useful to note here that Jacobs’ informant’s construction of potential sexualities makes use of both a homosexual–heterosexual dimension, as well as a three gender paradigm. Elsewhere (Segal, 1997), I have noted the possibility of discrepant emic understandings of a single phenomenon. Beyond the simple categorization and application of a label was the informant’s explanation that the kwido´ was not gay, though some people called him that, but was, rather made a kwido´ by spiritual powers. Jacobs goes on to note that the elders she spoke to said that kwido´ should be raised ‘to be who they are’ aided by adult kwido´’s socialization to proper third-gender behavior and knowledge. (Segal, 1997)

The Tewa, in the southwestern United States, are not the only people among whom this sort of internal disagreement can be discerned. It is also the case for the Society Islands, which include Tahiti. In that setting, the person occupying a non-masculine, non-feminine gender position is termed a mahu, and is often a morphological male.7 Here, it seems that a man’s sexual relations with a mahu are conceptualized (except by the mahu) as a replacement for relations with a woman. No one (except the mahu) seems to consider questions of sexual orientation (Levy, 1971, 1973). By way of contrast, for the Tewa, orientation seems to be an issue. Sex with a kwido´ is a distinct cultural category and, Jacobs indicates, kwido´ might have sex with other kwido´. In both instances, we are confronted with a heterogeneity of emic understandings that is all too often glossed over in anthropological literature. Another difficulty is the veneer of Eurocentric ethnocentrism and homophobia created by the European colonial enterprise over a span of, at least 200 years in most portions of the globe. In the instance of the Tewa, the major source has probably been an Anglo-Euro-American Protestantism. It is somewhat facile, but the shorthand reference to European colonialism and missionary activities fairly expresses the world-wide trends of which this is a part. The traditional Tewa explanation of the kwido´’s origins in an encounter with superhuman forces grants an element of sacredness to his nature. In the fallout from the confrontation with Euro-American culture and its agents, for the most part, that has been lost and concepts of a variety of sexual sins have become part of Tewa cognitions (Jacobs & Cromwell, 1992). On the other hand, Jacob’s fieldwork is of relatively recent date, and the Tewa third gender continues as a part of both beliefs and behaviors. In contrast, I am not as certain that the status, mahu, as found in the Society Islands, constitutes a third gender in the definitive way the kwido´ does. The largest part of the difficulty lies in the nature of the early sources,

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none of which, took the people’s perspectives into account, but the data that do exist are suggestive in a number of directions. By the latter half of the 20th century, when attention to emic perspectives had become more common, most of the world was in the throes of the sort of ‘‘modernization’’ noted by Donham, although not as a result of so felicitous a process as the collapse of apartheid. The effects of colonial and mission culture in shifting local cultural understandings of sex–gender systems are pervasive, and sexuality was a prime target. The mahu of the Society Islands seem to represent a sex–gender–sexuality category that is available to both men and women. Levy (1971, 1973) claims that there are only morphologically male mahu, and Gilmore (1990) following him, refers to them as ‘‘practicing homosexuals.’’ However, this construction of the data is problematic. First of all, the Society Islands seem to be a region in which gender dimorphism is relatively light, and people seem unconcerned about sharp gender distinctions (Elliston, 1999, Levy, 1973). This is exactly the sort of social setting most conducive to a multipolar sex–gender–sexuality system (Munroe & Whiting, 1969). Most important is the confusion of categories currently found in the Society Islands. Of these, mahu has the longest history, and might be referred to as the ‘‘traditional’’ category. There are other contemporary categories that explicitly link sexual behavior with gender, but mahu separates gender and sexuality in a way more complex than can be reviewed here. The merging of contemporary categories, derived from the global reach of large scale, powerful, Western societies, with indigenous sex–gender–sexuality systems is a subject for an entire paper on its own. Elliston’s (1999) explication makes clear what may be a central question in the study of sex–gender–sexuality systems. That question can be understood as a matter of sequencing. In each particular culture of sex, sexuality and gender, which is perceived as producer and which as product? The very asking of the question points to the interaction of biology and culture, rather than to the primacy of one over the other. Elliston’s analysis of sexuality–gender categories in the Society Islands helps clarify the apparent confusion. Mahu refers to the oldest layer, one in which experience and observed behavior produce gender, which, in turn directs people to their sexual partners, regardless of their morphology, i.e., produces sexuality. Other categories (raerae, petea, lesbiennes) refer to same-sex sexual relationships, coupled with coordinated gender behavior, and are conceived of as referring to categories of sexuality and gender derived from French colonial influence. The major difference, however, seems to be that for

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people assuming positioning within these categories, sexuality and gender behavior both exist within a performative foreground, whereas: While the gender-coded meanings attached to mahu were consistently foregrounded by the men, women and mahu with whom I worked y, the sexuality of mahu was consistently backgrounded. (Elliston, 1999, p. 236)

By way of contrast, we might consider the way in which Western cultural constructs, more linear in format, first place sex as the producer of sexuality and gender, which then produce behavior. These two different visions of the relationship between sex, gender and sexuality help us to understand both Christian missionary and other religious difficulties with the sex–gender– sexuality systems of other parts of the world as well as phenomena such as Zimbabwean or Ugandan governmental fulminations that homosexuality is a foreign import. For reasons probably related to colonial hegemony and the education of current leaders, the western model is adopted, rather than any other one. It goes without saying that the two models delineated here, the Western and a Polynesian, do not exhaust the possible cultural constructions. Additional research needs to be done to ascertain the range of empirical realities for models of the relationship among sex, gender and sexuality.

CONCLUSION One of the reasons Murray (2000) has difficulty accepting the concept of genders beyond two has to do with his foregrounding of sexual activity, focusing on the physiological characteristics of the partners. However, following Lang (1998), the issues involved are both complicated and clarified by introducing terminology based on gender. Thus, to use the example reported by Jacobs and Cromwell and cited above, people might engage in hetero- or homo-gender relationships, and these may, or may not be sexual in nature. The former are usually approved of and sought after by the culture being examined, while the latter may not be. Jacobs’ informant, then, provided one category of homo-gender relationships and three different ways to engage in hetero-gender relationships. The advantage of this sort of terminology is that it contains fluidity and in that way privileges a particular culture’s sex–gender–sexuality system, rather than putting all cultures into the same sex–gender–sexuality model. Graham’s work on Sulawesi (this volume) and her argument that the Bugis utilize a set of five named gender categories makes clear the limitations

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of the four-gender model implicitly used here, derived largely from the data available. That model may well be an artifact of both the English language and Western cultures, as they have developed through the 18th to 20th centuries. For many of the cultures discussed here, as well, probably, as for the many historic cultures whose data are already lost, it is likely that sex– gender–sexuality systems were more complex and less culturally salient than they are for a 21st century world of Western hegemony. Ultimately, reducing all sex–gender–sexuality systems to acceptance or rejection of homosexuality, imposes a universal foreground and a bipolar system that is consistent with the dichotomous thinking of most Western cultures. If we look at the western system, which operates with two intersecting dichotomies (masculine–feminine and heterosexual (permitted)–homosexual (forbidden)), and the effort to change that model and the values and meanings attached to it, the desire to demonstrate the ‘‘acceptance’’ of homosexuality on the large cross-cultural canvas becomes understandable. But the distortion of complex sex–gender–sexuality systems in service to that aim does a disservice to the cultural integrity of many peoples and to their efforts to recapture traditional patterns that have often been suppressed.

NOTES 1. Although the term berdache has a long history of anthropological use in a nonpejorative connotation, many Native American activists object to its use both because of its pejorative and inaccurate Franco–Persian roots, and because it is a term applied by outsiders. I use it here because it is still the only generalized term standing beyond the bounds of specific ethnic groups, and because it is still the most widely recognized term. The term slowly coming to replace it, at least as far as Native Americans are concerned, is ‘‘Two Spirit,’’ which reflects Native American constructions, but does not necessarily reflect other cultural constructs. 2. It is also important to note that there were/are cultures (e.g., the Mohave) with parallel institutional structures, and in other plains cultures, some women did, on their own initiative, assume roles comparable to male berdache. However, on a crosscultural level, it is most often the case that female gender variations have been individualized and male variations have been institutionalized. 3. In light of the current military activities and destructive conditions in this very region, which borders on Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Sudan, it is quite possible that the Mbuti way of life no longer exists and that the people themselves may have suffered a great deal. However, at the time of this writing, no reliable information about these possibilities is available. 4. Wikan (1982) uses ‘‘x’’ to indicate a soft fricative similar to the German ‘‘ch.’’ ‘‘Th’’ represents an aspirated ‘‘t.’’

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5. There is also literature referring to a ‘‘third sex.’’ In some instances, as with the Navajo nadle, the reference is to an individual who would, in the United States, be called intersexed. In other instances, the term is the result of a conflation of sex and gender (cf. Turner (1999) for a discussion of the difficulties involved in treating ‘‘sex’’ and ‘‘gender’’ as completely discrete categories). 6. In response to ‘‘What’s in a name ... ?’’ Donham notes that in South Africa, at least among Zulu, Linda can, ordinarily, be either a man’s name or woman’s, and so it joins the list of other androgynous English names, even though it has a predominantly feminine marking in American English. 7. Levy (1971, 1973) claims that only men were/are mahu. However, Elliston (1999) documents the existence of both morphological males and morphological females who take on the mahu status. In light of the relatively low level of gender dimorphism in the Society Islands, her projection that this was also probably the case in traditional, i.e., pre-colonial, times seems logical.

REFERENCES Alpern, S. B. (1998). Amazons of black Sparta: The women warriors of Dahomey. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press. Amadiume, I. (1987). Male daughters and female husbands: Gender and sex in an African society. London: Zed Books. Bowen, E. S. (Bohannan, L.). (1964). Return to laughter. Garden City, NY: Doubleday for the American Museum of Natural History. Bullough, V. (1976). Sexual variance in society and history. New York: Wiley. Devereaux, G. (1937). Institutionalized homosexuality of the Mohave Indians. Human Biology, 9, 498–597. DeWaal, F. B. M. (1995). Sex as an alternative to aggression in the bonobo. In: P. R. Abramson & S. Pinkerton (Eds), Sexual nature, sexual culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Donham, D. L. (1998). Freeing South Africa: The modernization of male–male sexuality in Soweto. Cultural Anthropology, 13(1), 3–21. Edgerton, R. B. (1964). Pokot intersexuality: An East African example of the resolution of sexual incongruity. American Anthropologist, 66, 1288. Edgerton, R. B. (2000). Warrior women: The Amazons of Dahomey and the nature of war. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Elliston, D. A. (1999). Negotiating transnational sexual economies: Female Mahu and same-sex sexuality in Tahiti and Her Islands. In: E. Blackwood & S. Wieringa (Eds), Female desires: Same-sex relations and transgender practices across cultures (pp. 230–254). New York: Columbia University Press. Gilmore, D. D. (1990). Manhood in the making: Cultural concepts of masculinity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gluckman, M. (1956). Custom and conflict in Africa. New York: Barnes and Noble. Herdt, G. (1981). Guardians of the flutes: Idioms of masculinity. New York: McGraw-Hill. Hill, W. W. (1935). The status of the hermaphrodite and transvestite in Navaho culture. American Anthropologist, 37, 273–279.

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Jacobs, S.-E., & Cromwell, J. (1992). Visions and revisions of reality: Reflections on sex, sexuality, gender and gender variance. Journal of Homosexuality, 23(4), 43–69. Jones, D. (1997). Women warriors: A history. Washington: Brassey’s. Kulick, D. (1998). Travesti: Sex, gender and culture among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lang, S. (1998). In: J. L. Vantine (Trans.), Men as women, women as men: Changing gender in North American cultures. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Levy, R. I. (1971). The community functions of Tahitian male transvestites. Anthropological Quarterly, 44, 12–21. Levy, R. I. (1973). Tahitians: Mind and experience in the Society Islands. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McCall, J. C. (1996). Portrait of a brave woman. American Anthropologist, 98(1), 127–136. Miller, N. (1993). Out in the world: Gay and lesbian life from Buenos Aires to Bangkok. New York: Vintage Books. Munroe, R. L., & Whiting, J. W. M. (1969). Institutionalized male transvestism and sex distinctions. American Anthropologist, 71, 87–91. Murray, S. O. (2000). Homosexualities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Quinn, N. (1997). Anthropological studies on women’s status. Annual Review of Anthropology, 6(1997), 181–225. Sahlins, M. (1985). Islands of history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Segal, E. S. (1997). Male genders: Cross cultural perspectives. In: V. Demos & M. T. Segal (Eds), Advances in gender research (Vol. 2). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Taywaditep, K. J., Coleman, E., & Dumronggittigule, P. (2001). Thailand (Muang Thai). In: R. T. Francoeur (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of sexuality. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company (electronic version). Turnbull, C. (1986). Sex and gender: The role of subjectivity in field research. In: T. L. Whitehead & M. E. Conaway (Eds), Self, sex and gender in cross-cultural fieldwork (pp. 17–27). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Turner, S. S. (1999). Intersexed identities: Locating new intersections of sex and gender. Gender and Society, 13(4), 457–479. Weston, K. (1993). Lesbian/gay studies in the house of anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 22, 339–368. Wikan, U. (1977). Man becomes woman: Transsexualism in Oman as a key to gender roles. Man (NS), 12(3), 304–319. Wikan, U. (1982). Behind the veil in Arabia: Women in Oman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Williams, W. (1992). The spirit and the flesh. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Winter, S. (2002). Country report: Thailand, division of learning, development and diversity. University of Hong Kong. http://web.hku.hk/sjwinter/TransgenderASIA/country_ report_thailand.htm. Last accessed in 2006. Wong, Y. W. (2003). Transgressing the gender boundary. National University of Singapore, Department of Southeast Asian Studies. http://web.hku.hk/sjwinter/TransgenderASIA/ paper_transgressing_the_gender_boundary.htm. Last accessed in 2006. Wood, J. (1999). When men are women: Manhood among Gabra nomads of East Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin.

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IS THERE A NEED TO (UN)GENDER THE PAST? Denise Pahl Schaan ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with identifying and discussing how archaeologists may have engendered the past in unintended ways and produced versions of social relations that, in the course of searching for antagonistic gender relations, project our own (feminist) desires of equality, autonomy, and agency onto past societies. It is proposed that an adequate recognition of the different dimensions of gender may help us to differentiate cultural understandings of gender from the ideological use of gender categories to establish hierarchical social relations.

INTRODUCTION Reviewing the feminist literature on archaeology, I came to realize how difficult it is to summarize and discuss the archaeological study of gender in a comprehensive and analytical way. The reason for this is the existence of a variety of approaches and understandings of just what the agenda for gender studies is, as well as what constitutes a feminist approach to the construction of archaeological knowledge. Although there have been a number of conferences, published volumes and journals dedicated to discussing Gender and the Local-Global Nexus: Theory, Research, and Action Advances in Gender Research, Volume 10, 45–60 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-2126/doi:10.1016/S1529-2126(06)10003-X

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research on gender, it seems that the feminist critiques of gender research (Balme & Beck, 1993; Brumfiel, 1992; Conkey, 1993; Conkey & Gero, 1997; Conkey & Williams, 1991; Gero, 1996; Hodder, 1997; Wylie, 1993) have had little effect on most work. Since 1984, when Conkey and Spector, in their seminal article, called for a feminist integration of gender studies in a field which had been largely dominated by a western, andocentric bias, archaeologists have incorporated (or not) feminist critiques in different ways, producing a very diverse body of research. In reviewing this innovative archaeology, I have found it useful to distinguish between ‘‘gender archaeology’’ and ‘‘feminist archaeology’’1 (Conkey & Gero, 1997). Gender archaeology is represented by research concerned with identifying gender in the past and making females visible. Feminist archaeology, on the other hand, is represented mainly by theoretical approaches aimed at criticizing a western approach to science, and an emphasis on the ‘‘need to situate gender research within an explicitly feminist framework’’ (Conkey & Gero, 1997, p. 411). Feminists have also questioned whether it is appropriate to frame research on the basis of gender, thereby assuming gender rather than investigating it (Conkey, 1993). Additionally, both the assumptions that biological sex can be evaluated independently of cultural values and that gender is always useful for understanding past societies have been under scrutiny (Hodder, 1997). Within the gender and feminist approaches, a number of different studies have been published, and, although they have focused on similar issues (e.g., division of labor, ideology, use of space, participation in rituals and ceremonies, exercise of power, and so forth), they have produced different accounts and explanations for past social behavior. Stemming in part from the difficulty in translating feminist theory into archaeological practice, differences between these two approaches are not always clear-cut. Some authors have gone so far as to describe them as irreconcilable. Roberts (1993, p. 20) observes, that ‘‘perhaps we have to separate the use of feminist theory to address issues of gender in the past from the use of feminist theory to reflect upon the construction of archaeological knowledge’’. Her statement reveals the multifaceted character of feminist scholarship. In archaeology, feminist thinking has not been unidirectional but has evolved in parallel ways; it started with a critique of the andocentric bias, it responded to that bias by finding women in the past, and finally, it turned to questioning the practice of inserting women into the past (Joyce & Claassen, 1997, p. 2; Wylie, 1991). Not all research, however, has reached the third level. This paper is concerned with identifying and discussing the ways in which we have engendered the past in unintended ways by looking for women in

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antagonistic gender relations, and projecting our own (feminist) desires of equality, autonomy, and agency onto past societies, thereby distorting past reality. I believe that the problem derives mainly from: (1) the fluidity of gender as it has been conceptualized, making it difficult to interpret its manifestations in the archaeological record; (2) the confusion between cultural constructs of gender roles and identities with the social and political use of these roles and identities to establish oppressive and hierarchical relations; and (3) the failure to acknowledge that social relations are permeated by values that establish various levels of hierarchy, present even in small-scale societies. Western ideas concerning agency, equality, and individualism have saturated archaeological research, projecting onto the past our anxieties and ideals pertaining to the relationship between individuals and society, and generating a misunderstanding of the past.

GENDER AND SOCIAL HIERARCHIES Owing to the western separation of social sciences into distinct disciplines, sociologists define gender as a social construct while anthropologists define gender as the cultural construct of sexual differences. These conceptualizations do not simply reflect different points of view on the same observable fact, but, I believe these conceptualizations reveal two different phenomena. Gender as a cultural construct can be understood as the way a given culture makes sense of biological sexual differences. It refers to a limited number of categories of people (in general females and males, but see Roscoe (1991) for an example on third gender) as distinctive in their social roles and identities, encompassing the way a person is suppose to dress, to behave, to talk, to make use of sexuality, to engage in subsistence activities, to interact economically, and so forth. These aspects obviously vary from culture to culture and, from an anthropological point of view, comparing one culture to another is illustrative of the variability in human behavior. Researching gender roles and identities within other cultures challenges ethnocentrism, and urges us to reflect on our own cultural values and behavior. This is the kind of study that has characterized most of the literature on gender, which I will call (after Joyce & Claassen, 1997) womanist studies. Although mainly focusing on females, that research has shown the possibility of locating women (and occasionally men, children, and elders) in the past, emphasizing cross-cultural variability and challenging common assumptions of gender roles as natural and associated with specific sexual characteristics (Brumbach & Jarvenpa, 1997; Claassen, 1997; Claassen &

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Joyce, 1997; Costin, 1996; P. L. Crown, 2000; Derevenski, 2000; Moore & Scott, 1997). This research is important in showing how gender differs from sex, since cross-cultural variations in gender roles do not always follow variation in sexual characteristics. A few scholars have indeed questioned the female/male dichotomy, discussing evidence for other genders (Hollimon, 1997), as well as exploring aspects of homosexual behavior (Casella, 2000). Also see both Graham and Segal in this volume. Gender as a social construct, on the other hand, refers to the way gender ideologies (constructed from cultural understandings of gender) are used to establish hierarchical and asymmetrical gender relations. Gender, as an aspect of social hierarchies, does not make much sense outside hierarchical, hegemonic settings. When two or more categories of people enjoy differential access, differential rights, and differential treatment solely on the basis of their gender, the existence of an explicit hierarchy between them can be identified. When the hierarchy is consistently established in favor of one gender – usually male – a clear pattern of gender dominance is established and it is likely to permeate all instances of social life. Interestingly enough, gender hierarchies are likely to be more visible in societies where egalitarian ideals are prevalent. For example, in kinship or class societies, gender hierarchies, if they exist, are subordinated to genealogical or economic principles. In this sense, elite women may enjoy high status, power and freedom, and poor men are subordinated to them in the hierarchical ladder. As a reaction to essentialist conceptions of women and men as wellbounded categories, scholars have stressed that gender relations are permeated by other variables such as age, class, race, and faction. In fact, there are studies showing that in some societies age and kinship are more important than gender in defining one’s role and identity, as well as in defining hierarchy (see, e.g., Descola, 2001; Fisher, 2001; Oyewu`mı´ , 1997). The same studies, however, show situations in which certain groups of females clearly lack agency. Can we conceive inexistence of gender hierarchies in contexts where some females have no agency? How can we frame an analysis of gender in contexts where hierarchical relations permeate many different instances of social life, surpassing gender differences? How can we deal with the fact that the female population is divided into many other categories, thus making gender diffuse? Acknowledging the complexity of gender roles and gender relations should not lead us to blur our investigation with a vast number of contingent variables that prevent us from a clear analysis. There is a need to frame gender in an analytically feasible and theoretically consistent way.

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My intent in separating gender as a cultural construct (as roles and identity) from gender as a social phenomenon (use of gender ideology to establish social hierarchy) is related to the need for determining when (and how) hierarchy and bias are based on gender. This intention may find parallels in Wallerstein’s (2003) call for reconciling structure and history, revitalizing a perspective that is quite peculiar to archaeology. This will allow us to (1) people the past with females and males that are as different from us as that reflect the many cultures in existence; and (2) locate in the past when and how gender was used to define and reinforce hierarchical, asymmetrical relations, especially, the conditions necessary for gender hierarchies to emerge and to be politically manipulated. Archaeology has much to contribute in presenting evidence for historical and cultural dynamics of gender hierarchies. In order to decouple gender roles and identities from gender hierarchies, we must conceive of the division of labor as part of a cultural understanding, one that is not static, but dynamic, of gender roles. Therefore, gender roles may be used to establish hierarchy, in particular situations, where belonging to a certain gender category (or conversely not belonging to acceptable ones) will be sufficient reason for discrimination in the form of less pay, lack of respect, low income, as well as restricted access (Foucault’s lack of power) to services, goods, places, and positions. This may take the form of discrimination against a group or an individual. Since such discrimination is historical, it has to be located within a historical process, thus denaturalizing its origins.

A LOOK AT THE LITERATURE ON GENDER Research on gender is well-represented by a number of edited volumes that show the engagement of several (mostly American and female) archaeologists in looking for gender as a way to illuminate our understanding of social relations in the past as well as rewriting prehistory within a feminist perspective (see, e.g., Claassen & Joyce, 1997; P. L. Crown, 2000; duCros & Smith, 1993; Gilchrist, 1999; Hays-Gilpin & Whitley, 1998; Nelson & Rosen-Ayalon, 2002; Sørensen, 2000; Sweely, 1999; R. P. Wright, 1996). Within these collections, there is a wide variety of approaches, which represent existing variability rather than some kind of collective understanding of feminist archaeology. P. Crown (2000, p. 22) for example, admits that, despite the growing literature on gender in archaeology ‘‘there is no single notion on what we are attempting to elicit from this research or how should we go about it’’.

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Most of the papers agree there is a need to talk about gender, because when gender is not explicitly addressed common sense leads people to assume that men were the individuals who performed important actions (Conkey & Spector, 1984; Gero, 1988). For example, Joyce and Claassen (1997, p. 8), point out that the papers published under the title ‘‘Women in Prehistory’’ pose a ‘‘methodological and interpretive challenge to conventional assumptions’’. The diversity of issues discussed in the papers shows how quickly and seriously female archaeologists challenged themselves to look for new readings of old problems (see Claassen (1997) for a review of pre-1994 work). The papers in the collection ‘‘Gender and Archaeology’’, for example, aimed at demonstrating the many ways in which feminist scholars changed archaeological agendas (R. P. Wright, 1996), by reviewing gender issues in the past and introducing new questions. According to Wright (op. cit. p. 3) the major premise of the book is the existence of many archaeologies of gender, not a single approach. In fact, in discussing technologies, production (Costin, 1996; R. Wright, 1996), and representations (Brumfiel, 1996; Joyce, 1996), the articles show how a gender perspective can be applied to different types of research, providing interesting new explanations for old problems. A chapter on the practice of archaeology in the classroom and the field shows also a concern with criticizing the bias in the profession (Gero, 1996; Romanowicz & Wright, 1996). In areas better known archaeologically, the introduction of gender seems not to pose a threat to conventional understandings, and gender has been incorporated as another dimension of the analysis. For example, in the volume entitled ‘‘Women and Men in the Prehispanic Southwest’’, the editor states that, since there was already a good synthesis in that area, a closer look at the gendered division of labor could lead to an assessment of effects that demographic and economic changes had on the lives of women and men, specifically on ‘‘their tasks, health, prestige, and power within the community’’ (P. Crown, 2000, p. 5). In the volume, the authors are concerned with the sexual division of labor and the ‘‘presence of gender hierarchies or gender asymmetries’’ (op. cit. p. 24). Here, the authors are studying middle-range societies – mostly single villages – and they take the opportunity to draw comparisons between different cultures. Although the inclusion of males in the analysis is welcome, a number of problems emerge from the focus on women and men as well-bounded categories. First, women and men are seen as distinct categories that have distinct (sometimes complimentary, sometimes divergent) interests. Second, concepts such as prestige, power, status, gender hierarchies, and negotiation of gender are used without criteria and simple associations between archaeological features, status, and gender are drawn freely.

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Following another path, ‘‘Manifesting Power’’ represents a collection of papers that focus on the relationship between power and gender. However, instead of problematizing that relationship, the articles employ different conceptions of power, frequently interchanging concepts of power with status and economic autonomy. Sweely (1999, p. 11), for example, defines power as ‘‘the capacity of individuals to pursue goals’’, focusing on individual capacity to negotiate power in social relations. In fact, she conceives power as depending on daily situations and ‘‘outside of a hierarchical, dominance-oriented framework’’ (Sweely, 1999, p. 1). Since most of the articles are concerned with demystifying the domestic-public dichotomy, they tend to demonstrate that the conventional division of labor, when it existed, did not lead to unequal relations. In this sense, there is an implicit agenda of picturing a past in which females, even when tied to domestic spheres, would have power and prestige. The problem present in many analyses derives from a feminist critique of the archaeological approach to the sexual division of labor. Conkey and Spector pointed out that archaeology had traditionally assumed that past activities were highly gendered and that male activities were more highly valued than female ones. Female archaeologists, then tried to ‘‘correct’’ the past, showing that though the division of labor was gendered, it did not imply asymmetrical values. As a result feminists projected the present onto the past (Balme & Beck, 1993). One of the reasons examining gendered activities has been one of the favorite avenues for archaeological inquiry on gender, is the fact that artifacts (the material remains of ancient activities) are highly visible in the archaeological record. In this sense, feminist archaeologists began to explore the relationship between performed activities and gender aiming at not only locating females in the productive space, but also assessing the social and economic importance of women’s activities for social reproduction. However, unless the research is theoretically and methodologically consistent, there are a number of problems with that kind of approach. Conkey and Spector (1984), for example, call attention to the fact that while the gender division of labor may refer to the cultural association of a specific gender with a particular task, this does not preclude the possibility of the task being performed by another gender. It may be difficult to demonstrate the link between gender and activity without relying on some kind of ethnographic analogy. Moreover, generating conclusions on gender relations based on the division of labor requires taking into account a variety of factors within a historical perspective. While the gender aspect of the division of labor is related to cultural traditions, the relative status and economic importance of labor is determined by historical and sociopolitical processes.

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As an example, Hegmon, Ortman, and Mobley-Tanaka (2000), in studying the organization of space and gendered activities affirms that ‘‘task groups, particularly if they are culturally recognized with architecturally defined spaces, may be an important source of power. At the same time, some women within task groups may be subject to the supervision of other women; thus although task groups may be sources of power, they may also impose limits on an individual’s autonomy’’ (op. cit. p. 49). It is evident here and in other chapters of the book (Women and Men in the Prehispanic Southwest) that the gendered division of labor is associated with levels of prestige, power, and status that the authors define, using no criteria other than their own. It is indeed possible that in many societies female labor was recognized as critical and as a source of status, but that is something that has to be demonstrated rather than assumed. In an article suggestively entitled ‘‘Women’s Work, Space, and Status’’, Julia Hendon (1997) discusses the gendered division of labor in a site occupied by Maya Elite in Copa´n, Honduras. Reasoning from iconography such as that displayed on figurines and pottery, Hendon concludes that the social division of labor was largely gendered, since women are depicted ‘‘spinning, weaving, maize grinding and food serving, while men are shown hunting or dressed as warriors’’ (Hendon, 1997, p. 37). Although men seems to be the primary figures in ritual performance, the author points out that women are clearly in culturally and economically important positions. They provide the material items necessary for rituals (such as textiles and food). The division of labor led to a division of space for work, but it did not cause segregation in the mortuary space, where adults of both sexes and children were buried together. Hendon concludes that differences between genders as depicted in their activities did not lead to differences in prestige and status. The emphasis on different types of work reveals gender complementarity and ‘‘parallel sources of political and social power for men and women’’ (op. cit. p. 45). Hendon explains that competition between elites led to the need for creating displays of power in which women and men worked together (developing complementary tasks) in order to guarantee the reproduction of the social system. Without realizing it, Hendon shows that, since the goal was to promote social cohesion and stability, gender was not in fact a way of discriminating against a specific group. Consequently, her final conclusion – that control over textile production was possibly a source of power and wealth that would lead women to ‘‘act independently of men’’ (Hendon, 1997, p. 45) – makes no sense within social groups that do not segregate people on the basis of gender and where the goals are collective rather than factional. Hendon’s article is an example of how gendered tasks may lead archaeologists to use gender as a social category in understanding a society in which gender is not an important organizing principle of hierarchy.

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There are many cases in which the ‘‘division of labor’’ problem is framed in a rather interesting and enlightening way. Brumbach and Jarvenpa (1997), for example, question the ‘‘Man the Hunter’’ and ‘‘Women the Gatherer’’ paradigm, in which there is a traditional and universal division of labor based mainly on men’s ability and strength for hunting and women’s immobility caused by pregnancy and child rearing (see also Balme & Beck, 1993). In doing ethnoarchaeological research among a Chipewyan community, the authors found that women participated in hunting as much as men did, but that they tended to hunt small animals within a short distance from the house, while men would spend more time searching for large animals far away from the village. As a consequence, women’s and men’s hunting activities would create different archaeological signatures: the discard of carcasses and tools belonging to women were found closer to the household, and men’s butchering sites would be located far away, thus making them more difficult to recognize archaeologically. Other research has also shown that the economic significance and consequences of hunting for the division of labor is more complex than commonly assumed; and that incorporating a gender perspective facilitates an understanding of this complexity (Balme & Beck, 1993; Kent, 1998; Sassaman, 1992; Szuter, 2000). In general, there is much to gain when the research is framed within a chronological perspective (e.g., demonstrating how particular historical conditions especially affected women’s labor). A case in point is Brumfiel’s (1991) study of how the advent of the Aztec rule in Mexico affected women’s workload and the organization of production. She contrasts iconographic imagery (women cooking and weaving) with evidence for specialization in production between sites. She found that although the dominant ideology placed much emphasis on women producing cloth and food within the household, the reality was that there was specialization of tasks and women were in fact working for the market in communal workshops. The archaeological record shows that with the rise of the Aztec state important changes were imposed on women’s mobility and workload, which were neither conveyed in the iconography nor documented by ethnohistoric sources.

FEMINIST ARCHAEOLOGY The feminist critique in archaeology had, in its beginnings, a major impact on the work of several female archaeologists who started questioning their own masculine bias in producing knowledge. It generated a search for females in the past, as research designs began to incorporate a gender component. As many authors have pointed out, just asking about women implies

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questioning the most common assumptions of the framework that had been utilized (Wylie, 1993). It can be said, however, little of that work has generated novel theoretical approaches (Balme & Beck, 1993, p. 70), since it was produced only by reframing research questions. In many instances, research on gender has distanced itself from feminist critique. The feminist approach to archaeology today has involved a critique of the way archaeologists practice science, how they do research (both theoretically and empirically), how they interpret results, and how the results are presented (Conkey & Gero, 1997). A feminist approach requires not only an acute criticism of established ‘‘facts of science’’ but also the ability to create novel and convincing explanations, particularly, since scrutiny over feminist construction of knowledge tend to be more severe than other constructions. Archaeologists seem to look at feminism as a political endeavor, without realizing that the production of scientific knowledge is always political and historical (Balme & Beck, 1993). The study of gender has generated a subfield within archaeology, since it does not seem to be useful for most of the questions archaeologists want to ask. At the same time gender studies claim that a gender perspective can provide more accurate reconstructions of the past. They imply that situations in which gender was irrelevant have been mistakenly gendered. For this reason, it is necessary to reconcile gender studies and feminist theory, and thus provide a structural, historical framework for the study of gender.

UNGENDERING THE PAST? Research on gender has shown that, despite the ambiguity of the archaeological record and claims of the invisibility of social actors, it is possible to find females in the past, and it is important to identify the gender of social actors in order to construct a more truthful vision of the past as a correction for the largely andocentric prehistory inherited by archaeologists. It is a fact that the past was populated by biological females and biological males, people who differed from each other according to their age, ethnicity, faction, group affiliation, abilities, obligations, and so forth. We have learned that gender is visible whenever we start looking for it (Oyewu`mı´ , 1997, p. 31), despite its irrelevance to most issues under investigation. In fact archaeologists have asked themselves about the usefulness and legitimacy of using gender categories to understand social behavior in the past. One interesting example of possible problems related to using gender as an analytical category is the study of ceramic figurines. Female figurines found in a variety of agrarian societies were traditionally considered to

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represent goddesses or objects used in fertility rites (Conkey, 1989; Ehrenberg, 1989; Roosevelt, 1988). The reason for that was the recurrence of figurines displaying protuberant bellies and breasts. During the last decade, however, a number of authors have criticized those assumptions, exploring the figurines in a different way. First they have noticed the great variability among the figurines, in terms of shapes, sizes, techniques of decoration, as well as the fact that they were not all female (Barstow, 1978). Alternative readings provide other explanations for their use including as toys, objects of domestic cults, and representations of individuals (Bailey, 1994; DeBoer, 1998). Moreover, authors have emphasized the importance of looking at the context in which figurines are found before suggesting interpretations. Although the majority of figurines are in general females, it is also common to find male figurines or figurines without representation of biological sex, sometimes interpreted as a third gender. But what if the figurines did not represent gendered individuals, but something else? Some authors have now suggested that classifying figurines according to gender may have prevented us from discovering other possible information, such as those figurines may differ from one another primarily on the basis of age (Gvozdover, 1989; Marcus, 1998). The point Marcus makes illustrates well how our own systems of classification (based on our western categories) influence our reading of the past. In this case, using gender as a basis of differentiation would lead to a very different reading of the past than would using other categories such as age. Several authors have in fact questioned the importance of gender in organizing social relations. For example, Nelson, Glowacki, and Smith (2002) criticize the assumption that gender hierarchies are present in all state societies. They point to the case of the Silla State (Korean peninsula – 57 BC to 668 AD) where hierarchies were primarily built on the basis of genealogy (casts) and age. The abundant evidence for gender equality is believed to reflect the fact that the basic principle of organization was kinship. In tribal or traditional societies, gender may be used to organize labor or ritual or to establish hierarchy. But when gender is not used as a social institution, when being male or female is not a prerequisite for belonging to exclusive social groups or for developing social roles, gender may not exist at all. In investigating traditional societies, any oppression, lack of power or agency that we perceive at the individual level cannot be evaluated on the basis of gender unless the social relationships are framed as such. Oyewu`mı´ , in ‘‘The Invention of Women’’ tries to demonstrate how gender as a western concept was used to understand a society (the Yoruba) which was not itself organized along gender lines. An apparent contradiction is the

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fact that marriage is polygamous. Yet, it seems odd to us that a society that was highly hierarchical was presented to us as gender and oppression free. The Yoruba societies, as well as the caste system in India, are examples of hierarchical social arrangements among age groups or social groups where the well-being of the social group and its reproduction is the goal, not the self-realization of the individual. In western society, where freedom and individualism are supposed to be the norm, everything that may conspire against the desired equality is considered pernicious. Dumont (1970) points out that humans are always valuing and ranking things and people among each other. It is known that in the so-called egalitarian societies, there are commonly castes or hierarchical groups even in the absence of economic inequality. Dumont believes our ideals of equality prevent us from understanding hierarchy while, at the same time, creating other types of inequality. ‘‘The fusion of equality and identity has become established at the level of common sense. This makes it possible to understand a serious and unexpected consequence of egalitarianism. In a universe in which men are conceived as no longer as hierarchically ranked in various social or cultural species, but as essentially equal and identical, the difference of nature and status between communities is sometimes reasserted in a disastrous way: it is then conceived as proceeding from somatic characteristics – which is racism’’ (Dumont, 1970, p. 16). In other words, in a democratic state, people tend to establish hierarchical relations based on race and gender, which can be more easily diluted into the system than patterns of dominance/subordination based on caste and age. It seems that the feminist critique in archaeology has to go further in criticizing our own bias. Roberts (1993, p. 18) affirms that the paradox of gender is that it cannot afford to challenge the framework. For her the solution is to include gender ‘‘within the broader realm of social theory’’ where its importance would be ‘‘minimized and its potential appropriated’’. I do not think that gender as a category of analysis has to be abandoned or set aside in some instances. However, the excessive emphasis of gender as individual identity has to be abandoned in favor of more social, historical approaches. Gender as a category of analysis has to be reframed and investigated as a culturally meaningful concept that, within historical circumstances, may be used to justify hierarchical social relations. The dynamics of the culture and the historical processes constitute the milieu where the study of gender might find its place. Based on the issues discussed above, it is worth envisioning an agenda for feminist studies in archaeology. I will delineate below some of the issues and strategies that I think are important.

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(1) Archaeologists will still want to show that the past was populated by women, men, and children, because ‘‘when gender is not explicit, it is assumed’’ (Conkey & Williams, 1991). (2) We may want to show that our current social arrangements (gender identity and gender roles) are not ‘‘natural’’, but dependent on historical and cultural processes. We do not want to place our understanding of gender as more ‘‘evolved’’ than other peoples, but show that we have much to learn from other cultures. Especially, we may want to research the existence of other genders and different cultural and social understandings for homosexuality, in order to deconstruct feminine and masculine as ‘‘natural’’ gender categories. (3) We may want to improve the visibility of gender in the archaeological record, developing new methodological approaches. (4) We may want to question our own assumptions about gender. Although ‘‘bias is unavoidable and an important part of the interpretation’’ (Hodder, 1997), we may want to have some control over our own bias, at least to the point of having it explicitly assumed. As Roberts (1993, p. 16) has pointed out, ‘‘the ultimate aim of the incorporation of gender into archaeology is to produce less biased accounts of the past’’. We should not, then, substitute male bias with feminist bias. (5) Finally, we may want to investigate how gender ideology and gender hierarchies are constituted, how they are manipulated, and how they change through time. A historical perspective provides the best background against which we can evaluate social relations, because it involves both process and change. Archaeology, as a discipline that studies processes of cultural change, is, indeed, well suited for this mission.

NOTES 1. Conkey and Gero (1997, p. 423) establish a difference between archaeology of gender and gendered archaeology, where the latter would involve the ‘‘interrogation of archaeological inquiry’’.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A first version of this paper was written for Kathleen Blee’s Global Feminisms Seminar, at the University of Pittsburgh in the Spring of 2003. I cannot express with words how much I enjoyed discussing current feminist literature with such an intelligent group, made up of women from different

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backgrounds, whose enthusiasm and shamelessness in exposing their ideas enriched the debates enormously, transforming an academic course to an amazing intellectual experience. Although this paper was not discussed with them as much as I wished, I feel that my understanding of the importance of feminist theory for the development of social sciences and particularly archaeological theory and practice was definitely shaped in that warm environment.

REFERENCES Bailey, D. W. (1994). Reading prehistoric figurines as individuals. World Archaeology, 25(3), 321–331. Balme, J., & Beck, W. (1993). Archaeology and feminism – views on the origin of the division of labor. In: L. Smith (Ed.), Women in archaeology. A feminist critique (Vol. 23, pp. 61–74). Canberra, Australia: Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies. Barstow, A. (1978). The uses of archaeology for women’s history: James Mellaart’s work on the Neolithic Goddess at C - atal Huyuk. Feminist Studies, 4(3), 7–17. Brumbach, H. J., & Jarvenpa, R. (1997). Woman the hunter: Ethnoarchaeological lessons from Chipewyan life-cycle dynamics. In: R. Joyce (Ed.), Women in prehistory (pp. 17–32). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Brumfiel, E. M. (1991). Weaving and cooking: Women’s production in Aztec Mexico. In: M. W. Conkey (Ed.), Engendering archaeology: Women and prehistory (pp. 224–251). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Brumfiel, E. M. (1992). Distinguished lecture in archaeology: Breaking and entering the ecosystem – gender, class and faction steal the show. American Anthropologist, 94, 551–567. Brumfiel, E. M. (1996). Figurines and the Aztec State: Testing the effectiveness of ideological domination. In: R. Wright (Ed.), Gender and archaeology (pp. 143–166). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Casella, E. C. (2000). Bulldaggers and gentle ladies: Archaeological approaches to female homossexuality in Convict-Era Australia. In: B. L. Voss (Ed.), Archaeologies of sexuality (pp. 143–159). London, New York: Routledge. Claassen, C. (1997). Women’s lives in prehistoric North America. In: R. Joyce (Ed.), Women in prehistory (pp. 65–87). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Claassen, C., & Joyce, R. (1997). Women in prehistory. North American and Mesoamerica. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Conkey, M. W. (1989). The structural analysis of Paleolithic art. In: C. C. Lamber-Karlovski (Ed.), Archaeological thought in America (pp. 135–154). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Conkey, M. W. (1993). Making the connections: Feminist theory and archaeologies of gender. In: L. Smith (Ed.), Women in archaeology: A feminist critique (Vol. 23, pp. 3–15). Canberra, Australia: Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies. Conkey, M. W., & Gero, J. (1997). Programme to practice: Gender and feminism in archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 26, 411–437. Conkey, M. W., & Spector, J. D. (1984). Archaeology and the study of gender. In: M. Schiffer, (Ed.), Advances in archaeological theory and method (Vol. 7, pp. 1–38). New York: Academic Press. Conkey, M. W., & Williams, S. H. (1991). Original narratives: The political economy of gender in archaeology. In: M. d. Leonardo (Ed.), Gender at the crossroads of knowledge: Feminist anthropology in the Postmodern era (pp. 102–139). Berkeley, CA: University of California.

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Costin, C. L. (1996). Exploring the relationship between gender and craft in complex societies: Methodological and theoretical issues of gender attribution. In: R. Wright (Ed.), Gender and archaeology (pp. 111–140). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Crown, P. (2000). Gendered tasks, power, and prestige in the Prehispanic Southwest. In: P. Crown (Ed.), Women and men in the Prehispanic Southwest. Labor, power, and prestige (pp. 3–41). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Crown, P. L. (2000). Women and men in the Prehispanic Southwest. Labor, power, and prestige. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. DeBoer, W. (1998). Figuring figurines. The case of the Chachi, Ecuador. In: J. S. Raymond (Ed.), Recent advances in the archaeology of Northern Andes. Los Angeles, CA: University of California. Derevenski, J. S. (2000). Children and material culture. London, New York: Routledge. Descola, P. (2001). The genres of gender: Local models and global paradigms in the comparison of Amazonia and Melanesia. In: Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An exploration of the comparative method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. duCros, H., & Smith, L. (1993). Women in archaeology. A feminist critique. Canberra, Australia: Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies. Dumont, L. (1970). Homo hierarchicus. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Ehrenberg, M. (1989). Women in prehistory. London: University of Oklahoma Press. Fisher, W. H. (2001). Age-based genders among the Kayapo. In: D. F. Tuzin (Ed.), Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An exploration of the comparative method (pp. 115–140). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gero, J. (1996). Archaeological practice and gendered encounters with field data. In: R. Wright (Ed.), Gender and archaeology (pp. 251–280). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gero, J. M. (1988). Gender bias in archaeology: Here, then and now. In: S. V. Rosser (Ed.), Feminism (pp. 33–43). New York: Pergaman Press. Gilchrist, R. (1999). Gender and archaeology: Contesting the past. London, New York: Routledge. Gvozdover, M. D. (1989). The typology of female figurines of the Kostenki Paleolithic culture. Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology, 27(4), 32–94. Hays-Gilpin, K., & Whitley, D. S. (1998). Reader in gender archaeology. London, New York: Routledge. Hegmon, M., Ortman, S. G., & Mobley-Tanaka, J. L. (2000). Women, men, and the organization of space. In: P. Crown (Ed.), Women and men in the Prehispanic Southwest (pp. 43–90). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Hendon, J. (1997). Women’s work, women’s space, and women’s status among the classis period Maya elite of the Copan Valley, Honduras. In: R. Joyce (Ed.), Women in prehistory (pp. 33–46). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hodder, I. (1997). Commentary: The gender screen. In: E. Scott (Ed.), Invisible people and process: Writing gender and childhood into European archaeology. New York: Leicester University Press. Hollimon, S. E. (1997). The third gender in native California: Two-spirit undertakers among the Chumash and their neighbors. In: R. Joyce (Ed.), Women in prehistory. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Joyce, R. (1996). The construction of gender in classic Maya monuments. In: R. Wright (Ed.), Gender and archaeology (pp. 167–198). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Joyce, R., & Claassen, C. (1997). Women in the ancient Americas: Archaeologists, gender, and the making of prehistory. In: R. Joyce (Ed.), Women in prehistory (pp. 1–14). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kent, S. (1998). Gender in African prehistory. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

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Marcus, J. (1998). Women’s ritual in formative Oaxaca. Figurine-making, divination, death and the ancestors. Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, No. 33. The University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, Ann Arbor. Moore, J., & Scott, E. (Eds) (1997). Invisible people and process: Writing gender and childhood into European archaeology. New York: Leicester University Press. Nelson, M., Glowacki, D., & Smith, A. (2002). The impact of women on households economies: A Maya case study. In: M. Rosen-Ayalon (Ed.), In pursuit of gender. Worldwide approaches (pp. 125–154). New York: Altamira Press. Nelson, S. M., & Rosen-Ayalon, M. (2002). In pursuit of gender. Worldwide approaches. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Oyewu`mı´ , O. (1997). The invention of women: Making an African sense of western gender discourses. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Roberts, C. (1993). A critical approach to gender as a category of analysis in archaeology. In: L. Smith (Ed.), Women in archaeology. A feminist critique (pp. 16–21). Canberra, Australia: Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University. Romanowicz, J., & Wright, R. (1996). Gendered perspectives in the classroom. In: R. Wright (Ed.), Gender and archaeology (pp. 199–223). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Roosevelt, A. C. (1988). Interpreting certain female images in prehistoric art. In: V. E. Miller (Ed.), The role of gender in Precolumbian art and architecture (pp. 1–34). Chicago, IL: University Press of America. Roscoe, W. (1991). The Zuni man–woman. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Sassaman, K. (1992). Lithic technology and the hunter–gatherer sexual division of labor. North American Archaeologist, 13, 249–262. Sørensen, M. L. S. (2000). Gender archaeology. Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity Press/ Blackwell. Sweely, T. L. (1999). Manifesting power: Gender and the interpretation of power in archaeology. London, New York: Routledge. Szuter, C. (2000). Gender and animals: Hunting technology, ritual, and subsistence. In: P. Crown (Ed.), Women and men in the Prehispanic Southwest. Labor, power, and prestige (pp. 197–220). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Wallerstein, I. (2003). Anthropology, sociology, and other dubious disciplines. Current Anthropology, 44(4), 453–465. Wright, R. (1996). Technology, gender, and class: Worlds of difference in Ur III Mesopotamia. In: R. Wright (Ed.), Gender and archaeology (pp. 79–110). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wright, R. P. (1996). Introduction: Gendered ways of knowing in archaeology. In: R. Wright (Ed.), Gender and archaeology (pp. 1–22). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wylie, A. (1991). Gender theory and the archaeological record: Why is there no archaeology of gender? In: M. W. Conkey (Ed.), Engendering archaeology: Women and prehistory (pp. 31–54). Oxford: Blackwell. Wylie, A. (1993). Introduction: The complexity of gender bias. In: L. Smith (Ed.), Women in archaeology. A feminist critique (Vol. 23, pp. 53–60). Canberra, Australia: Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies.

YOUNG PEOPLE’S ATTITUDES TO GENDER ISSUES: ASIAN PERSPECTIVES Chilla Bulbeck ABSTRACT Academic and popular commentators of Asia find it almost impossible not to reach for metaphors of breathtaking economic and social change, fanned by the winds of globalization. This chapter explores the extent to which young Asian values concerning gender relations in the household, pornography and prostitution are similar to or different from those of young westerners. While some respondents themselves talk of the impact of globalization on attitudes in their countries, clear differences in attitudes as well as vocabularies or justifications for those attitudes are found, the Asian samples, usually but not always, expressing a different set of responses from the Anglophone or Western samples.

INTRODUCTION: BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY A China correspondent recently argued in an Australian newspaper that, among other signs, the trebling of China’s divorce rate over two decades to now constituting 30 percent of marriages is due to ‘improvements in Gender and the Local-Global Nexus: Theory, Research, and Action Advances in Gender Research, Volume 10, 61–96 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-2126/doi:10.1016/S1529-2126(06)10004-1

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material life which have allowed people to focus more on their emotions’ (Professor Xu Anqi of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences). A female representative, Zheng Yu, of the Beijing Hongqiao Marriage Introduction Company says, ‘In the past people paid more attention to the family, to responsibility and put their own individual happiness on the second level. But many young people today, their only idea is to pursue their own happiness’. Catherine Armitage, the correspondent, concludes that the younger generation, ‘liberated by the market’, is asking whether they live for themselves or their parents, children and others who love them: ‘Their quest is driving social change in China at a rate unimaginable to their parents, let alone their ancestors’ (Armitage, 2002, p. 12). This article addresses Armitage’s suggestion that gender relations are changing rapidly among the middle classes of Asia, no longer reflecting obligations to parents or society more generally, but a thoroughly Western pursuit of individual happiness.1 The data that informs the analysis come from a research project funded by a large Australian Research Council grant. The original purpose of the grant was to survey young South Australians concerning their attitudes to feminism and gender issues. The questionnaire included questions concerning young people’s political involvements and socio-economic data. The questions on attitudes to the women’s movement were taken from a Time/ CNN survey (reported in Bellafante, 1998) and the gender issue items derived from a study of three generations of Welsh women (Pilcher, 1998). Pilcher discussed role reversal, abortion, whether women’s equality had been achieved, same-sex sexual relations and pornography. I added a further question concerning shared housework. Respondents were required to answer each question on a four-point scale: strongly agree, agree more than disagree, disagree more than agree, strongly disagree, while they were also given the option of ‘no opinion/don’t know’. There was space for respondents to make comments in relation to each question.2 After designing the questionnaire and surveying about half the school students in the South Australian sample, I became convinced that the data would be more revealing if I included some international comparisons, specifically with countries in the Asian region, but also with other so-called Western nations, so that Australia did not stand alone as the example of a ‘Western’ society. I expanded my sample to encompass the 10 locations shown below in Table 1, meanwhile adding samples in Western Australia and New South Wales. In the Australian samples, I used cluster sampling to obtain respondents from each major school types: government, private Protestant, private Catholic. Funding did not permit replication of this ideal survey method in the other sites, apart from Tokyo to a partial extent. In

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Table 1.

Sources of Young Respondents at School or University by Gender (Numbers in Brackets).

Source

Female (%)

Male (%)

High School (%)

University (%)

Australia (South Australia) (Western Australia) (New South Wales)

65 (511) 66 (295) 57 (145) 79 (71)

35 (279) 34 (149) 43 (111) 21 (19)

84 (664) 80 (357) 84 (216) 99 (91)

16 (127) 19 (85) 16 (41) 1 (1)

USA USA (Portland) (Santa Monica)

63 (59) 66 (31) 62 (28)

37 (33) 34 (16) 38 (17)

10 (9) 18 (9) 0 (0)

90 (86) 81 (39) 100 (47)

5.5 (95) 2.8 (48) 2.7 (47)

Canada (Winnipeg)

50 (21)

50 (22)

49 (21)

51 (22)

2.5 (43)

India (Mumbai) (New Delhi)

61 (79) 72 (44) 52 (35)

39 (50) 28 (17) 48 (33)

60 (79) 48 (30) 71 (49)

40 (52) 52 (32) 29 (20)

7.6 (131) 3.6 (62) 4.0 (69)

Vietnam (Hanoi)

58 (33)

42 (24)

15 (9)

85 (51)

3.4 (60)

Republic of Korea (Seoul)

52 (31)

48 (29)

50 (30)

50 (30)

3.5 (60)

a

Percent of Total

46.4 26.2 15.0 5.3

(791) (444) (256) (91)

China (Beijing)

51 (25)

49 (24)

49 (24)

51 (25)

2.9 (49)

a

Thailand (Bangkok) (Chiang Mai)

50 (61) 50 (30) 50 (31)

50 (61) 50 (30) 50 (31)

49 (40) 50 (20) 48 (20)

51 (42) 50 (20) 52 (22)

7.2 (123) 3.5 (60) 3.7 (63)

Indonesia (Jogjakarta)

66 (37)

34 (19)

49 (29)

51 (30)

3.3 (59)

Japan (Tokyo)

66 (197)

34 (100)

27 (138)

73 (163)

17.5 (301)

62 (1055)

38 (641)

61 (1043)

37 (628)

100 (1711)

Total

Notes: Due to some respondents failing to indicate their sex, gender and source, sub-totals are not always the same and gender sub-totals do not sum to total respondents. a Four (Australian), 20 (Bangkok) and 21 (Chiang Mai) vocational student respondents are not shown in the table.

Tokyo, I used my contacts during a year’s secondment to Tokyo University to survey a number of university classes and three school classes (the latter being much more difficult to access, which explains the predominance of university students in the Japanese sample).3 In each of the other cities I found a local researcher, who was given instructions to secure about 30 university and 30 high school students, at least

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half of whom in each sample were female. As can be seen from Table 1, some local researchers produced near perfect 50–50 splits in either gender or sample source or both, but others faced difficulties of one sort or another, expressed in the uneven split between high school and university students. Given the tiny size of my samples, I sought to survey middle-class urbanites, although I was guided by the local researcher in Chiang Mai, who suggested surveying some vocational school students, and in Delhi, who recommended including a high school where Hindi was the language of instruction, to make my samples more socio-economically inclusive. I explained to my local researchers that I administered the questionnaire during class-time, but not all were able to duplicate this method. As a result the samples are not completely comparable. On the other hand, there are clear patterns in the results, suggesting that young middle-class urbanites in each of these locations do have distinct understandings of gender issues in the home and in sexual relations.4 The questions I will discuss in this chapter asked for the respondents’ attitudes to four gender issues: sharing housework, role reversal (in which the husband stays home to care for the children and does the housework and the wife is engaged in paid work), same-sex sexual relations and pornography/nudity. From her interview data, Pilcher (1998) developed what she called ‘vocabularies’ or sets of justifications respondents gave for their answers. Pilcher (1998, pp. 129–133) discovered a clear dominance of individualism and liberalism as mechanisms for reading feminist moral questions, particularly in her middle and youngest cohorts. Members of the oldest cohort were more likely to use a traditionalist anti-feminist discourse. In my sample, there were a good number of comments that did not fit into Pilcher’s categories, and which required further analysis. In particular, I identified three more ‘collectivist’ vocabularies: doing something because it was ‘good for others’ (love/sharing), because of a ‘duty/obligation’ to others or because it was good for ‘national development/progress’. The expanded vocabularies, usually capturing at least 80 percent of the comments in each national sample, are shown below. Vocabularies for Discussing Gender Relations (see Pilcher, 1998, pp. 129–130) Pro-feminist Feminist

Identifies the needs or situation of women as a collective group; discusses the women’s movement; understands women are systematically and structurally disempowered in relation to men; uses terms developed by feminism such as ‘oppression’

Young People’s Attitudes to Gender Issues

Equality (and rights)

Individualism Love/sharing Situation-dependent

Duty, obligation

Progress, modernization/ national development

Traditionalist

Anti-feminist

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Supports equality between the genders, or equal opportunities within which women’s rights, e.g. to vote, work, an abortion, an education are a sub-set (but also rights of men, unborn child in some answers) Individual choice or preference, irrespective of social norms or gender roles Good for couple to share housework, love is justification for same-sex sexual relations Opinion is conditional and attitude may vary from couple to couple or situation to situation (for example, commitment to sharing housework might ‘depend’ on whether both partners have an equally stressful job, or women’s access to abortion might ‘depend’ on whether she was raped or the child will be born malformed) A duty to protect, support others, e.g. men, women or parents their children; obligations as citizens of a country; linked to this is notion of doing something for the well-being or good of others, e.g. good for children to be raised by two parents – and so overlaps with ‘collectivism’ Contributes to national development, progress or modernization, for example, gender equality is a mark of modern society. But this can be a justification FOR the women’s movement or gender equality or AGAINST change in gender relations Men should be in dominant or superior position in society or there is a man’s place and a woman’s place, most commonly invoking as justificatory reasons (where any are given) religious or biological essentialist claims, for example, men and women are built differently. Opposition to pornography/nudity or homosexuality as ‘evil’, ‘unnatural’, ‘morally wrong’. A sub-strand was ‘men are disadvantaged’: identifying ways in which men suffer, e.g. due to positive discrimination, women cannot take a joke, feminism has gone ‘too far’

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I want to place my findings alongside some ‘figures’ of the Asian woman that circulate, not only in the popular media but also in women’s studies and other academic literature on Asia. The two figures I will discuss are ‘the new middle class’ (in relation to sharing housework and role reversal) and the idea of the exotic sexualized Asian (in relation to homosexual relations and pornography). These figures refer to other images, such as ‘Asian tigers’, ‘sex tourism’ and ‘third genders’. They are framed by notions of globalization and the uneven circulation of commodities, labor and ideas. For example, Westerners engage with Asians as consumers at home and abroad: purchasing cheap electronics and clothing or traveling to Asia as tourists seeking short-term exotic sexual encounters.

THE ‘NEW’ MIDDLE CLASS AND CHANGING FAMILY FORMS From ‘Electric’ Girls to Companionate Marriage Although she has only recently become a cause cele`bre in anti-globalization protests in the United States (1), political economists and gender in development studies have long been familiar with the ‘electric girls’ whose passive compliance and ‘nimble fingers’ (2) have spun and assembled the wealth of the Asian dragons. Her sexualization has been studied in her dreams of marrying a ‘man with a necktie’ in South Korea (Louie, 1995, p. 421; see also Kim, 1997), and her sexual exploitation by supervisors, and most famously her construction by Aiwha Ong as ‘electric girls’ (in Malaysia). This triple pun reflects her employment in the electronics industry, her search for the bright lights and her supposed unrestrained sexuality (Ong, 1987). These women are neither as sexual nor as passive as some of the popular representations suggest, as indicated by the title of Ong’s book: Spirits of Resistance. South Korean factory workers in particular are well known for their successful struggle to form unions and improve conditions and their major role in the democracy movement in South Korea (Sohn, 1999, p. 38; Nam, 2002, pp. 79–82, 87). In Communist China and Vietnam, the woman worker has been conceived somewhat differently. The heroine of communist development was the ‘iron woman’ who excelled in work traditionally ascribed to men (Hooper, 1979, p. 127). In Vietnam, the Communist state draws on both socialism and Vietnam’s official matriarchal heritage (Fahey, 1998, p. 233) to explain the significant role of women in the economy. Furthermore, while

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women’s participation in the workforce in most Southeast Asian countries has increased dramatically in recent decades, in some South Asian countries, for example India, women’s involvement has remained low, increasing only marginally since 1971 (Brasted, 2000, pp. 202–203). Although it is the ‘electric girls’ who have captured the imagination of feminist and other writers, the majority of women in most Asian countries still live in the villages and are farm workers (Stivens, 1994, p. 377). Furthermore, domestic workers may work in more hazardous, isolated and lower-paid conditions than even the free-trade zone workers (Bello & Rosenfeld, 1990, p. 313) but have only recently gained scholarly attention. Also against the bulk of Asian women’s experience (3), apart from Japan, is growing academic interest in the ‘new’ middle classes of Asia. Examples include the collections by Sen and Stivens (1998), Gender and Power in Affluent Asia, and by Munshi (2001), Images of the ‘Modern Woman’ in Asia. The new middle-class woman is conceived in a combination of three roles: (1) consumer of household white goods as well as feminine beauty products, (2) participant in companionate marriage and modern motherhood and (3) professional or white collar worker in the city (for example, Cook, 1998, p. 262 for Thailand). Whether or not in paid work, many middle-class women, apart from in South Korea and Japan, have domestic servants responsible for most of the housework and much childcare (Sen, 1998, pp. 56–57 for Indonesia; Fahey, 1998, p. 239 for Vietnam; Mallee, 2000, p. 78 for China). In South Korea, the ‘Missy syndrome’ denotes the young consumerist and bodyconscious South Korean professional housewife. The term first became popular in Japan in the 1970s and was introduced into Korea in the 1990s by a department store to advertise household appliances, baby foods, cosmetics and so on. Missies ‘treat marriage and family as steps toward self-development, rather than y as binding institutions’ (Lee, 2000, p. 23) as did previous generations. In Malaysia and Vietnam, women’s magazines and advertisements cultivate modern ‘ideas about intimacy, romantic love, the individual and the interpersonal based on notions of psychological well-being’, in some cases linked to cosmetics, clothes and gyms (Stivens, 1998, pp. 6, 8; Fahey, 1998, pp. 227, 229). In Indonesia, in the early 1970s the Family Welfare Movement identified women’s roles first as producer of future generations, second as wife and faithful companion to her husband, third as mother and educator of her children, fourth as manager of the household and finally as citizen (Sen, 1998, p. 36). In 1993, a new government document identified joint family roles and responsibilities, insisting on the equality of men and women in public roles ‘as citizens and as human resources for development’. This

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included the responsibility of both parents to nurture children, adolescents and youth and build a prosperous and happy family life (Sen, 1998, p. 47). According to Krishna Sen (1998, pp. 35–36), the working woman is replacing the housewife as the paradigmatic female subject, icon of Indonesia as a modern nation, at least in terms of middle-class Jakartan women. Professional women are increasingly common in advertisements for banks, real estate, cars and computers (Sen, 1998, p. 47). Today, many young Indonesian women equate sexual liberation with ‘modernity’ and ‘personal liberation’ (Suryakusuma, 1996, p. 115). A familiar and well-rehearsed discourse promulgated by state organizations gave my Jogjakartan respondents a ready set of handles by which to discuss gender differences, as suggested by the homogeneity of their comments. In China, by contrast, rejection of the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four also takes the form of denunciation of the ‘Iron Girls’, to now emphasize psychological and physiological differences between the sexes (Jacka, 1997, pp. 41, 194), differences which were repressed by the Mao era. Instead of the ‘we’ of factory, farm or family, an emerging ‘I’ attends to her emotional and sexual needs, her personality development (Croll, 1995, p. 150). Given that economic reform has closed down state enterprises and forced many women out of the workforce, women have been encouraged to ‘return home’ and express their true natures in beautification, motherhood and consumption. Women are increasingly represented in advertisements as ‘flower vases’, luxuriously adorned and promoting consumerism, for example, lovingly addressing a vacuum cleaner as ‘I love Little Swan’ (Hooper, 1998, pp. 167, 181). In Vietnam there is a similar pressure on women displaced from closed down state factories to turn to consumerism and to work supplementing the husband’s role (Pettus, 2003). Despite these official pronouncements, around 90 percent of women aged 20–40 in China are still in paid employment (Hooper, 1998, pp. 182–183). Indeed my female respondents did not generally support the ‘return home’ movement, although Chinese male respondents were more enthusiastic. The Results (1) To the three Anglophone samples, a man becoming a ‘househusband’ and a woman entering the paid workforce was on a continuum with sharing housework, both expressions of equality or individual choice. Almost all the Asian samples (apart from the Japanese and Korean females) do not agree. Sharing housework received high endorsement, despite some die-hard traditionalist men in Korea and male advocates of the new gender relations in

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China and Vietnam. While sharing housework is generally endorsed at about the same rate across the samples (Chart 1), role reversal is not (Chart 2). This contrast is particularly acute for the Jogjakartans, followed by Thailand. By contrast, the young Chinese women show similar support for both sharing housework and role reversal, while the young Chinese men reveal a similar lack of support for both propositions. One can see the same kind of gender divide in the Korean sample. Respondents relied on societal expectations, to some extent based on dominant practices, to produce their different understandings of shared housework and childcare vis-a`-vis role reversal. While some Anglophone male respondents used a traditionalist discourse, particularly to resist role reversal, the major discourses used by these samples were equality for sharing housework and individualism for role reversal. There was widespread acceptance that it was only fair to share housework equally if both partners were working the same number of paid hours. By contrast, the individualist vocabulary was used to allow individuals to choose the less common practice of role reversal (compare Charts 3 and 4). By contrast, the Asian sample endorsed housework in terms of equality (Chart 4) and rejected role reversal in terms of tradition (Chart 5) and was more likely than the Anglophone samples to endorse shared housework in terms of a duty to one’s partner or children (Chart 6): men and women complement each other so they must work together and share equally in whatever they do (Indonesia, female, 180221931). yes, they should share work equally and understand each other’s responsibilities and problems and should take care of each other to run the home smoothly (India, female, 150182743). both share the housework, showing their commitment to equality. They are interested in each other so the family atmosphere is warm, comfortable and happier. They feel they have the same duty (Vietnam, female, 120152606). both husband and wife must take responsibility for the care of the children. Children need both parents so that they are not favouring one parent above the other (Indonesia, female, 180221915). we should devote maximum time to our children as they are our future (India, male, 150191782). partners should care for their children equally, not because they are earning equally but for balance, development of child. Children can’t be built properly with one hand (India, male, 150182755). nowadays children like to talk with mum not with father. It will be nice if men have chance to get close to their children (South Korea, male, 130161629).

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Chart 1.

Canada

Australia

Japan

Korea

China

Vietnam Thailand

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Indonesia

weighted average

If Both Partners in a Household are Working the Same Number of Paid Hours, they Should Share Housework and Childcare Equally: Agree Strongly and Agree by Sex and Country Sample.

CHILLA BULBECK

US A

male agree female agree strongly male agree strongly

USA

Chart 2.

Young People’s Attitudes to Gender Issues

female agree

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Canada

Australia Japan

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Vietnam Thailand

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Indonesia weighted average

It is Fine in a Marriage or Relationship for the Man to Stay at Home and Do the Housework and Look After the Children, if there are Any; and for the Woman to Go Out and Work Full Time.

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female- sharing male - sharing female - reversal male - reversal

60 50 40 30 20 10 0 USA

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Indonesia weighted average

Individualist Vocabulary for Sharing Housework and Role Reversal by Gender and National Sample.

CHILLA BULBECK

Chart 3.

Canada Australia

male - sharing female - reversal

50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

male - reversal

USA

Chart 4.

Canada

Australia Japan

Korea

China

Vietnam Thailand

India

Young People’s Attitudes to Gender Issues

female - sharing

Indonesia weighted average

Equality Vocabulary for Sharing Housework and Role Reversal by Gender and National Sample.

73

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female - sharing 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

male - sharing female - reversal male - reversal

USA

Chart 5.

Canada Australia

Japan

Korea

China

Vietnam

Thailand

India

Indonesia weighted average

Traditionalist Vocabulary for Sharing Housework and Role Reversal by Gender and National Sample. CHILLA BULBECK

Young People’s Attitudes to Gender Issues

female - sharing 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

male - sharing female - reversal male - reversal

USA

Chart 6.

Canada

Australia

Japan

Korea

China

Vietnam Thailand

India

Indonesia weighted average

Duty/obligation Vocabulary for Sharing Housework and Role Reversal by Gender and National Sample.

75

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However, they generally did not apply the same template to role reversal. Indeed the relatively high usage of duty/obligation, particularly by the Indonesian respondents, was linked to opposition to role reversal (see Chart 6). Thus while Indonesia’s official policy advocates that couples share their domestic duties, there is no official endorsement for husbands staying at home to raise the children. Indeed a number noted that role reversal was ‘savaging our customs’ (Vietnam), was ‘just stupid’ (India), ‘shameful’ (Korea), ‘very ridiculous’ (China), ‘not proper’ or ‘ugly’ (Thailand). In South Korea, where half of the sample was a women’s study class, a number contrasted their comfort with the ‘stereotype’ with tentative endorsement of gender equality, one bravely saying: ‘I want my lover to do what she wants to do. Marriage shouldn’t be the end of life’ (Korea). Two female Thai respondents offered feminist justifications for role reversal: so the man sees that housework and raising children is just as difficult as working outside of the house (Thailand, female, 160202828). in order to change society because men and women have the same/equal role in society (Thailand, female, 160202822).

There were a number of strands to the traditionalist discourse; few of them would come as a surprise to a Western feminist audience, arguing against similar claims over the past decades. Women were ‘more talented in looking after children and doing the housework’ and should do these tasks ‘for the sake of the next generation’ (China); women have ‘instincts’ for housework (Vietnam), while men are incompetent at controlling children (India). Some were explicit concerning the disruption of power relations implied by role reversal, contrasting ‘man’s destiny to be the head of the family and to earn money for the family’ (Indonesia, 180221937) with women’s ‘weakness’ – ‘though they have equal rights’ (Thailand, 160204836). A strong thread in these arguments is the notion of duty, particularly men’s duty to support the family, related to ‘true love’ for one female respondent, and having nothing to do with equality for another respondent: it is as much a traditional ‘Asian’ value as it is a men’s ego that a man must be the breadwinner in the family, simply because he is the head of the family (Indonesia, female, 180222965). my husband loves me, is interested in me and takes care of me, so he tries to be the breadwinner of the family in both the economic and social aspects and still helps me in housework – it is wonderful husband that I love (Vietnam, female, 120152590). the man has to take care of the woman because he is a gentleman (but it doesn’t have to do with women being equal to men) (Thailand, male, 160201800).

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Several commented on women’s duties, for example, to sacrifice her career for the family’s sake (China) or to ‘maintain the harmony in the family’ (Indonesia). Of course, the endorsement of shared housework and childrearing sometimes meant that role reversal was opposed for this very reason: it is improper to either one in a marriage to stay at home all the time, for everybody has many talents and goals. Except to those who are completely uninterested in work, it is boring and passion killing to stay at home doing housework and looking after the children (China, female, 140172709).

In my presentation of a version of this paper at Curtin University, Krishna Sen suggested that men could happily endorse sharing housework and childcare because most middle-class Asian families had domestic servants to do the work. But then, presumably, role reversal would also be acceptable because it would not entail any actual domestic duties. In fact, I suspect that a major reason for endorsing shared housework and rejecting role reversal is that childcare and housework responsibilities are no more shared in most Asian families than they are in Australian ones. This has been labeled ‘pseudomutuality’ in relation to housework patterns in Australia (Bittman & Pixley, 1997, pp. 145–171) where there is a contradiction between a discourse of equality and a practice of inequality. Only one Chinese respondent and two Indian respondents noted ‘pseudomutuality’ in their own cultures. More gave the game away in their comments. Thus, respondents spoke of women ‘supplementing’ their husbands’ income (Indonesia, 180222954) or the husband ‘helping’ the woman (China, 140171677) if he has time (Vietnam, 120152572). He ‘can do the trivial things such as housework but it is more important for him to work with great ambition’ (China, 140171692) as the ‘the mighty pillar of the family’ (China, 140171687). Commenting perhaps on the new ideas circulating in advertisements and women’s magazines, one Indonesian respondent concluded: modernization and globalization aside it is still a man’s duty to earn money for the family and it is a wife’s duty to provide loving care for her children (Indonesia, female, 180222958).

SEXUAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF AND BY ASIAN SOCIETIES ‘Pulling a butterfly’ and the ‘global gay’

Alluding to the construction of India’s sexual history as a long night of sexual repression by British colonial rule, Mary John and Janaki Nair

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(1998, p. 1) ask: Is there a way of charting sexuality in India that does not begin with the Kamasutra (the text) and end with ‘Kama Sutra’ (the condom), separated by an intervening period of darkness illuminated fleetingly by the laborious pieties of erotic temple sculptures?

The Kamasutra addresses a male citizen while women are defined according to their sexual relationship with the protagonist, for example, as accessible to a single man, two men or all men (Roy, 1998, pp. 60–63). By contrast with the single male subject of the Kamasutra text, the Kamasutra (or KS) condom advertisements suggest ‘a new public legitimation of sexuality in the form of consensual, mutual, safe and private heterosexual pleasure’, a nuclear family independent of pre-modern regulation (John, 1998, p. 382). The Kamasutra was also a handbook of Western sexual liberation in the 1970s, although few Western devotees noted its sexism. Similarly, the nimble fingers of Asian women have not only helped build the economic miracle in the free trade zones and the suburban homes of middle-class North Americans or Gulf Oil families, they also work in the red light districts of Bangkok and Manila, Tokyo and Sydney (4). Thailand is the west’s ‘imagined Orient’ in films like The King and I, Emmanuelle and The Good Woman of Bangkok, a trajectory in which Thai women increasingly displace Thai men (Manderson, 1997, pp. 136, 137). Good Woman is not about Thailand, but about Europeans in Thailand, constructing both the women and the country as ‘superfeminine, submissive’ and rape-able (Manderson, 1997, p. 125). However, Western clients are suspicious that the prostitute’s submissiveness is merely an act, that ‘She’s pulling a Butterfly’ (Garber, 1992, p. 124). Prostitutes must be sexually available before they can demonstrate that they are sexually submissive. This is revealed most clearly in the strip shows (Manderson, 1992, pp. 452, 460–462). Thai transvestites, cross-dressed actors and transsexuals ‘perform in ways that reflect their (Thai) perceptions of the feminine, or their perceptions of Western notions of the feminine; often they parody both’ (Manderson, 1997, p. 125). The strip show format was translated into the degrading depiction of a Filipina wife in the Australian movie Priscilla Queen of the Desert, an image of excessive, tasteless sexuality rather than submissive compliance. Another exotic sexualization of the Asian other is in stories of third genders, constituting a topic in several edited collections in the early 1990s, for example, Asian Homosexuality (Dynes and Donaldson, 1992) and Oceanic Homosexualities (Murray, 1992). Examples include the hijras of India and the kathoey of Thailand. For Western academics, a central question has concerned the extent to which these third genders are social roles arising either

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because of more rigid gender role differentiation in Asian and Pacific societies or are expressions of sexual identity. Generally speaking, the answer is that Asian societies have transgender roles while Western societies have sexualized gay subcultures. The story then proceeds to the westernization of Asian homosexuality into the ‘global gay’ as ideas circulate in magazines or with Asian travelers returning from overseas, as gay people meet through the internet or at international conferences (Altman, 2001, pp. 94, 96). More recently, anthropological studies have interrogated the ways in which both ‘traditional’ third gender roles and ‘gay subculture roles’ mutually influence each other in different Asian locations (Altman, 2001, pp. 88–89; Sang, 2003). For example, gayness in Thailand inscribes itself between the ‘complete man’ and the demasculinized kathoey (Jackson, 1997) who takes on ‘feminized’ gender roles. Gayness aligns itself with masculinity through ‘straight acting’, defined against the negative other of the kathoey. Thus gayness is not an import from the west, but rather a ‘marking of what has always existed in Thailand by was previously overlooked’ (Jackson, 1997, pp. 168–189). Where Western academics, tourists and media commentators sexualize Asian societies, some local Asian activists reject these images as contributing to the violence against Filipina or Thai women, all of whom are deemed to be sexually available. Prostitutes are held in low esteem in urban Thai society because of their rural and non-Thai ethnic origins (Cook, 1998, p. 253; Hamilton, 1997, p. 145). Chinese Thai men distinguish the Chinese wife’s body as the ‘domestic flower’, who provides regular coitus, children and family stability, from the ‘wild flower’, the Thai sex worker, who provides temporary eroticized experiences (Bao, 1999, p. 68). Middle-class activist Thai women (Cook, 1998, p. 250) position Thai prostitutes as ‘dutiful daughters’ who struggle to support their families and child prostitution as symptomatic of the violence and misery caused by modernization (Cook, 1998, p. 258). Just as the ageing decry the loss of morals in the west, across Asia there are cries against the ‘corrupting’ effects of Western ideas, transmitted through films, pornography, television, the traffic in people as migrant workers, as prostitutes and as tourists. Corruption is evidenced in a greater incidence of premarital sex, more visible prostitution and gay subcultures. In China, pornographic materials circulate in magazines that contain stories of sexual brutality alongside knitting patterns (Evans, 1997, pp. 14–15). In Vietnam, there is concern that ‘homosexuality is becoming a vogue among young people’ and that ‘these social wrongdoings and disgraceful practices [have come] to be recognized as new, fair and reasonable norms’ (Dang, 1996, p. 72). In rural Thailand customary law, that physical contact between men and women before marriage is a transgression, has not changed. But

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handholding or body contact on a motor cycle is perceived by the young as quite ordinary and rapid adjudication by elders does not necessarily follow observed contact (Lyttleton, 1999, p. 32). Men use their wages and mobility to pay the bride-price for a woman they plan to abandon, a practice encouraged by the belief that AIDS cannot be caught from village girls (Lyttleton, 1999, pp. 32–39). In fact, the young respondents in my sample were more often traditionalists in their opposition to homosexuality and pornography than enthusiastic advocates of these new sexual freedoms. Furthermore, rather than simply understanding this as yet another example of Western ideas displacing Eastern ‘realities’, two further points can be made in relation to reading these data. One concerns the notion of ‘tolerance’ in societies where face is important. The second relates to collective understandings of sexual relations in some Asian contexts. While there might be strident criticism of gay-identified homosexual men as ‘diseased’ or ‘perverted’ in Thailand, this criticism is rarely matched by practical interventions to make men conform to heterosexual norms. Thai views are ‘tolerant yet unaccepting’, prepared to ‘put up with, or permit to exist’. The Western homophobic discourse is both intolerant and non-accepting, so that Western observers miss this distinction in Thai society (Jackson, 1999, p. 229). ‘Coming out’ can be both highly inappropriate and superfluous, where leading a double life is not necessarily equated with duplicity and deception (Jackson, 1997, pp. 178, 188). Similarly, many Thai villagers recognize prostitution as an industry in which women can earn well, but are reluctant to acknowledge young women they know are sex workers, suggesting they are score keepers in snooker halls and so on (Whittaker, 1999, p. 53). The strong burden on young women to support their families is met without confronting quite how this is achieved (Pongsapich, 1997, p. 36). While talking about sex is confrontational, condom distribution is less so and cute condom cartoons and advertisements are everywhere (Borthwick, 1999, p. 214). Stories of collective sexual meanings, framed in terms of honor, shame and face, inform understanding of at least one cross-gender role. In South Sulawesi, women can take on the role of Calalai’ (a term meaning ‘false man’) to save their families from being shamed by a daughter who does not marry and bear children. But some of these women also make personal choices. They call themselves ‘tomboi’ or ‘hunter’ because ‘we hunt down love and then pounce on it’ (Dilah, a Calalai’ in Graham, 2001). In India, the women’s movement accepted, while also seeking to extend, the meaning of rape as linked to communal relations, an attack on the collective group she represents. In some Indian communities, a woman’s body is explicitly used by one man or group as a vehicle to punish her family, caste, clan,

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religious group, as in ‘landlord rape’ or ‘caste rape’ (Ram, 2000, p. 66). More recently, some women’s centers in India work with women within the framework that rape is an unacceptable individual violation of her body, for example, by husbands or ex-partners. With these caveats in mind, let me turn to the results. The Results (2) Where Lyttleton paints a portrait of young rural men and women indulging in illicit sexual relations against the preferences of their elders, a number of my Chiang Mai respondents were very disapproving of ‘women engaged in many bad activities, for example, going out at night’, showing ‘their skin’, having no ‘self-respect’ or not being ‘very polite’. In relation to homosexuality, where the individualist discourse was used by Anglophone and Japanese samples to accept this practice (see Charts 7 and 9), the traditionalist discourse was deployed by the Asian samples to oppose homosexual relations (see Charts 7 and 10). The pattern is not as clear for pornography, where young Asian men in several samples are just as enthusiastic about female nudity as the Anglophone and Japanese samples are. Women, by contrast, oppose pornography in most of these samples (Chart 8). While the willingness to accept homosexuality as an individual’s choice is deployed largely by the Anglophone and Japanese samples, the idea that women can freely choose (or not) to pose for nude photographs and viewers can freely choose to view them is a much more widely used justification in relation to pornography, particularly in the case of male respondents (see Chart 11). By contrast, female Asian respondents, apart from Japan and South Korea, express a traditionalist opposition to pornography. They are only joined by male respondents to any significant degree in India and Indonesia (Chart 12). I will return to these gendered patterns after a discussion of the vocabularies used by the respondents to justify their attitudes. Different combinations of a standard set of ingredients produced the traditionalist discourse across many of the Asian sub-samples. In places like Indonesia, the religious argument of homosexuality as a sin was dominant. In Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam, homosexuality was also understood to be a psychological illness. In almost all the samples, some respondents saw homosexuality as ‘unnatural’ or ‘disgusting’, while some Indonesians saw it as ‘plain stupidity’ or ‘foolishness’. Dangers were also alluded to, both physical dangers (like AIDS) and social (ostracism). A less virulent strain of comments, largely from India and China, suggested there was a proper time in life for sexual relations (and indeed viewing pornography), and 16 was too young.

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l te

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Same-Sex Sexual Relations between People Over the Age of 16 are Acceptable: Gender and Nationality.

CHILLA BULBECK

Chart 7.

Th

ea

na hi

n pa Ja

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ra

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a ad C an

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Young People’s Attitudes to Gender Issues

female agree 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

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Chart 8.

ta

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a w

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male agree strongly

Female Nudity in Magazines is Acceptable: Agree Strongly and Agree by Sex and Country Sample.

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female - individualist 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

l w

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In do ne si a

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Vi et na m

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Gay Sexual Relations are Acceptable: Individualist Discourses by Sex and Country of Sample.

CHILLA BULBECK

Chart 9.

C an ad a

U SA

male individualist

Young People’s Attitudes to Gender Issues

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female traditionalist

l to ta

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In d

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ia In d

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Chart 10.

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re a

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pa n Ja

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SA

male traditionalist

Gay Sexual Relations are Acceptable: Traditional Discourses by Sex and Country.

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USA

Chart 11.

Canada Australia Japan

China

South Ko Thailand Vietnam India rea

Indonesia weighted

total

Female Nudity in Magazines and Advertising is Acceptable: Individualist Discourse by Sex and Country. CHILLA BULBECK

Young People’s Attitudes to Gender Issues

70 60 50

female traditionalist

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male traditionalist

30 20 10 0 USA

Chart 12.

Cana

da

Aust

ralia

Japa

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a

Sout

T V I h Ko hailand ietnam ndia rea

w nesia eighted

Indo

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Female Nudity in Magazines and Advertising is Acceptable: Traditionalist Discourse by Sex and Country of Sample.

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Young people lacked responsibility, were unable to judge the consequences of such grave actions or would be distracted from their studies. Capturing the flavor of many of these responses was this comment from China: unmarried people should be prohibited from having sexual relations in order to maintain social stability and control the spread of certain sexual diseases (China, male, 140171692).

This comment suggests collective reasons for restricting young people’s access to sex. Other respondents explicitly identified social reasons: homosexuality (and less often pornography) are anathema to ‘Vietnamese fine custom and tradition’, posed ‘hazards’ to ‘traditional’ Indian culture, caused the degradation, despoilation or uglification of Thai culture, violated the ‘wisdom’ and ‘values’ of Indonesia. In India, female nudity ‘would push our country’s future toward darkness and our progress would be hampered’. In China, part of the official rhetoric in relation to homosexuality, prostitution and pornography identifies these as pollutions imported from the west. Several respondents noted that the government did not approve of magazines showing nudity. Students reflected on the challenge from the west, even if they opposed the official discourse, for example, accepting homosexuality now that human relations are ‘complicated’ by the ‘development of society’ or claiming that ‘we should open our minds in this open world’. In other national samples, an international perspective was suggested: in today’s globalized and transparent world, children grow fast and so they mature fast. Sexual relations with the same sex is fine as long as the persons are responsible for their act (Indonesian, male, 180221930). according to statistics, 5% of world population is homosexual. I think they need to be treated equally with other people (Vietnam, female, 120152591).

Several Anglophone respondents referred to the sermon of self-help literature: we have an obligation to ourselves to search for and express our ‘true’ selves, our authentic sexual identity: by this age most people are sure about their sexuality and if they’re confused what’s wrong with experimenting to try and find out. It’s better than living the rest of your life a lie or in doubt about who you are (Australia, female, 10021004). some people do like things that are different but people should be them selfs (Australia, female, 2105611885).

Similarly, to many of the Japanese respondents, gay love ‘couldn’t be helped’ (male), or ‘regardless of sex, a human being can love the humanness of the partner’ (female). By contrast, the Korean respondents were, on the whole, more ambivalent. They expressed tension between traditional opposition to homosexuality and claims that it was ‘fine if they love each other’ or the ‘right’ of

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individuals to make this choice in a ‘diverse’ society. Generally speaking, however, the trope of love and happiness was absent from the young Asians’ comments. Indeed some of the Indonesians and Indians felt that homosexuality would only bring unhappiness. Others were puzzled by the very notion, given that large numbers of people of the opposite sex are available and no one could find homosexual relations sexually ‘exciting’. Let me turn to the gender differences in the attitudes to these two sexual issues. According to many radical feminists, lesbian relationships should be legalized while (violent and abusive) pornography should be illegal. Indeed a number of samples of young women take up this ‘feminist’ position, in that their opposition to pornography is greater than their opposition to homosexual relations, as indicated in Chart 14. In almost every sample, the females disapprove of pornography more so than they do homosexuality; the reverse being the case for the males. Only the Korean and Indonesian females are more approving of pornography than homosexuality and only the Canadian males are more approving of homosexuality than pornography. Indeed a good number of female respondents used a feminist discourse to oppose pornography (see Chart 13), although not to endorse same-sex sexual relations (the negligible to zero use of the feminist vocabulary in relation to homosexual relations is not charted). In fact, the feminist and traditionalist discourse often become blurred when discussing pornography, with terms like ‘degradation’ potentially indicative of either discourse, unless it is connected more explicitly with women’s rights: ‘[nudity] degrades women, it violates women’s dignity, women’s right and status’ (Indonesia, female, 180221926). In India, Indian feminists have blackened film hoardings and picketed cinemas in their initiatives against the ‘ubiquity of sexual imagery for male consumption’ (John & Nair, 1998, p. 29). Following some Western jurisdictions such as Canada, the Indian legal system added a law in 1987 which sought to prevent the depiction of women ‘in a manner which is derogatory to women or denigrating women or which is likely to corrupt public morality’ (Agnes, 1995, p. 137). As in Canada, there is debate amongst feminists concerning whether such legislation actually arms the moral majority rather than feminists, particularly as many of the cases in Canada were brought against lesbian and gay publications (Gotell, 1997). Thus many respondents, in India and elsewhere, criticized the objectification of women in pornography: ‘women aren’t a showpiece or a toy’, a ‘furniture piece to be kept at home and admired’ or used to sell men’s products. Some young Indonesians also spoke of ‘exploitation’, ‘sexual harassment’ and reinforcing the ‘male stereotype’. The South Korean males responded to the lessons learned in their women’s studies class at Ewha University, with strong use of the feminist discourse (Chart 14), although, here too, the traditional and feminist

90

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Chart 13.

Canad

a

Austra

J lia apan

China

South

India V T Koreahailand ietnam

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w esia eighted to

tal

Female Nudity in Magazines and Advertising is Acceptable: Feminist Discourse by Sex and Country.

CHILLA BULBECK

Young People’s Attitudes to Gender Issues

Weighted average Male Indonesia

Female

India Vietnam China Thailand Korea Japan Australia Canada USA -40

-30

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Chart 14. Difference between Approval of Pornography and Same-Sex Sexual Relations by Gender and Country: Agree Plus Agree more than Disagree (the Left-Hand Side Shows Greater Disapproval of Pornography; the Right-Hand Side of Homosexual Relations). 91

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rhetorics were interwoven. One respondent described it as ‘disgusting’ to treat ‘women as sexual objects’ and the viewers and photographers as ‘animals’. In Vietnam and China, following the official communist line, there was more opposition to the commodification of women’s bodies, which are in fact ‘beautiful’ if not used commercially. A feminist position suggested: in today’s society women have achieved equal status with men. So I think the abovementioned things are a kind of insult to women. Women’s rights are respected. It should be strongly opposed since women are no longer men’s toys (China, female, 140171683).

CONCLUSION Anthropologists and regional scholars are generally leery of the dualist oppositions I have used in this paper. But I believe that something of value, in terms of broad brush strokes, can be said about differences between Western and Asian approaches to gender issues, while allowing for the exceptions, such as Japanese respondents’ greater use of the individualist vocabulary for the sexual issues and the shifts made possible by exposure to feminist ideas, as with the South Korean males. Following Gayatri Spivak’s defense of strategic essentialism, I call this thought experiment ‘strategic dualism’. As Spivak (in Spivak with Rooney, 1994, p. 179) suggests, ‘you deconstructively critique something which is so useful to you that you cannot speak another way’. Just as Spivak has defended the pragmatic value of essentialism for political purposes in concrete situations, so too I think a claim can be made for strategic dualism. There are differences of power, resources and culture across the world even if they do not line up neatly into first and third worlds. While simple oppositions between us and them quickly become blurred once we start exploring the issues, we need a place to start the analysis, categories with which to organize ideas even as they become compromised and complicated in discussion. So, bravely, I will conclude by saying that issues of collectivity and obligation seem more to characterize the Asian responses, while individualism and choice mark the Anglophone responses. Access to these different discourses interacts with social prescriptions to influence opinions concerning gendered workload divisions in the household, pornography and same-sex sexual relations.

NOTES 1. Klein (asks why the abuses in sweatshops in Asia, which have been going on for decades, became prominent in the mid-1990s. The slogan of the 1990s that Asian

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workers were taking ‘our’ jobs began to give way to ‘Our corporations are stealing their lives’. The power of the logos also makes consumers feel complicit in the wrongs these brands commit (Klein, 2000, pp. 332–335). 2. The idea of ‘nimble fingers’ has arisen from an oft-quoted Malaysian government brochure: ‘The manual dexterity of the oriental female is famous the world over. Her hands are small and she works fast with extreme care’ (see Bulbeck, 1988, p. 99 for a summary of the discussion). 3. For example, China’s middle class is a tiny fraction of the population, estimated at 4.3 million Chinese (Hooper, 1998, p. 168). 4. In Thailand, it is estimated that two million women work in the sex industry, including migrants from Burma and Cambodia, and that an estimated 50,000 Thai women work illegally in the Japanese sex industry (Phizacklea in Westwood & Phizacklea, 2000, p. 132). Western female tourists also engage in liaisons with Thai men which have a commercial aspect (Hamilton, 1997, p. 146).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have benefited from feedback on interpretation of my results from audiences in Eugene Oregon (my thanks to Joan Acker for arranging the seminar), New Delhi (thanks to Patricia Uberoi), Mumbai (thanks to Veena Poonarcha) and Perth (thanks to Krishna Sen). My thanks go to the participants in all the localities involved in this research and to my local researchers: Dou Wei in Beijing; Suryono Gentut in Jogjakarta; Alok Ranjan Jha in New Delhi; Parul Khampara in Mumbai; Phung Thu Thuy in Hanoi; Kumna Jung in Seoul; Sukanya Pornsopakul in Chiang Mai; Chonmasri Patcharapimol in Bangkok; Aya Kimijima, Miya Suga, Yukako Shibata, Yukiko Tani, Iida Hiroyuki, Kazuko Tanabe, Nakao Hidehiro and Kazuyo Kamikubo in Japan; Mark Moritz and Bayard Lyons in the USA; Mireille Huberdeau in Winnipeg; Sharon Rouse, Simon Davey and Lara Palombo in Australia. My special thanks to Jenni Rossi who devised the coding manual, coded all the questionnaires and created the ever-expanding SPSS file to our mutual satisfaction, and to Saul Steed who assisted Jenni with coding the comments. Jenni and Saul are the most enthusiastic and competent researchers one could wish to have.

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Roy, K. (1998). ‘Unravelling the Kamasutra’. In: M. E. John & J. Nair (Eds), A question of silence? The sexual economics of modern India (pp. 52–76). New Delhi: Kali for Women. Sang, T. D. (2003). The emerging lesbian: Female same-sex desire in modern China. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Sen, K. (1998). Indonesian women at work: Reframing the subject. In: K. Sen & M. Stivens (Eds), Gender and power in affluent Asia (pp. 35–62). London, New York: Routledge. Sen, K., & Stivens, M. (Eds) (1998). Gender and power in affluent Asia. London, New York: Routledge. Sohn, S. (1999). The women’s movements in Korea: Transition and prospects. Asian Women, 9, 27–44. Spivak, G. C. with Rooney, E. (1994). In a word: Interview. In: N. Schor & E. Weed (Eds), The essential difference (pp. 151–183). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Stivens, M. (1994). Gender at the margins: Paradigms and peasantries in rural Malaysia. Women’s Studies International Forum, 17, 373–390. Stivens, M. (1998). Theorising gender, power and modernity in affluent Asia. In: K. Sen & M. Stivens (Eds), Gender and power in affluent Asia (pp. 1–34). London, New York: Routledge. Suryakusuma, J. I. (1996). The state and sexuality in New Order Indonesia. In: L. J. Sears (Ed.), Fantasizing the feminine in Indonesia (pp. 92–119). Durham, London: Duke University Press. Westwood, S., & Phizacklea, A. (2000). Transnationalism and the politics of belonging. London: Routledge. Whittaker, A. (1999). Women and capitalist transformation in a Northeastern Thai village. In: P. A. Jackson & N. Cook (Eds), Genders and sexualities in modern Thailand (pp. 43–62). Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books.

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SEX ROLE IDEOLOGY IN CANADA, MEXICO AND THE UNITED STATES Richard J. Harris, Juanita M. Firestone and Paul J. Bryan ABSTRACT This study is a secondary analysis of attitudinal data collected by the World Values Study Group in 1990. Focus is upon differences in sex role ideology among the North American countries of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Specifically, efforts are made to determine if Mexico exhibits significantly more conservative attitudes about gender roles than its northern neighbors. Further emphasis will be placed upon determining whether or not the notion of ‘‘machismo’’ truly exists among Mexican males. The population consists of persons 18 years of age or older and was selected by stratified random sample in the United States and Canada, and quota sampling in Mexico. Weights are employed to ensure that the samples are nationally representative. Findings suggest that, after the implementation of demographic and attitudinal controls, Mexicans are slightly more likely to exhibit more traditional attitudes about appropriate gender behavior. The ‘‘notion’’ of an element of ‘‘machismo’’ in Mexico, however, does not hold up to the rigors of statistical analysis. Instead, findings illustrate that being a male Gender and the Local-Global Nexus: Theory, Research, and Action Advances in Gender Research, Volume 10, 97–123 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-2126/doi:10.1016/S1529-2126(06)10005-3

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in Canada or the United States is more likely to predict conservative gender role ideology than being a male in Mexico. Nevertheless, being male was one of the weaker predictors of conservative gender ideologies in all of the models. Finally, the strongest correlations were between the dependent variable and the age at which the respondent finished school, age of respondent, and political ideology.

INTRODUCTION Most of the prior research conducted on gender role ideology in regards to the United States, Canada, or Mexico focuses upon the countries individually. While some cross-national approaches that examine the differences in the positions of women in hierarchies of authority in the United States and Canada do exist, this research effort has been unsuccessful at locating any work that focuses specifically on a comparison of gender role ideologies of persons in Mexico with either of the countries previously mentioned. For this reason, most works examined focus strictly upon Canada or Mexico or the United States. Two complementary characterizations related to gender roles have been strongly associated with Mexican culture – machismo and marianisimo (Wood & Price, 1997). Machismo as traditionally conceived forms a world view that exalts patriarchy by assuming masculinity, virility, and physicality as the ideal essence of ‘‘real’’ men (Mosher & Tomkins, 1988; Torres, Solberg, & Carlstrom, 2002; Villereal & Cavazos, 2005; Wood & Price, 1997). Of course, most recent publications criticize traditional conceptualizations of machismo as exaggerated archetypes (Gutmann, 1998, 2003; Mirande, 1997; Neff, 2001; Torres et al., 2002). These recent works highlight the variations on the macho script, which are used to fit environmental circumstances and life stage and family situations (Mosher & Tomkins, 1988). In spite of variations in actual behaviors, most researchers acknowledge an overarching macho ideology, which is supported through media emphasis on males as exciting, action, violence, and male heroics (Mosher & Tomkins, 1988; Neff, 2001; Villereal & Cavazos, 2005). The complementary characteristic marianisimo typically refers to a strong identification with and attachment of individuals to their family roles (Mirande & Enriquez, 1979; Sabogal, Marin, Otero-Sabogal, Marin, & Perez-Stable, 1987; Ybarra, 1988). Research from this tradition often assumes working-class Hispanic women place a high value on the maternal and related domestic roles, and that this value preference is reinforced by

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parents and husbands who do not encourage their focus on higher education and career skills (Mirande & Enriques, 1979; Wood & Price, 1997; Ybarra, 1988). It is not clear whether traditional expectations about gender roles in Mexican origin families are rigid or are necessarily fluid in order to meet current circumstances (Ybarra, 1982). Thus, Mexican families may retain symbolic allegiance to traditional gender roles, but in practice be adaptive in acting out role behaviors as required by such environmental demands as labor market structures, and the power of majority ideologies in shaping individual decisions (Tienda, 1982; Baca Zinn, 1976, 1982, 1994; Ybarra, 1988; Fernandez Kelly, 1991; Williams, 1990; Segura, 1992). Research on Hispanic women in the United States indicated that as their structural circumstances more closely resembled women of other race and ethnic groups, the more similar were their gender role beliefs (Harris & Firestone, 1998). Research on the issue of women in Mexico focuses on economics and household labor as a means of analysis. Chant (1991) looked at female labor force participation and household structure in the cities of Puerto Vallarta, Leo´n, and Quere´taro. Focusing on whether or not women participated equally with men in the varying labor forces and if household structures influenced that participation, she concluded that, while industrial production had increased, it was poverty that motivated household ideologies to shift in a manner that would allow women to work outside of the home in order to subsidize their husbands’ incomes (Chant, 1985; 1991). This has been corroborated by much recent research (Benerı´ a, 1991; Chant, 1996; Chant with Craske, 2002; Gonzalez de la Rocha, 2000; Martin, 1990; McGee & Gonzalez, 1999). The jobs typically held by poorer women rarely pay well enough to support a family entirely and rarely offer opportunities for advancement (Chant, 1991, p. 223). However, they were associated with changes in beliefs about ‘‘typical’’ roles for women (Cerrutti, 2000; Chant, 1996; Martin, 1990, p. 197). Unfortunately, increased female participation in the labor force did not necessarily result in a more egalitarian sharing of household duties (Cerutti, 2000; Chant, 1991; Chant, 1996; Tiano, 2001, p. 1517). Thus, there was no lessening of sexist practices in regards to women and their positions in the labor force and household. Gender by itself does not totally explain one’s ability to enter the labor force. In fact, the lack of access to positions of authority, higher wages, and responsibility appeared to be less true for wealthier, more educated women. In other words, the manner in which sex and class interact to influence one’s ability to participate more fully in the labor market may be more telling of women’s positions in Mexico than gender alone. One way to conceptualize differences in class is to examine the types of paid and unpaid work performed

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by Mexican women. Benerı´ a and Rolda´n (1987, pp. 13–15) discussed these types of labor in terms of ‘‘industrial homework, subcontracting, and household dynamics.’’ Industrial homework consisted of tedious manual tasks that were performed in the household to produce products that could then be sold in the markets or streets. These tasks included assembling plastic flowers or toys, packing sunflower seeds, assembling garments or finishing textiles, making raspas (snow cones). Further, entire colonias (neighborhoods) were centered about a particular industry. The colonia of Tacubaya focused on assembling plastic flowers and packing cloth, while women in El Molinito packed metal sponges and finished textiles (Benerı´ a & Rolda´n, 1987, p. 22). Industrial homework appeared to be the purview of poorer women and was engaged mostly by married women attempting to subsidize the income of their husbands and single, female heads of household. Often, however, the income generated from this activity was insufficient and required women to engage in other moneymaking activities as well. These included paid domestic labor, part-time work in local eating houses, and subcontracting in garment houses. These women often were solely responsible for the unpaid domestic labor they engage in at home, the industrial homework in which they are engaged, and the organizing of their children’s efforts in relation to that industrial homework. Further, women in the colonias often shared in the responsibilities of childcare when they were required to engage in part-time work outside of the home. Upper- and middle-class Mexican women were generally not bound to the same kinds of unpaid domestic labor that were required of lower class women (Garcia & de Oliveira, 1997, p. 381). This is likely due in part to the high abundance and low cost of domestic laborers (Cerrutti, 2000). Further, wealthier women appeared to be more encouraged to pursue both educational and career goals. However, while this was encouraged in women who continued to live with their parents, they were still expected to set those goals and pursuits aside when they married and moved from their parents’ homes into the houses of their husbands. After examining the percentage of household labor, industrial homework, and subcontracting performed by women of all classes, Benerı´ a and Rolda´n (1987) concluded that it is a misperception that increased access to the labor force influences and forces a loosening of traditional gender roles within the household. In fact, their findings suggested the opposite. It was economic necessity that required household dynamics to accommodate women’s entry into the paid labor force as a means of subsidizing household income. In other words, observable changes in the status of labor force participation for women were less attributable to changing gender role ideology and more to the result of pure

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economic need, as evidenced by the types of positions in which women were employed. A survey of Mexican production firms as to the reasons given for hiring women demonstrate quite traditional gender role ideology. Fifteen percent of the responses stated that women were good employees because of their ability to follow orders. The careful manual work that required the dexterity of female hands trained to sew and embroider was the reason why another 28% of companies hired their women employees. Finally, 3% stated that they preferred to hire women because they were less troublesome than men. In the United States most work related to gender role attitudes highlights how attitudes have become more liberal over time. For example, Harris and Firestone (1998) documented a ubiquitous convergence toward egalitarian attitudes among Whites, African Americans, and Hispanic American women in the U.S. As documented by Bryant (2003), both men’s and women’s traditional views about gender roles declined during their college experience, and women held more egalitarian views than men at college entry and after 4 years. The work of Thornton, Alwin, and Camburn (1983) in the early 1980s examines the shifting sex role attitudes of persons living in the United States and examines attitudinal as opposed to behavioral data. Findings demonstrated that gender role ideology was becoming more egalitarian over time. Substantial differences were observed across generations. Daughters demonstrated more liberal views in 1980 ‘‘y than their mothers had in 1962’’ (Thornton et al., 1983, p. 213). Further, striking differences in attitudes were noted between boys and girls (see also Bryant, 2003 who found similar differences between male and female college students). According to the authors, sons consistently scored more conservatively than daughters. Interestingly, when the researchers examined the attitudes of mothers and their sons, the more liberal scores typically observed in the younger generation were offset by the disparities in attitudes between men and women (Thornton et al., 1983, p. 215). The authors attributed these shifting attitudes to increased labor force participation among women. More recently, Firestone, Harris, and Lambert (1999) and Harris, Firestone, and Bollinger (2000) also supported these findings. Similar to the findings of Benerı´ a and Rolda´n (1987) in Mexico, the authors suggested that female labor force participation influences and is influenced by gender role attitudes. Specifically, ‘‘the finding of both cause and effect relationships between work and sex role attitudes reinforces the importance of biases produced by assuming causal influence in one direction,’’ (Thornton et al., 1983, p. 225) and detracts from the focus on the

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influence of economic need as a catalyst for labor force participation. Furthermore, gender role ideologies becoming less traditional could lead to more egalitarian expectations (and socialization experiences) for men and women, including those related to participation in paid labor and differential wages (Firestone et al., 1999). A study in the province of Newfoundland, Canada suggested that economic need has required household structures to shift in a manner similar to those discussed previously in regards to Mexico and the United States (Sinclair & Felt, 1992). The Great Northern Peninsula is one of the poorer areas of Canada, and is primarily a fishing region. Study of this region focused on shifting gender role ideologies and practices among the poorer married women in more ‘‘peripheral’’ regions of Canada. Sinclair and Felt (1992) found that although paid labor remained mainly the purview of men in the region, increased need required more and more women to leave the home, at least part time, in order to work in the fishing industry as a means of increasing household income. As in Mexico, however, women remained almost wholly responsible for the unpaid domestic labor that is required to maintain the household. In fact, domestic labor among the men and women of this region was divided into traditional gender role categories. Women typically engaged in household maintenance inside the home, meal preparation, childcare, and the like. The men, on the other hand, engaged in lawn maintenance, car repair, and the cutting of wood. Interestingly, when there were children under 15 years of age in the home, women typically engaged in fewer household-related duties and spent more time in childcare. This lower percentage of household duties engaged in by women was typically because of the presence of children-helpers and not the additional assistance of their partners (Sinclair and Felt, 1992, p. 65). Finally, the data suggested that the relationship between sex and task was significant in all cases of household and labor force duties, demonstrating that, as in Mexico, a strong division of labor existed between poorer men and women. Recent studies conducted in Canada also highlight the liberalizing of gender role attitudes among racial and ethnic minority groups as well as religious groups (Kim, Laroche, & Tomiuk, 2004; Eid, 2003). These studies also indicate that acculturation had a significant liberalizing impact on wives’ orientations toward gender roles, but did not have a significant impact on changing men’s traditional beliefs about gender role expectations (Kim et al., 2004; Eid, 2003). Interestingly, September, McCarrey, Baranowsky, Parent, and Schindler (2001) found that women incorporated more instrumental ideologies into their gender role orientations while remaining more expressive than men. While the addition of instrumental concerns

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among many women produced an overall liberalizing shift in gender role attitudes among university students, sex remained highly correlated with women remaining significantly more likely to exhibit traditional, expressive orientations (September et al., 2001). A few studies do focus on cross-national differences in sex in relation to positions of authority. This relationship is also likely to impact views about appropriate gender role behaviors. Results suggest greater disparity in access to positions of authority in those countries with larger gross national products (GNPs). In other words, women are more likely to be underrepresented in administrative positions, managerial positions, and elected political positions in those countries with higher GNPs. In fact, even in the few countries that are headed by women, most of the other powerful political positions are held by men, both federally and locally (Moore & Shackman, 1996, p. 273). This is equally true of groups whose purpose is to influence policy. An example of this in the United States is the observable gender gaps in union memberships. Despite the fact that three women continue to join unions for every one man that joins (Mellor, 1995, p. 706), very few women hold an office or serve on committees. Further, ‘‘while higher rates of female enrollment in secondary education increase the relative odds for women in administrative/managerial occupations,’’ higher levels of GNP per capita lower those odds (Moore & Shackman, 1996, p. 281). Ultimately the authors found that neither high levels of economic prosperity, nor the development of women’s ‘‘human capital’’ increased their likelihood of having greater access to positions of authority. Attempting to explain the variations that do exist between countries in regards to women’s access to positions of authority in the workplace, Wright, Baxter, and Gunn (1995) suggested that although persons in Sweden (not a country that will be examined in this analysis) appear to be much more egalitarian in their gender role ideology than the United States, a gender gap in positions of authority exists in Sweden that is much larger than that observed in the United States. Other findings suggest that once a woman has managed to obtain a position of authority in the United States, she has no more difficulty climbing the ranks than she did obtaining her original position. This appears to be less true in Canada however. Instead, it is more difficult for a woman to rise to an authoritative position, the higher that position is in the hierarchy. Further, as is to be expected, levels of occupational segregation by gender, pay disparities, and sexual and reproductive rights for women are fairly similar in both the United States and Canada. These variations suggest Wright and his colleagues (1995) were explained mostly by (1) the availability of managerial/administrative positions and

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(2) the presence and ability of politically organized women’s groups intended to combat discrimination and challenge barriers to women’s advancement. Our research focuses on differences in the North American countries of Mexico, Canada, and the United States. We employ attitudinal data as a means of discovering the differences in gender role ideology among people in the three countries. Independent variables used include sex, marital status, the age the respondent finished school, the respondent’s age, labor force participation, political views, social class, and whether or not the respondent is a member of a racial or ethnic minority group. The first hypothesis is that after controlling for demographic and attitudinal variables, gender role ideologies expressed by American and Canadian respondents will be as traditional as those expressed by Mexican respondents. In addition, in order to explore the existence of the notion of ‘‘machismo’’ among Mexican males, we hypothesize that after controlling for demographic and attitudinal variables, Mexican males are no more likely to exhibit traditional sex role ideologies than male respondents in America or Canada.

METHODS Study Population This research is a secondary analysis of attitudinal data collected by the World Values Study Group (1994) These surveys were conducted in the ‘‘mass publics’’ of 45 countries and consist of adults over the age of 18 (World Values Study Group). From those 45 countries surveyed, three have been selected for the purposes of this analysis. They include Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The survey instrument was administered by Gallup Canada, The Gallup Organization (USA), and Market and Opinion Research International (Mexico). In the United States and Canada, stratified random sampling was utilized. Mexico utilized quota sampling based upon ‘‘sex, age, occupation, and region’’ (World Values Study Group, 1994, p. 11). Weights are employed to insure that the samples are nationally representative. Univariate information for the complete samples for each country indicates that in Canada 51% of the respondents were female and 49% were male. The respondents’ mean age was 42 (SD ¼ 13). The mean age for finishing school was 18 (SD ¼ 2.4). Ninety-four percent of the population was Caucasian. The remaining respondents (6%) have been placed in a ‘‘minority’’ category.1 In Mexico, 45% of the respondents were female and 55% were male. The respondents’ mean age was 34 (SD ¼ 13). The mean

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age for finishing school was 16 (SD ¼ 3.8). Nineteen percent of the population was Caucasian. The remaining respondents (80%) have been placed in a ‘‘minority’’ category (see Table 1). In the United States, 50% of the respondents were female and 50% were male. The respondents’ mean age was 44 (SD ¼ 18). The mean age for finishing school was 18 (SD ¼ 2.2). Eighty-four percent of the population was Caucasian. The remaining respondents (16%) have been placed in a ‘‘minority’’ category. Measurement and Procedure The independent variables included in this analysis include marital status, sex, age, labor force participation, a scale measuring political views, class, race, or ethnicity, and an interaction term looking specifically at married males. Table 1 provides the univariate distributions for the cases included in the regression analyses. Originally, respondents could respond to the variable measuring marital status as married, living as married, divorced, separated, widowed, or single. The variable asks for the respondent’s ‘‘current’’ living situation. With this in mind, ‘‘married’’ or ‘‘living as married’’ was coded as one and the remaining possible responses were coded as zero. The sex variable was dummy coded so that zero equals female and a score of one equals male. Labor force participation has been coded, as closely as possible, to approximate a measure of full-time employment. Respondents working in the labor force for 30 h a week or more were coded as one in order to determine if larger amounts of labor force participation influences one’s gender role ideology. Two dummy variables were created to measure class.2 The first measures whether or not a respondent is upper or uppermiddle class (coded as 1), with other respondents being coded as zero. The second variable identifies middle-class, non-manual workers and skilled manual laborers (coded as 1), with other respondents coded as zero. In an attempt to measure race/ethnic minority status, minorities of several different ethnicities (Negro Black; South Asian Indian, Pakistani; East Asian Chinese, Japanese; Arabic; Other) have been grouped together and coded as one, while Caucasians have been coded as zero (see Table 1). This grouping of minorities together is necessary because of the small numbers of cases in the varying categories as well as the varying racial and ethnic makeup of the countries being analyzed. For the purposes of this analysis, the term minority is used to indicate a ‘‘power minority’’ as opposed to a demographic minority. For example, in Mexico 79% of the respondents were not Caucasian. They have, nevertheless, been coded as minorities in an attempt to capture the difference in their sex role attitudes as compared to Caucasians

Variable

Sex role ideology (SEXIDEOL)

Marital status (MARRIED) Gender (MALE) Age when respondent left school (V356)

Respondent spends 30+ h in the labor force per week (GT30HR)

Univariate Informtion about Variables in Analyses.

Description

Eight-point index measuring sex role ideology. 0 ¼ most liberal response; 8 ¼ most conservative response 1 ¼ currently married or living as a married couple; 0 otherwise 1 ¼ male; 0 otherwise 1 ¼ completed at 12 or younger; 2 ¼ completed at 13; 3 ¼ completed at 14; 4 ¼ completed at 15; 5 ¼ completed at 16; 6 ¼ completed at 17; 7 ¼ completed at 18; 8 ¼ completed at 19; 9 ¼ completed at 20; 10 ¼ completed at 21 or older Measured in years. Range ¼ 18–90 1 ¼ respondent spends 30 h or more in the labor market per week; 0 otherwise

Total

Canada

Mexico

USA

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

3.66

1.84

3.575

1.856

3.927

1.714

3.554

1.893

.627

.484

.678

.467

.531

.499

.645

.479

.501 6.161

.500 2.928

.487 6.548

.500 2.333

.537 4.611

.499 3.864

.489 6.878

.500 2.182

40.544

16.677

42.443

16.652

33.806

13.009

43.460

17.655

.485

.500

.490

.500

.420

.494

.524

.500

RICHARD J. HARRIS ET AL.

Age (AGE)

106

Table 1.

Upper or upper-middle class (UPRCLASS)

Middle non-manual and skilled manual workers (MDLASS) Married male (MARMALE) Race or ethnicity (MINORITY) Mexico (MEXICO)

Canada (CANADA)

This variable has been standardized. Negative numbers indicate a more liberal political ideology. Positive numbers indicate a more conservative political ideology 1 ¼ upper and uppermiddle class; 0 otherwise (this variable is interviewer coded) 1 ¼ middle non-manual and skilled manual workers; 0 otherwise 1 ¼ married male; 0 otherwise 1 ¼ persons who are not Caucasian; 0 ¼ Caucasian 1 ¼ persons in Mexico; 0 ¼ persons in the United States or Canada 1 ¼ persons in Canada; 0 ¼ persons in Mexico or the United States

.032

.996

.016

1.009

.048

.989

.036

.989

.355

.182

.386

.109

.311

.143

.350

.677

.468

.661

.474

.617

.487

.733

.443

.333

.471

.049

.215

.786

.410

.135

.342

.277

.447

.347

.476

.304

.460

.341

.474

.265

.441

.356

.479

1.48

A Comparative Analysis of Sex Role Ideology in Canada

A scale measuring the leftness or rightness of respondents political views (ZPOL)

Note: Total, N ¼ 3096; Canada, N ¼ 1102; Mexico, N ¼ 819; U.S., N ¼ 1175.

107

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(the typical ‘‘power majority’’). An interaction term has also been created, which examines the impact of being a married male over and above the effects of either variable independently (1 ¼ married male; 0 otherwise). Since there is no variable in the data set that measures completed years of formal education, we used a variable that asks the age of the respondent when they last finished schooling. Responses include 10 categories that will be included in the analysis as it was originally coded. The youngest category is 12 or younger and each consecutive value increases 1 year at a time until the highest value (21 years of age and older). This variable has been included under the assumption that the older a person is when she or he finishes school, the more likely she or he is to have completed more schooling. This is, of course, an imperfect measure and this must be taken into account when interpreting this analysis (see Table 1).3 The variable measuring age in years is an interval/ratio-level variable and begins at 18 years of age.4 A scale measuring liberal or conservative political values has been included as an independent variable in this analysis as well. The scale was originally a 10-point scale with 1 being the most liberal and 10 being the most conservative view. The respondent was asked to place herself or himself on the scale. Because being politically left, moderate, or right might mean something different in Mexico than it would in the United States or Canada, the scale has been standardized (z-score ¼ (variable mean)/ standard deviation) in order to compare the responses cross-nationally. In this case, negative responses indicate more liberal political views, while positive responses suggest a more conservative political ideology.5 Table 2 on the following page provides an explanation, which will serve as a legend for the variables included in the analysis as well as the means and standard deviations for all three countries combined and separately. All variables are approximately normally distributed.6 The dependent variable created for this analysis is an eight-variable sex role ideology index. The eight variables included in the index have been dichotomized so that a score of zero indicates the most egalitarian response and score of one indicates the most traditional answer. The questions and distributions for each nation are shown in Table 2. The first variable asks if it is necessary that a woman have children in order to be fulfilled. The possible answers included ‘‘needs children’’ and ‘‘not necessary.’’ This was originally coded so that ‘‘needs children’’ equaled one and ‘‘not necessary’’ equaled two. It has been recoded so that ‘‘not necessary’’ equals the more egalitarian response, which was coded as zero. The second variable asks if the respondent approves of a single woman having a child outside of a stable relationship with a man. Originally, a

Descriptions, a Statistics, Means, and Standard Deviations of Variables Included in Sex Role Ideology Index.

Variable

Woman needs children to be fulfilled (V215) Woman as single parent (V217)

Working mother (V218)

Pre-school child suffer if mother works (V219)

Women want a home and child (V220)

1 ¼ woman does need a child to be fulfilled (conservative response); 0 otherwise 1 ¼ woman should not have a child as a single parent conservative response (conservative response); 0 otherwise 1 ¼ a working mother cannot establish as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work (conservative response); 0 otherwise 1 ¼ a pre-school child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works (conservative response); 0 otherwise 1 ¼ a job is all right, but what most women really want is a home and children (conservative response); 0 otherwise 1 ¼ being a housewife is as fulfilling as working for pay (conservative response); 0 otherwise

Canada

Mexico

USA

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

.2497

.4294

.4769

.4997

.2122

.4090

.6098

.4880

.5525

.4974

.6038

.4893

.3011

.4589

.3395

.4737

.2681

.4431

.5200

.4998

.7724

.4195

.4908

.5501

.4321

.4956

.5980

.4905

.5480

.4979

.7044

.4565

.6744

.4688

.7273

.4455

109

Being a housewife is fulfilling (V221)

Description

A Comparative Analysis of Sex Role Ideology in Canada

Table 2.

110

Table 2. (Continued ) Variable

A job is the best way for a woman to be independent (V222)

Husband and wife should contribute to income (V223)

Description

1 ¼ having a job is not the best way for a woman to be an independent person (conservative response); 0 otherwise 1 ¼ both the husband and wife should not contribute to household income (conservative response); 0 otherwise

Canada

Mexico

USA

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

.4685

.4992

.3819

.4861

.4185

.4935

.3218

.4674

.1759

.3809

.3108

.4659

Note: Canada, N ¼ 1334, a ¼ .5493; Mexico, N ¼ 1296, a ¼ .5101; United States, N ¼ 1522, a ¼ .5596.

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111

response of one indicated approval, a response of two indicated that it ‘‘depends,’’ and a score of three indicated disapproval. This has been recoded so that an indication that it depends or that the respondent disapproves has been coded as one and approval has been coded as zero. The third through the eighth variables originally allowed respondents to indicate strong agreement, agreement, disagreement, strong disagreement, or that she or he did not know. The third variable asks if a working mother can establish as secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work. In this case, strong agreement and agreement were coded as zero and disagreement and strong disagreement were coded as one. As with the remaining five variables included in the index, a response of ‘‘don’t know’’ was declared missing. The fourth variable questions the likelihood that a pre-school child will suffer if his or her mother works. Strong agreement and agreement were, in this case, coded conservatively (1) and disagreement and strong disagreement were coded as zero. The fifth variable states that a job is fine, but that most women really want a home and children. Strong agreement and agreement were coded conservatively (1) and disagreement and strong disagreement were coded as zero. The sixth variable states that being a housewife is as fulfilling as working for pay. Again, strong agreement and agreement were coded conservatively (1) and disagreement and strong disagreement were coded as zero. The statement that having a job is the best way for a woman to be an independent person (the seventh variable in the index) was coded so that strong agreement and agreement were coded liberally (0) and disagreement and strong disagreement were coded as one. The eighth variable asks for degree of agreement/disagreement with the idea that both the husband and wife should contribute to household income. This was coded so that strong agreement and agreement were coded liberally (0) and disagreement and strong disagreement were coded as one. All variables were added to create the gender role index (see Table 2). The index’s reliability scores were a ¼ .5493 in Canada, a ¼ .5101 in Mexico, and a ¼ .5596 in the United States.7 Explanations, mean scores, and Standard deviations associated with the variables in the index as well as a statistics are summarized in Table 2.

RESULTS As shown in Table 3, the results from an analysis of variance indicated a significant relationship exists between the index measuring sex role ideology and the three countries selected for analysis (F ¼ 18.955, df ¼ 2, p ¼ .0000).

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Table 3.

RICHARD J. HARRIS ET AL.

Means Analysis of Sex Role Ideology by Country (Canada, The United States, and Mexico).

Variable

(N)

Canada USA Mexico

(1334) (1522) (1296)

F

Entire population (4152) 18.9548

DF Sig. F Mean Standard Deviation

2

.000

3.602 3.587 3.972

1.864 1.857 1.772

3.712

1.841

Z

Z2

.095 .0091

There are not, however, substantial differences between the mean score of each country as indicated by the weak correlation (Z ¼ .095) and the very small variance explained (Z2 ¼ .009). For example, the United States scored the most liberally on the index (mean ¼ 3.587, SD ¼ 1.864), while Mexico scored most conservatively (mean ¼ 3.972, SD ¼ 1.772), and Canada’s score was similar to that of the United States (mean ¼ 3.602, SD ¼ 1.864.). Eight separate OLS regression analyses have been performed in an attempt to examine the influences of the independent variables upon gender role ideology. The first two analyses examine attitudes in Canada, Mexico, and the United States combined. The analysis was first performed without the inclusion of an interaction term focusing on married males and then repeated with the term included. The analyses (presented in Table 4) are both significant (stage 1 F ¼ 46.098, po.001; stage 2 F ¼ 42.247, po.001). In Table 4, Stage 1, there are significant relationships between the dependent variable and the independent variables that measure being married, being male, the age the respondent finished school, the respondent’s age, working 30 or more hours a week, political ideology, and being from Mexico. The strongest predictor in the model is age (b ¼ .228). This suggests that the older a person is, the more likely she or he is to have a conservative sex role ideology. Being from Mexico is the second strongest predictor in the model (b ¼ .128) and also suggests a more conservative gender role ideology among those respondents from Mexico. Another one of the stronger relationships is between sex role ideology and the age at which the respondent finished going to school. The relationship is inverse and weak to moderate. In other words, the older a respondent was when she or he finished going to school, the more liberal his/her attitudes about gender roles. Persons who are married, males, and persons with more conservative political ideologies are also slightly more conservative in their attitudes about gender roles. Persons working in the labor force 30 or more hours a week, however, demonstrate slightly more liberal attitudes. The model

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A Comparative Analysis of Sex Role Ideology in Canada

Table 4. Regression Analysis of Sex Role Ideology by Marital Status, Sex, Age When Respondent Left School, Age, Labor Force Participation, Political Ideology, Class, Country, and Race/Ethnicity (Canada, Mexico, and the United States). Stage 1 b Married male Age left school Age Work 30+ h/WK Political views Upper class Middle class Minority Canada Mexico Married male Constant F¼ Sig. F ¼ R2 N ¼ 3096

.182 .399 .076 .025 .204 .252 .153 .016 .180 .005 .532 2.807 46.098 .000 .141

Stage 2

SE b

b

.066 .063 .012 .002 .066 .031 .115 .086 .096 .073 .104

.047 .108 .122 .228 .055 .136 .030 .004 .044 .001 .128

b

SE b

b

.195 .417 .076 .025 .202 .252 .154 .015 .180 .005 .533 .029 2.796 42.247 .000 .141

.089 .102 .012 .002 .067 .031 .115 .086 .096 .073 .104 .130

.051 .113 .121 .228 .054 .136 .030 .004 .044 .001 .128 .007

Source: World Values Data Set.  po.05.  po.01.

presented in Table 4, stage 1 explains 14% (R2 ¼ .141) of the observed variance in gender role ideology as measured by the index. Stage 2 includes an interaction term for married males. The variable is not significant and there is little impact on the dependent variable. Further, the same variables that were significant in stage 1 are significant here with very little change in the strength and direction of the relationships, as evidenced in the slopes displayed in Table 4. There is also no increase in the explanatory power of the model as a result of including the interaction term. About 14% of the variance observed in the dependent variable is explained by the model with the interaction term as well as the one without it (R2 ¼ .141). The analyses included in Table 4 are intended to provide a comparison of sex role ideology of persons in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. In these models, the United States serves as part of the constant. The coefficient for Canada is not significant. However, the relationship between

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living in Mexico and sex role ideology is one of the stronger relationships in the model. This suggests that there are significant differences between the sex role ideology of Mexican and American respondents, but not between American and Canadian respondents. Tables 5–7 move beyond this straightforward comparison and attempt to explain the observed variance in gender role ideology within the individual countries. A regression analysis of the same independent variables used above and their relationship to sex role ideology in Canada is displayed in Table 5. Stages 1 and 2 are both significant (Stage 1: F ¼ 28.294, po.001; Stage 2: F ¼ 26.653, po.001). The significant relationships in stage 1 are between the dependent variable and whether or not the respondent is male, the age of the respondent when she or he finished school, age, working 30 or more hours a week in the labor force, political views, and being a member of an ethnic or racial minority group. The strongest relationships are between the dependent variable and the respondent’s age as well as the age the respondent finished school. Results Table 5. Regression Analysis of Sex Role Ideology by Marital Status, Sex, Age When Respondent Left School, Age, Labor Force Participation, Political Ideology, Class, and Race/Ethnicity (Canada). Stage 1 b Married Male Age left school Age Work 30+ h/WK Political views Upper class Middle class Minority Married male Constant F¼ Sig. F ¼ R2 N ¼ 1102

.104 .397 .112 .032 .304 .200 .122 .119 .743 2.756 28.294 .000 .189

Source: World Values Data Set. po.05.  po.01.

Stage 2

SE b

b

.112 .105 .024 .004 .112 .051 .187 .148 .240

.026 .107 .141 .284 .082 .109 .284 .030 .086

b

SE b

b

.028 .197 .113 .030 .332 .198 .101 .140 .742 .300 2.898 26.653 .000 .190

.150 .185 .024 .004 .114 .051 .188 .149 .240 .229

.007 .053 .142 .272 .090 .107 .021 .036 .086 .077

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A Comparative Analysis of Sex Role Ideology in Canada

Table 6. Regression Analysis of Sex Role Ideology by Marital Status, Sex, Age When Respondent Left School, Age, Labor Force Participation, Political Ideology, Class, and Race/Ethnicity (Mexico). Stage 1 b Married male Age left school Age Work 30+ h/WK Political views Upper class Middle class Minority Married male Constant F¼ Sig. F ¼ R2 N ¼ 819

.226 .320 .073 .020 .032 .221 .069 .227 .002 3.421 12.636 .000 .123

Stage 2

SE b

b

.126 .117 .016 .005 .119 .057 .211 .134 .141

.066 .093 .164 .151 .009 .128 .013 .064 .000

b

SE b

b

.377 .468 .073 .020 .042 .221 .056 .213 .003 .287 3.327 11.537 .000 .125

.174 .167 .016 .005 .119 .057 .211 .135 .141 .229

.110 .136 .164 .152 .012 .128 .011 .061 .001 .077

Source: World Values Data Set.  po.05.  po.01.

suggest that older respondents are slightly more likely to have more conservative gender role attitudes (b ¼ .284). Further, the relationship between sex role ideology and the age of finishing school is weak to moderate and inverse (b ¼ .141). This suggests that the older a person is when she or he finishes school, the more likely she or he is to have a more liberal sex role ideology. Males, persons with more conservative political views, and minorities are also slightly more likely to be conservative in terms of their attitudes about gender roles. The model explains 19% of the observed variance in sex role ideology as measured by the index. Stage 2 includes the interaction term focusing upon married males. The relationship between the interaction term and the dependent variable is not significant. With the exception that being male is no longer significant in Stage 2, there are no significant differences in the relationships between the independent variables included in the two models as a result of the term’s inclusion.8 Nineteen percent of the observed variance is explained by the model. As in Table 4, there was no increase in the

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RICHARD J. HARRIS ET AL.

Table 7. Regression Analysis of Sex Role Ideology by Marital Status, Sex, Age When Respondent Left School, Age, Labor Force Participation, Political Ideology, Class, and Race/Ethnicity (United States). Stage 1 b Married male Age left school Age Work 30+ h/WK Political views Upper class Middle class Minority Married male Constant F¼ Sig. F ¼ R2 N ¼ 1175

.217 .420 .060 .020 .231 .315 .014 .245 .681 2.766 19.216 .000 .129

Stage 2

SE b

b

.110 .106 .026 .003 .113 .053 .211 .163 .157

.055 .111 .069 .189 .061 .165 .003 .057 .123

b

SE b

b

.276 .505 .061 .021 .223 .316 .016 .243 .685 .133 2.724 17.318 .000 .130

.148 .178 .026 .003 .114 .053 .211 .163 .157 .223

.070 .133 .070 .191 .059 .165 .003 .057 .124 .034

Source: World Values Data Set.  po.05.  po.01.

explanatory power of the model by including the interaction term (Stage 2: R2 ¼ .190). Table 6 replicates the above analyses for Mexico. As in the previous tables, both Stages 1 and 2 are significant (Stage 1: F ¼ 12.636, po.001; Stage 2: F ¼ 11.537, po.001). The significant relationships in stage 1 are between the dependent variable and being male, the age of the respondent when she or he finished school, the age of the respondent, and political views. The age the respondent finished school is the strongest relationship in the model and is inversely related to gender role beliefs (b ¼ .164). The older the respondent is when she or he finishes school, the less likely the respondent is to answer conservatively regarding gender roles. Persons with conservative political views and males are also more likely to exhibit a conservative gender role ideology. The model explains 12% of the variance in the dependent variable (R2 ¼ .123). The inclusion of the interaction term in Stage 2 is, again, not significant. Marital status becomes significant,

A Comparative Analysis of Sex Role Ideology in Canada

117

however, and suggests that married persons are slightly more likely to have more traditional gender role ideologies. Nevertheless, the explanatory power of the model is not substantially increased by the inclusion of the interaction term (R2 ¼ .123 (Stage 1); R2 ¼ .125 (Stage 2)). The regression analyses performed for the United States were both significant as well (Table 7, Stage 1: F ¼ 19.216, po.001; Stage 2: F ¼ 17.318, po.001). The significant variables in stage 1 include being married, being male, the age of the respondent when she or he finished school, age, participation in the labor force for 30 h or more a week, political views, and being a member of a racial or ethnic minority. The strongest relationships are between the dependent variable and the respondent’s age as well as the dependent variable and the respondent’s political views. This suggests that older respondents are slightly more likely to have conservative views regarding gender roles (b ¼ .189). Also, persons with more conservative political views, married respondents, and males are slightly more likely to score conservatively. Inverse relationships, on the other hand, exist between a respondent’s gender role ideology and the age at which she or he finished school, working in the labor force for 30 or more hours a week, and minority status. In other words, persons who were older when they finished their schooling, persons who work in the labor force 30 h or more per week, and racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to exhibit more liberal gender role ideologies. The model explains 13% of the observed variance in the dependent variable (Stage 1: R2 ¼ .129). The interaction term focusing upon married males is included in Stage 2. The model, as stated previously, remains significant. There are no significant shifts in the individual relationships with the dependent variable with the exception that marital status and labor force participation are no longer significant. Further, the inclusion of the interaction does not improve the explanatory power of the model, and remains 13% (Stage 2: R2 ¼ .13).

COMPARING RESULTS FOR CANADA, MEXICO, AND THE UNITED STATES The unstandardized regression coefficients presented in Tables 5–7 allow the researcher to compare the impact of the independent variables across each country. The relationships that are significant in all of the models are between the dependent variable measuring sex role ideology and the independent variables measuring the age of the respondent, the respondent’s age

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RICHARD J. HARRIS ET AL.

when she or he finished school, the respondent’s political views, and being a male. Significant relationships also exist between the dependent variable and the independent variables measuring labor force participation and the respondent’s ethnic or racial minority status in the United States (Table 7) and Canada (Table 5). These relationships, however, are not significant in Mexico (Table 6). The age the respondent finished school is a stronger predictor of sex role ideology in Canada (b ¼ .112) than in the United States (b ¼ .060) or Mexico (b ¼ .073). The same is true with the relationship between the respondent’s age and the dependent variable. Being an older person is slightly more predictive of conservative attitudes about gender roles in Canada (b ¼ .032) than in the United States (b ¼ .020) and Mexico (b ¼ .020). Results suggest that conservative political views, on the other hand, are more predictive of conservative gender role ideologies in the United States (b ¼ .315) than in Canada (b ¼ .200) or Mexico (b ¼ .221). Similarly, being a male in the United States (b ¼ .420) appears to be slightly more indicative of conservative attitudes about sex roles than being a male in Canada (b ¼ .397) or Mexico (b ¼ .320). Although it is not significant in Mexico, working in the labor force 30 h a week or more is predictive of more liberal gender role ideology in both Canada (b ¼ .304) and in the United States (b ¼ .231). Finally, while there is no significant relationship between being a racial and ethnic minority and the dependent variable in Mexico, the relationship is almost opposite in direction and strength for the United States (b ¼ .681) and Canada (b ¼ .743). In other words, while being a minority in the United States is predictive of a more liberal sex role ideology, racial and ethnic minorities in Canada are more likely to have more conservative attitudes about gender roles.

DISCUSSION These results fail to support Hypothesis One. In fact, findings suggest that controlling for marital status, sex, the age the respondent left school, the respondent’s age, labor force participation, political views, social class, and minority status, still result in Mexico being a significant predictor of a conservative gender role ideology. However, Hypothesis Two is supported, as findings suggest that being a male in the United States or Canada is more likely to predict conservative gender role ideologies than being a male in Mexico when controlling for those variables listed above. In other words, Mexican males exhibit no more of a ‘‘machismo’’ attitude than male respondents in the U.S.

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119

or Canada. In fact, there is a smaller difference between men and women in Mexico than between their American or Canadian counterparts, at least as those views are measured here. This directly contradicts the often-expressed popular myth of the chauvinist Mexican man. Because the gender role questions used in these surveys focus on the legitimacy of homemaker roles for women, it may be the case that they do not capture Mexican attitudes about gender roles as well as they do those of Americans and Canadians. Accordingly, it may be the case that economic demands in Mexico mean that, in spite of demonstrated traditional beliefs, beliefs about homemaker roles are necessarily fluid. In the U.S. and Canada, it may be the case that because of nostalgic cultural norms about the ideal family, that the questions are more likely to distinguish traditional and nontraditional attitudes. In their discussion of the liberalizing of gender role ideologies in the United States, Thornton et al. (1983, p. 224) suggest that education and generational cohort are two of the most substantial influencing factors upon sex role ideology (see also Bryant, 2003; and Harris & Firestone, 1998 for a discussion of women in the U.S.). Utilizing the variables testing the respondent’s age as well as the age when she or he finished school as proxies for generational cohort and education, Thornton et al.’s finding is replicated in this analysis and suggests that these factors may be a better focus for analysis than either gender or nationality. In fact, respondent’s age as well as the age of the respondent when she or he finished school were consistently the stronger predictors in the models. Our results expand the analysis of Thornton et al. (1983) and suggest that this is the case not only in the United States, but in Mexico and Canada as well. The explanatory power of the models included in this analysis never exceeds 20%. The strongest R2 is associated with the Canadian model (R2 ¼ .189). Twelve to thirteen percent of the variance is explained by the models for both the United States and Mexico, and the comparative model explains 14% in the three countries combined. The inclusion of the interaction term examining married males did nothing to increase the explanatory power of any of the models and resulted in no significant differences in the slopes of any of the independent variables included in the models. To improve the analysis, future research efforts might be better served by creating a series of dummy variables for age in order to capture cohort or intergenerational impacts, as the differences observed in age in this analysis are likely a result of a cohort effect rather than an aging one – that is, rather than a shift to traditional gender ideologies as one ages. Since the variable measuring social class was an interviewer coded variable, future efforts might include a standardized earnings variable, which

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would allow for different monetary units, changes because of inflation or deflation as well as accounting for differences in standards of living and poverty levels across nations. Other efforts might also include a variable examining the impact of having children in the household and a variable measuring the respondent’s religiosity. Nevertheless, this research does help to support some of the work done by previous researchers in the United States, and, further, expands these results by suggesting that stereotypes regarding groups of people in other countries can be called into question by controlling the same variables that contribute to more egalitarian or traditional gender role attitudes in the United States. Finally, while results suggest moderate gender role ideologies among the respondents in the United States, Canada, and Mexico overall, social definitions of appropriate behavior for men and women continue to change. These changes, as documented and researched by several authors (Bryant, 2003; Harris and Firestone, 1999; Firestone, Harris, & Bollinger, 2000; Thornton et al., 1983, p. 215), are evidenced by the relationships to age as well as increases in the educational attainment of men (Bryant, 2003; Moore & Shackman, 1996, p. 283) and women’s increased labor force participation (Moore & Shackman, 1996, p. 285). To conclude, results also suggest that conservative political values are indicative of similar gender role attitudes regardless of nationality. With this in mind, one’s attitudes about appropriately gendered behavior can be said to be a part of a much larger social or political ideology and suggests that these attitudes may be identified and addressed best by examining the broader ideological context from which they stem. Certainly, these results highlight the difficulty of engaging in cross-cultural research. On the one hand, to accurately compare responses, questions have to be worded the same. On the other hand, lack of sensitivity to cultural contexts may lead to impacts based on respondents’ own cultural interpretation of the questions. In the end, the globalization, which is producing systematic changes across nations may also be impacting important attitudes and diminishing past differences.

NOTES 1. The desire to complete parallel regressions with exactly the same variables led to this coding. The original codes for ethnicity in Mexico, however, differ substantially from those in Canada and the U.S., with codes for white (19.8%), black (0.5%), medium brown skin (35.5%), yellow skin (0.3%), light brown skin (22.6%), Indian (5.6%), and dark brown skin (15.7%) (World Values Study Group, 1994). Investigating variations among all categories established that the whites have a

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considerably larger percent classified as upper and upper middle class (19.14% compared to 8.82%, 11.27%, and 4.17) for the medium, light, and dark brown, respectively, providing some support for the dichotomous minority group classification. Further, responses on the gender role ideology variable were very similar, with mean scores of 4.07, 3.88, and 4.06 for the medium, light, and dark brown. This compares to 3.7 for the white respondents. 2. This variable was initially coded by the interviewer who was given specifications as to how to categorize respondents. Beyond this, however, specifics as to the interviewer’s instructions were not outlined in the available codebook. 3. A means test of the dependent variable by the age of the respondent when she or he left school was performed for all three countries. Only Mexico demonstrated significant deviations from linearity (p ¼ 003). It should be noted, however, that there is only a difference of .03 between the R statistic and the Z. Further, as exhibited by the means, the deviations occur mostly for those respondents of 21 years of age or older, and is expected as fewer persons will go to college after completing high school. 4. A means test of the dependent variable by the age of the respondent was performed for all three countries. There are no significant deviations from linearity. 5. A means test of the dependent variable by the standardized political ideology scale was performed. Both Mexico and Canada demonstrated significant deviations from linearity (Canada p ¼ .000, Mexico p ¼ .0118). It should be noted, however, that there is only a difference of .06 between the R statistic and the Z in Canada and a difference of .05 in Mexico. Further, as exhibited by the means, the deviations occur mostly as the mean increases for moderate respondents and decreases for those on either political extreme and is expected. 6. Skewness and Kurtosis statistics were used as the basis for this assessment. 7. a coefficients are typically considered to be conservative measures of internal consistency, and a’s over .5 are often accepted as sufficiently reliable measures, especially given the difficulty of using the same questions across different cultures. 8. The largest observable difference is between the slopes of the labor force participation variables (Step 1: b ¼ .032, Step 2: b ¼ .332). A t-test indicated there was no significant difference (t ¼ .173).

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Mosher, D. L., & Tomkins, S. S. (1988). Scripting the macho man: Hypermasculine socialization and enculturation. The Journal of Sex Research, 26(1), 60–84. Neff, J. A. (2001). A´ confirmatory factor analysis of a measure of ‘‘Machismo’’ among Anglo, African American, and Mexican American male drinkers. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 23(2), 171–189. Sabogal, F., Marin, G., Otero-Sabogal, R., Marin, B. V., & Perez-Stable, E. J. (1987). Hispanic familism and acculturation: What changes and what doesn’t? Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 9, 397–412. Segura, D. A. (1992). Walking on eggshells: Chicanas in the Labor Force. In: S. B. Knouse, P. Rosenfeld & A. L. Culbertson (Eds), Hispanics in the workplace (pp. 173–193). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. September, A. N., McCarrey, M., Baranowsky, A., Parent, C., & Schindler, D. (2001). The relation between well-being, impostor feelings, and gender role orientation among Canadian university students. The Journal of Social Psychology, 141(2), 218–232. Sinclair, P. R., & Felt, L. F. (1992). Separate worlds: Gender and domestic labour in an isolated fishing region. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 29, 55–71. Thornton, A., Alwin, D. F., & Camburn, D. (1983). Causes and consequences of sex-role attitudes and attitude change. American Sociological Review, 48, 211–227. Tiano, S. (2001). From victims to agents: A new generation of literature on women in Latin American. Latin American Research Review, 36(3), 183–203. Tienda, M. (1982). Sex, ethnicity, and Chicano status attainment. International Migration Review, 16(2), 435–472. Torres, J. B., Solberg, S. H., & Carlstrom, A. H. (2002). The myth of sameness among Latino men and their machismo. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 72(2), 163–178. Villereal, G. L., & Cavazos, A., Jr. (2005). Shifting identity: Process and change in identity of aging Mexican-American males. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, XXXII(1), 33–41. Williams, N. (1990). The Mexican American family; tradition and change. Dix Hills, NY: General Hall Inc. Wood, M. L., & Price, P. (1997). Machismo and marianismo: Implications for HIV/AIDS risk reduction and education. American Journal of Health Studies, 13(1), 44–52. World Values Study Group. (1994). World values survey, 1981–1984 and 1990–1993 (computer file, ICPSR version). Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research [producer], August, 1994, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1994. Wright, E. O., Baxter, J., & Gunn, E. B. (1995). The gender gap in workplace authority: A cross-national study. American Sociological Review, 60(3), 407–435. Ybarra, L. (1982). When wives work: The impact on the Chicano family. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 44, 169–178. Ybarra, L. (1988). Separating myth from reality: Socio-economic and cultural influences on Chicanas and the world of work. In: M. B. Melville (Ed.), Mexicans at work in the United States (pp. 12–23). Houston, TX: University of Houston, Mexican American Studies.

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THE ‘‘FREE UNIVERSITY OF WOMEN.’’ REFLECTIONS ON THE CONDITIONS FOR A FEMINIST POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE Paola Melchiori ABSTRACT In this paper I draw some reflections from the experience of the Free University of Women in Milan, Italy. Through this experience it was possible to clarify some of the main issues at stake in feminist knowledge production and pedagogy such as: the relationship between women’s and feminist culture, the knowledge production processes which occur among women, their epistemology, and the kind of scientific rigor of such a body of knowledge. These issues are particularly important from the perspective of teaching and transmitting feminism to a new generation of women.

INTRODUCTION Culture is not a way to attain emancipation, but it is a precise answer to intellectual, existential and vital needs. Culture is a tool for research concerning life, a ‘‘quality’’ of life, not a ‘‘quantity’’ to be possessed. The aim of our research is not only to reinstate female presence in various disciplines, but to investigate the meaning of the fantastic and real man/woman, masculine/feminine, Gender and the Local-Global Nexus: Theory, Research, and Action Advances in Gender Research, Volume 10, 125–144 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-2126/doi:10.1016/S1529-2126(06)10006-5

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relationship, which lies at the origin and shapes any kind of knowledge, finding out which transformations a female subject brings into them. (Melchiori, 1986)

This is the opening ‘‘manifesto’’ of an institution created by a handful of women, in Milan, Italy, which will soon reach its 20th birthday. The text was written at its foundation, in 1986, after 10 years of experimenting with different possible institutional forms. This independent organization was called the ‘‘Free University of Women.’’ The women who founded the Free University were feminists, some of them university professors, particularly interested in what I would call, today, a feminist politics of knowledge. All of them had been involved, at various levels, in research and action around the issue of how the culture of resistance of an oppressed group can become an autonomous culture, able not only to demystify the ideology of a culture and a science with their pretended goals of objectivity, rationality, and universality, but also to move toward a new conception of science and culture. This background and their feminist intellectual practice led them to invent space autonomous from the academy. The autonomy of this space, the absence of negotiations with bureaucracy, the freedom of thinking outside the frameworks allowed an exploration and a clear identification, if not solution, of the main issues at stake in feminist knowledge production and pedagogy.

THE ‘‘150 HOURS’’ The ‘‘150 Hours’’ is the name that was given to a contractual improvement gained by Italian auto and steel workers in 1973, a time when Italian unions were led by a radical generation of workers and joined by many intellectuals. The employers had to pay for 150 hours every three years for cultural and learning activities undertaken by each of their employees, who would add the same amount of hours from their free time. The ‘‘150 hours’’ clause was quickly adopted in other industrial sectors, and later extended to the unemployed and adults in general, which brought many women, first workers, then housewives and the unemployed, to the courses. All the unions decided to give priority to remedial programs for older workers who had never had access to schooling, followed by wider programs aimed at granting all workers a high school diploma. The State was then asked to recognize such independent programs as ‘‘public school.’’ During the same period, some unions organized independent ‘‘university’’ seminars and training sessions for top representatives of labor, political, and cultural groups. The political thrust and strength, that had made the ‘‘150 hours’’ possible, also pushed

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the public administration to agree to offer teachers and logistical support to host workers’ evening programs in public schools and universities and, at the same time, to recognize the best intellectuals chosen by unions and social movements as trainers of all the teachers. In three years 100,000 metallurgic workers went back to public schools with programs designed by Marxist and leftist intellectuals. Although the secondary school phase was more problematic owing to the complexity of redesigning the curricula and the resistance from the State to recognize the programs, at this higher level the experiment was huge, very different from the adult schooling promoted in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. It was an experiment managed directly by the unions, the workers’ cultural vanguards together with some intellectuals. They had taken responsibility for learning objectives, methods, and for negotiating the recognition of their programs with state authorities. The choice of curricula, the composition of the student body and teaching faculty amounted to a true political and cultural experiment. Pupils consisted of blue-collar vanguards who had led the 1968 struggles together with the students, and the teachers were these same students who were coming back en mass to help and learn from their blue-collar allies. This experiment was an attempt by the lower classes at reclaiming and modifying culture. The attempt was sustained by a rich Gramscian tradition, by the debate surrounding Brazil’s Paulo Freire’s exile to Geneva, but above all by the questioning of the Marxist tradition that occurred in those years, through a rereading of Lucaks, Rosa Luxembourg, and other intellectuals. These writers were rethinking the formation of a class conscience and a concept of political avant-garde in a different way than the classic Marxist tradition. The main question at stake was what possibility this political vanguard had, entering the world of culture, to rethink its meaning, its neutrality, its production processes, its capacity to really afford the creation of a different culture and science. The general objectives, as mentioned in the programs were for strengthening collective control over labor conditions and production processes, reclaiming school education without capitulating to outdated standards, questioning school’s social function and neutrality, and defining the intellectual’s role in relation to blue-collar and lower classes. The intention was to avoid oversimplifications and to select the best of the cultural tradition, reinterpreting bourgeois culture, and locating its usefulness from the point of view of alternative social and historical positions. This needed a collective effort from different positions. The workers’ avant-gardes, the Trade Unions who had got this space, needed intellectuals to collaborate. A space opened up for an unusual

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collaboration between students and political leaders, each interested in the political meaning of culture, science and education. Academics, intellectual leaders within the unions, popular adult educators, and researchers joined in many centralized and decentralized groups of discussion and curricula planning at national and local levels. Such a process of collective reflection appealed not only to independent intellectuals, teachers, and students, but also to traditional academics. They opened the doors of their institutes to blue-collar workers, invited unionists to lecture in their universities, and put into question the goals and the social power of their knowledge. The debate, the teaching and the programs focused on how to form an ‘‘alternative social consciousness.’’ A whole series of more specific questions were raised: What kind of relationship should be established with middleclass culture – acquisition, refusal, critique? How to go about building knowledge and historical truths while maintaining and showing awareness of partiality and non-neutrality? How does class-consciousness develop? What are the linkages between experience and its symbolization, between action and reflection? What is the role of teachers, of the full-time intellectual, of the cultural organizer? What is the relationship among social struggles, the changes that such struggles produce, and the cultural interpretations of these transformations? For years, classes were busy reading and debating the classics of the political Marxist tradition for the light they could shed on the formation of ideology. At that time, it was not uncommon for students and workers to read together the works of Marx, Sartre, Lukacs, Merleau-Ponty, Marcuse, Fanon, and others. The influence of Paulo Freire meant that much attention was given to the individual experiences of the people attending courses. Oral histories, reallife anecdotes, the experiences of immigrants and factory workers were told in the first person, collected into texts, worked through with the intent of supporting research on how life experience combines with conscience production and knowledge production, to the point that they could even change the content of formal academic subjects and redesign their disciplinary boundaries and epistemological tools. On the other side, some formalized disciplines were used largely to offer new insights to unravel the cultural patterns and meanings lying behind different life experiences. In the best cases, from these interrelations, new fields, interdisciplinarily reframed, were created. The best results were reached when strong intellectuals of certain disciplines became available and were curious to rethink their own foundation paradigms from these perspectives. In a renewed tie, formed among social processes, political action, and different forms of

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cultural analysis and knowledge, a political stand simultaneously questioned ideology, the neutrality of science, and the constitution of disciplines, in an attempt to find a new rigor and epistemology. Many intellectuals attempted to bring the outcomes of these independent and alternative experiences into academia and took the movement as their most important basis for theorizing. We will see later how this attitude also strongly influenced feminist ideas on how to set ‘‘women’s and feminist studies’’ inside the universities.

FROM THE ‘‘CLASS’’ TO THE INDIVIDUAL The results of this experiment presented many surprises. School classes slowly formed into ‘‘free ports’’ where both cultural norms and politically correct behaviors were put on hold. Listening passionately and investigating individual stories rather than studying abstract ideology became paramount. In this process, however, the mythology of abstract conceptions like ‘‘class’’ was progressively replaced by the real histories of people, and reallife experiences, apart from ideology. This meant that the homogeneity of the ‘‘class culture’’ began breaking down into differences and conflicts, the real confrontation of what we would call today, many ‘‘situated knowledges.’’ ‘‘Vanguards’’ become ‘‘people’’ filled with contradictory desires oscillating between ‘‘integration’’ and ‘‘revolution.’’ The distance between the idealization of the working class and the complex existence of real workers became evident. Also evident was the ‘‘internalization of the oppressor.’’ Teachers were almost disappointed because they were expecting to find ‘‘the leadership of the working class.’’ They found it difficult to manage the complexity and uneasiness of dealing with contradictory and conflicting individualities marked by an internal struggle between the values of the oppressed and of the oppressor. The complexity of individual subjectivities fragmented the compactness of ‘‘the idea.’’ When ‘‘class consciousness’’ was left free to express itself without the constraints of political correctness, it displayed all its convoluted complexity. An analysis of a deeper oppression having to do with the subjectivity of the individual members of the working class started to enter Marxist analysis. Frantz Fanon, Marcuse, Laing, Foucault, and what was then called the antiauthoritarian psychoanalytic movement, led by the psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli and by Lea Melandri, who would be one of founders of the Italian feminist movement. Melandri contributed greatly to the analysis of

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the subjectivity and the formation of the culture of a class that is at the same time culturally colonized and yet in a position to demystify the ideological constructions of the dominant sciences and culture.

‘‘MORE DUST IN OUR HOUSES, LESS DUST IN OUR BRAINS’’ The title of this paragraph, above, is the heading of the class journal given by the women who joined the courses during those years, mainly housewives. Following the first wave of auto and steel workers, women started taking up courses; women workers, but mostly home workers, nurses, unemployed women, migrant women, lately, brought different voices to the working class. What happened was that at the end of each course, male workers usually went back to their occupations, while women did not want to leave the classes. They kept coming back, even to repeat the same course. The voices of illiterate, working and popular classes of women started entering the space of a public school. It was estimated that 2,000 women came back to school in the first three years. For the women, the courses proved to be places of discovery of ‘‘another possible life;’’ they could give voice to their solitudes, consciousness and lifeexperiences, free from cultural and political norms. A space, a social public haven, was provided in which it was possible to talk in the first person about women’s experiences about unspoken suffering, suffering that was considered worthy of study. The collective sharing of this life-based knowledge became, literally, a condition for survival. Feminist teachers immediately reached these spaces where ‘‘normal women’’ were speaking to each other, raising consciousness, studying all kinds of books voraciously, learning to express themselves, and giving feminism the voices of women who feminism feared it would never reach. ‘‘Ordinary’’ women brought to the table a wealth of experiences and reflections on the relationship between life and knowledge, between women’s culture and feminist culture. Women’s philosophy was formed at night, washing dishes, ironing shirts, tiding things up when everybody is asleep. It was formed, they said, ‘‘when everyone is gone, and our kids stop bringing us dirty laundry,’’ when the purpose of ‘‘service’’ in our lives becomes most apparent and ‘‘emptiness knocks at the door of our conscience.’’ It was at this juncture that women discovered a ‘‘desire for knowledge of the world’’ which was also a desire for ‘‘knowledge of the self.’’ Little by little the courses were literally invaded by

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women, mostly housewives, ‘‘more dust in our houses, less dust on our brains.’’ Women’s real presence changed the terms of the intellectual and political debate as the consciousness raising methodology of feminists was added to the mix of Marxist and Gramscian traditions, and psychoanalysis. Moreover, after the initial enthusiasm, the increase in the number of women joining the courses awakened a growing intolerance from the unions. They were ‘‘disturbed’’ by women’s methodology and themes. The combination of these factors with the attempt of Italian feminism to enlarge its reach while keeping all its autonomy led to a separation of the women’s courses from the unions and to the start of independent cultural organizations which later became the ‘‘Free University of Women.’’

THE ITALIAN FEMINIST CONTEXT The years between 1976 and 1980 coincided with a second feminist wave. In this wave feminists were looking for more contact with women of different experiences, classes, and history. The ‘‘cloistered’’ period of strict self-actualization was followed by attempts to make the feminist movement more visible in society. A pedagogical setting was identified as the right space to continue the work started in consciousness raising groups, a space to analyze the problems of power that were starting to appear in the ideal world of sisterhood and the particular kind of authority that was, at the same time, dominating the groups and putting them in crisis. It was considered that any political practice where what is supposed to be transmitted is not only knowledge, but a certain kind of ‘‘consciousness,’’ has a more or less visible pedagogical implication made of the interconnection between an authority coming from ‘‘the experience of life,’’ and an authority coming from a more classic knowledge base. The space of ‘‘150 hours’’ was ideal for developing a work of this kind. Some of the ‘‘150 hours’’ course teachers were already feminists; others joined the movement, attracted by the power of women whose great wisdom was matched only by their great lack of formal acculturation. It is important to note that Italian feminism, along with the political and cultural background mentioned above, was strongly permeated by Marxist culture and was born as a separation and differentiation from the left. What in the United States was called the debate on the feminist standpoint, without its later post-structuralist component, took place very early in Italy. With two characteristics: a strong anti-institutional approach including the

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idea of trying to influence the academic world with its own principles and rules, and the identification of psychoanalytic thinking as a tool particularly important to understand the specific oppression of women. The first meant that the prevailing idea, inherited also by women’s studies, was not to enter the academic world but to dismantle the structure of a self-pretended neutral knowledge and science, from the outside, from the perspective and the strengths of the social movements and their organic intellectuals, deepening the Marxian critique of ideology. According to Marxian analysis of ideology, revisited through Gramsci and Lucaks, the idea was that a really rigorous and creative knowledge could only be produced by intellectuals coming from a class whose position in economy and society was able to unmask the lies of a false ideology. Academics, freed by the need to strictly follow disciplinary and academic rules, conceived as organic intellectuals, were welcome to collaborate in this deconstruction and reconstruction process. The second meant that, in this framework, Italian feminism, deepening the analysis of the material basis of women’s oppression and trying to illuminate all the aspects of power and patriarchy, incorporating psychoanalytic tools into the analysis of patriarchy, and the critique of its ideology, invented a ‘‘special version’’ of consciousness raising, called the ‘‘practice of the unconsciousness.’’ The name was meant to combine a traditional consciousness raising practice, taking as its basis the narrative of every single woman, with a particular use of psychoanalysis, enacted in the ‘‘women’s group.’’ The underlying hypothesis was that the group eliminates the physical presence of men, which is what impedes women from thinking of themselves from themselves. As the psychoanalyst Manuela Fraire writes: One of the elements that hinders the possibility for women to produce not only their own culture but also a critical perspective on the existent one, is men’s physical presence. The co-presence of men and women does not allow the women to think of themselves. They answer a command so old as to be confused with the instinct leading to the fact that, where the man is present, he represents the organizing mind and rationality, while women are inevitably pushed to impersonate the body and instinctuality. (Fraire, 1989, p. 128, Melchiori transl.)

In this ‘‘primary scenery’’ of patriarchy, women are obliged to represent the continuity of existence while men can act the dreams of an immortal and non-embodied mind. Out of the existence given to them by the male presence, paradoxically, the pervasiveness of its imaginary presence becomes even more evident but can be kept at a distance, can be analyzed. This primitive scenery of patriarchy becomes accessible to elaboration and change only by this combination of material absence and imaginary

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presence. In this situation the ‘‘group of women’’ does not guarantee any difference per se. However, making visible the obstacles women meet in thinking about reality and about themselves in a re-composition of mind and body, trying to give voice to their own experience in their own way, they can detect the misogyny that inhabits their intellectual world, show which fears, complicities and seductions have to be elaborated, and thus become subjects and producers of an autonomous culture. ‘‘The group of women’’ allows the permanence of this standpoint, through women’s collective presence and, making available to women a different imagination about themselves, legitimating different linkages between body and mind, and making possible a different knowledge production process. The evocation of motherhood is, in this sense, the possibility of making alive again, recalling in a lived emotional experience, the presence of the first element which constitutes every personal subjectivity: the mirroring eye of a mother/woman. The re-composition of mind and body, made possible by a women’s group, by a valorized mother’s eye, evokes however a work to be done, a project for the future, not an already available inheritance of the past. The recuperation of what was called a ‘‘feminine mediation’’ toward the world, through a mother figure, is necessary, but dangerous and ambivalent. In order to understand the complex and contradictory dynamics of women’s groups oscillating among strong sisterhood, strong rivalries, and deadly personal competition, the specificity of a new mother/daughter relationship with all its discoveries, ambiguities and ambivalences, had to be taken into consideration. The combination of Marxist critique of ideology and psychoanalysis, used in consciousness raising groups, is, in my opinion, the most original and interesting trait of Italian feminism. Among other things, it prompted many academics to rethink their cultural formation and try what was called a ‘‘wild’’ interdisciplinary approach, a ‘‘stealing’’ of bits and pieces of various disciplines, recombining them according to a different logic, and thereby undoing the path that had led them to acculturation. A new hierarchy of knowledge emerged during these processes, so different from the usual one, that one could easily remember group meetings where the academics and even the professional analysts were rethinking and silently accepting the guidance of ‘‘natural feminist leaders’’ who were recognized as able to weave a different set of connections between events and knowledge, using different disciplinary approaches, making visible new linkages and meanings which would have been meaningless in any traditional academic context. In that environment the recognized authority was that of those who were able to keep together the dualities that patriarchal

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culture has created, who were able to create new meanings incorporating lived experience and knowledge, and who were creating an ‘‘embodied mind.’’ The roots of this authority were complex, a combination of consciousness, life experiences, wisdom, critical rethinking about knowledge, and its production processes from a point of view able to ‘‘see through’’ them, unveiling the critical silences that constitute them. Not an ‘‘only women’’ knowledge but a critical women’s eye on knowledge, an eye not immune to patriarchy, but able to detect its own complicity and, only from that consciousness, able to build new knowledge.

WOMEN’S SPACES, WOMEN’S CULTURE: THE FREE UNIVERSITY OF WOMEN The independent organization that was created at this point was called the ‘‘Free University of Women.’’ ‘‘Free’’ being used here according to the German ‘‘Freie Universitat’’ model, an autonomous university born in Berlin in the 1960s, in the midst of the student movements, where the freedom referred both to difference from traditional knowledge and also to reclaiming of a conceptual rigor as valid as the academic one. The idea was to give words and memory to women’s subjectivity and experiences, contrasting them with academic cultures and disciplines in order to rethink knowledge production, its system, and its epistemology. It was implied that the teachers were feminists, researching and teaching women the methodology of feminist research, more than its results, thereby questioning the structure and process of knowledge production in the various disciplines. It was seen as crucial that the collaboration of different women and feminists not be absorbed by academic mechanisms and by the strength of the academic organization of knowledge. The presence of ‘‘ordinary’’ women was seen as a guarantee for not losing touch with women’s culture as the real basis for feminist knowledge. The strong collaboration between women and feminists came out of the fact that many feminist teachers had found a deeper self-involvement with women during the experiences of the ‘‘150 hours.’’ Teaching women a knowledge that was at the same time an enemy and an object of love, a knowledge not made for women and by women, going back to and openly facing the price paid to enter any field of knowledge, in the presence of almost illiterate women pupils, led to unforeseen results. Women not acculturated, were and are, implacable memories of a feminine identity, living memory of what one had to cut, to abandon, in the exercise of learning and

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accepting the rules and the secrets of patriarchal knowledge. These women were revealing to feminists the secret misogyny still embedded in their own intellectual activity and knowledge. More specific hypotheses about the relationship between women and culture started to appear. Feminists had to question their own love for their chosen disciplines, asking themselves to what extent culture was used to mask their belonging to their gender, somehow guaranteeing them a neutral identity. The structure and goals of culture were questioned from the point of view of women’s real-life experiences and from the point of view of nonelite cultures as well as from the point of view of the meaning of intellectual activities in relation to sexuality. A pedagogical setting was an ideal space to analyze all these issues in slow motion. It was a protected setting, like a laboratory, where it was possible to observe the making of a knowledge process for an individual woman starting from its very beginning. Here the kind of questions that life experiences pose to a knowledge system and to different disciplines, and also the interplay of differences among women as sources of power and potential conflict could be seen. Because in a formally recognized pedagogical setting the power of the historically cumulated differences, of culture and of class, are explicitly declared, and because the borders between teachers and pupils can be explicitly made the objects of analysis, observation can be made of how the intellectual power and the social power implied in these differences operates to affect the ideal sorority of women working together in a common project. Throughout this experience, identities and differences among women apparently cut through ‘‘quantities’’ of culture, literacy, wealth, and class, which inevitably create a hierarchy of values, and start to redesign themselves in unexpected ways. Various overlapping scenarios of a process of knowledge production and transmission reenacted themselves under new perspectives.

THE PEDAGOGICAL SETTING AS A LABORATORY A course or class of women is first of all an environment. It can be described as a complex forum crossed by a variety of currents and tensions giving place to a force-field where many levels play and appear at the same time. How does a woman enter the knowledge production process from her own body and not have to forget her own sexual identity? This is the process to be observed. It means unfolding the minute steps of how the intermittencies of the body link with the work of symbolization, how intellectual activities are symbolized in

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relation to sexuality, how abstractions and generalizations are made, how basic paradigms for judgment and further knowing are constructed. More analytically, we can observe:  the meaning of cultural activities in the personal emotional balance of women. The relationship between learning, its contents and its tools, its activities, such as writing/ speaking/ reading: what I would call the (emotional economy) of knowledge;  the secret animation of knowledge, that is, the secret life of disciplinary thinking as a whole system and as a single discipline;  the interrogation that the chaos of experience poses to the structure of knowledge itself, to its founding paradigms, and the implication in terms of the relationship between reality and the abstractions necessary to knowledge; and  finally, the interplay of differences among women in terms of the kinds of power that emerge among women and in the building of the fabric of a women’s society. These include the differences of social condition, cultural history, time constraints, age, life situations, and emotional attachments. Often, young and single women find themselves leading older women with children and families along their cultural journey. Today older women have to transmit to younger women their knowledge and experience. These elements are important in a scenario, which willing or not, evoke maternal and filial roles that continually give additional and side meanings to the process of learning.

A CULTURE FOR LIFE What needs to be understood first is the purpose of cultural activity in the formation of any female subjectivity. The central goal in women’s quest is not pure knowledge. It is always related to a quest for life. Cultural acquisition is the stated goal of education and courses, but it occurs inside a relationship so involving that it cannot be displaced by the objects of culture. Intellectual work cannot be separated from emotional ties. Teaching and learning among women allows a kind of restarting of the process under different conditions, without first having to repeat the splitting of body and mind. The first striking event, in terms of emotional setting, is the reawakening of desire, a ‘‘sparkly feeling.’’ As one woman defined it, like an awakening. What is waking up is the opening of the possibility to access reality with a less painful symbolization process. It is the suspension of a sentence, the

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reopening of a story with a different possible end, the tying back of old threads. What is interesting is the fact that this feeling is shared by teachers and pupils. The renewed tie to which I am referring is that between women’s drives and the will for knowledge. The shadow usually cast by women’s traditionally passive response to their own desires, mind, and body is blown away. Action goes back to its neutral point, before the polarization of characters fixes individual features into stereotypical historical identities. The mere presence of another woman evokes the possibility of easing the split between mind and body as the precondition of access to the world of knowledge. This is the split responsible for setting the original contraposition between mind and body against each other, replicating countless times the sexual dualism of ‘‘opposite’’ or, what is the same for women’s destiny, its ‘‘complementary.’’ If ‘‘the man/woman relationship is the most fundamental locus of all unequal relationships,’’ and if this relationship has ‘‘crept and multiplied in the deepest strata of consciousness and society,’’ (Balandier, 1985, p. 83) then the slightest intentional movement of symbolism makes it remerge in its defining elements. A whole pattern which had remained submerged comes to the surface. Teachers and students produce knowledge, but as the presence of women’s bodies is unavoidable, they have to question themselves about the relationship between their knowledge and their sexual identities. A pupil is a receiver of a knowledge not created by and for women while the teacher is the mediator of it. Knowledge is not ‘‘gendered’’ by changing the gender of its mediator, but in this presence, a double process takes place. On one hand, students/women can approach knowledge and learn under the understanding eye of other women, now seeing their gender as the legitimate subject of knowledge and thought. On the other, teachers ‘‘unlearn’’ their knowledge. If a feminist is supposed to have clarity about the meaning of the process which is going on, she is not immune from the process. The feminist presence is the guarantee of a different possibility for women; they witness the possibility of learning without sacrificing their own gender. But the process involves teachers as well because what is at stake is the whole meaning of the intellectual activity for a female subject. Therefore, from different positions, both teachers and students go through similar experiences. Women’s presence reactivates for teachers’ dormant memories, reconnecting with the emotional pathways, which lead women both to (new) modes of thought and to new relationships with different thought modes. The act of teaching women gets charged with all the cultural messages relating to women, femininity, female, body and its equivalent, and in the

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process such messages become entrenched. Women who are learning evoke the cumbersome weight of the female body, its resistance to the mind, but they also guarantee that the female figure will not disappear in the process. An original often forgotten process of re-enactment occurs, a process through which teachers can re-live and re-look through the deep meaning of their own cultural history in relation to their gender is re-enacted. They can see the unfolding of their own process of symbolization, the approaching of their intellectual activities and the deep reasons for the emergence of a passion for a certain subject or a certain discipline. How do the activities of the mind unfold in relation to the sexual polarities and the body: Subjugation? Control? Revenge? Oblivion? And which feelings, emotions, in relation to which imagination of femininity and sexuality? This thinking in presence with other feminine subjectivities, in reality and in the imaginary, creates a collective ‘‘gendered eye’’ which is more than the addition of the individual women. This collective eye, embodied by real and imaginary presences, takes a stance outside patriarchal parameters; sets a process which allows, promotes, and legitimates new links between emotions, thoughts, and phenomena; and gives meaning to ideas and processes that would not have any meaning in other contexts. This is what was at stake in consciousness raising. The possibility of doing this together consciously and explicitly, with a more refined and focused process of consciousness raising about cultural and intellectual activities, is what Italian feminist psychoanalyst, Manuela Fraire, called, during a conversation, a ‘‘conscious raising of second degree.’’ Here feminist consciousness is important; it means the capacity to understand the process, and possibly to readdress it. Many ‘‘women’s studies’’ programs that were developed in the early years, before the ‘‘gender studies’’ took over, inside the universities, rested on the same premises: opening up to the ‘‘pressure exercised by obscure lives,’’ identifying the purpose of knowledge, and of possible applications of culture from the point of view of women. We could wonder today, what was subsequently lost of this attempt to re-compose life and knowledge, bodies and minds.

THE SECRET ANIMATION OF KNOWLEDGE The legitimization of different questions, of certain modes of intellectual operating has consequences. It modifies the structure of knowledge production processes, their epistemology, their contents, and the kinds of questions that give origin to a certain kind of research. It opens up to the second scenery.

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It appears clear, in analyzing the reactions to different disciplines, that every discipline has a secret existence. Women’s voices that had been excluded or hidden in the making of the basic paradigms of a discipline reappear as secretly involved in the formation of any knowledge, as the phantasmic object behind a man thinker. It is like opening up the boundaries of the knowledge field to its subconscious images, the images men had in mind when creating knowledge. This results in an interrogation into the quality of the subject/ object relationship at the core of every knowledge production. Here again feminist work is important as it is able to give meaning to the developments of the processes of teaching and learning, reintroducing and making visible the critical passages, implied but hidden, showing embedded assumptions, undeclared omissions, supposed logic, or ‘‘natural’’ deductions. In general, this means making visible some hidden part of the ‘‘icebergs’’ that form the corpus of science and knowledge. During classes it seemed that women instinctively reacted to something behind the content of a particular discipline, producing reactions, symptoms, body language. Trying to give meaning to these reactions, other feminists were called in to be observers and gather, and analyze the ‘‘symptoms’’ of uneasiness, restlessness or excitement surfacing during class activities, and idiosyncrasies expressed toward academic subjects, so that it was possible to clarify their meaning and unearth cultural artifacts buried deep inside the history of knowledge. And it was like the re-enactment of the mythical relation between a man and his sexualized intellectual objects, leading to the foundation of the processes of knowledge, staged right in front of the observers’ eyes. Just as in consciousnessraising groups, the absence of the male body allowed women to experience the lingering power of a ‘‘ghostly’’ male presence, analyzing its internalization, in the same way knowledge, ‘‘filtered’’ through women’s reactions, did not cancel the male imprint, it put it ‘‘on hold,’’ under a certain kind of scrutiny. This scrutiny makes evident on one hand the male basic image secretly carried inside any discipline and on the other the particular relationship that all teachers entertain with their own field of knowledge, the emotional economy of knowledge. Giving words to women’s and teachers’ feelings in reaction to every discipline, the original metaphors become alive again. In order to better explain what I mean, I refer to Fox Keller’s (1986) work on the language of science. Fox Keller identifies the basic metaphors with which science explains reality through examining the diaries and private images of scientists, illuminating the core issues, and the hidden questions scientists were attempting to answer with their research. She uncovers the drive for knowledge and its ties to the drive for power over the female body

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as founding the basic scientific metaphors. In the basic paradigms, those concepts that allow other concepts to be formed, the female body is seen as something ‘‘to be penetrated in order to reveal its innermost secrets,’’ or something to ‘‘comprehend and embrace,’’ something to be fully unveiled and investigated (Fox Keller, 1986, pp. 51–52). In the story of Barbara McClintock, the eccentric biologist who first identified the DNA structure, Fox Keller (1983) makes clear how women scientists, in order to really accept and fully appropriate any language, are caught between self-recognition and alienation. Because to participate fully in it, they have to ‘‘share its fundamental metaphors,’’ and, if a woman’s self is represented as ‘‘inert matter,’’ ‘‘blind and passive nature,’’ then as soon as she starts producing knowledge, she must accept an immediate and total devaluation of her gender identity. Women may try to live in a state of selfalienation, constantly deluded about their own identity, but at what price? Many personal lives of women who were also intellectual creators, can be read in this perspective. At the Free University our work with uneducated women was impressive in this sense, showing clearly how a hidden perception of these metaphors is always at work. In parallel, the experience of the teacher showed the price paid to move effortlessly within the parameters of any knowledge. Today the situation is different because a new generation has access to a culture partially revisited by women. But what about these hidden metaphors? And what happens now that women teachers can be more easily seen as subjects of knowledge? The act of teaching to and learning by women reawakens ancient mores buried deep inside memory. I call this ‘‘crossed maternity’’ to describe the relationship between women teachers and women students. If the teacher is, for the student, the passport to a knowledge that does not deny women’s worth, the lack of academic knowledge of the women pupils, generally combined with wisdom on life, is a guarantee that it is impossible to forget the women, impossible to enter the world of knowledge accepting unconsciously its founding metaphors and their content in terms of women being despised.

METONIMY AND METAPHOR: WHICH GENERALIZATION, WHICH ABSTRACTION? The third aspect of this process is the kind of abstraction and generalization mainly used by women. In epistemological terms, the relationships, lifeculture, and subjectivity-experience-knowledge have not yet received a clear

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mandate. The interrogation ultimately focuses on the crucial passage between the chaos of life and the orderly nature of thought. It aims at revealing what has been removed from the act of thinking and why. It aims at disclosing the extent to which such a removal has to do with the existence of sexual duality. The French philosopher Simone Weil worked on this problem through her work on the role of analogy. Against the Aristotelian epistemology, she preferred analogies because at the same time ‘‘they preserve reality in its original terms’’ and ‘‘always oblige to rethink’’ (Weil, 1982, p. 147). With the same motivation, other feminists in the 1970s focused on metonymic thought in contraposition to metaphoric thought, because the latter still allows some presence of the real object which is symbolized in language. Looking at women’s courses, at the way they treat disciplines, a systematic ‘‘contamination’’ of levels and different disciplinary fields, takes place. Analogies are randomly thrown around without respecting the division of knowledge into its traditional fields. Such analogies contest and shuffle languages around, stacking them in new ways, and creating new meanings. Sometimes they are really chaotic, sometimes it becomes clear that the chaos is due to the fact that they are organized around other perspectives. If we look at the process of rejection that took place not only against women such as McClintock, but also against men such as Gregory Bateson, we see that one of the reasons for the rejection of their theories is the fact that they are formulated in a way that academic tradition does not recognize, outside classic disciplinary fields, using unusual visualizations or different modes of proceeding in the intellectual work or asking different questions than the ones allowed in the scientific tradition. Even before the solutions, the basic questions are unacceptable. Again using one example among many others, through the intellectual history of Barbara McClintock, Fox Keller has shown McClintock’s eccentricity lay in the way she formulated her questions and in their peculiar purposefulness, rather than in the results. Those ways of putting the questions were meaningless to her colleagues in the academy. One of her key elements is the prominence given to the observation of ‘‘individual objects’’ without immediately trying for a generalization. Looked at from a classic standpoint, some of these conceptual contaminations can be seen as mere chaos. This chaos is the process of building a different (embodied) knowledge. I used the term ‘‘wild knowledge’’ to define this attempt to use existent knowledge without obeying to its parameters, stealing from it and deforming it in order to achieve other objectives and visions of reality. This perspective revolves around the concept of a subject who interrogates

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knowledge, from the point of view of other priorities, asking questions, which call for different answers. Here again the interplay between feminists and women culture is important. The role of a feminist is to see and give meaning to what happens. Even more, it is important to defend a process too often threatened by selfdestruction, because of the shadow cast by a whole tradition of patriarchal knowledge against these sometimes awkward attempts. One is led to think that what is necessary to teach to women, is more the study of the operative modes of knowledge, than the issues of ‘‘women’s studies’’ themselves. Sometimes such modes are difficult to work through even for those of us who are feminists, rooted as they are in the deep misogyny of intellectual world. It is a misogyny that even feminists cannot sometimes detect, a misogyny alive even in the very act of carrying out women’s studies courses. It is sometimes difficult to remember the slow motion of our own domestication embedded in the same apprehension of the tools for our own liberation, the prices paid, and the reasons for its failures. Women pupils immediately and mercilessly perceive this relationship tying the teacher with her knowledge. Such women act as mirrors, revealing at once the teachers’ subjugation to tradition, their acceptance of culture as an act against themselves and their efforts to get out of this. How many live the mastering of knowledge as a relief from a fastidious female identity, an act of neutralization of gender. It would be interesting to research if and how, among the current third or fourth wave of young feminists who now work and study in a framework marked by women and feminist thought, this has changed and what form it has taken.

DIFFERENCES AMONG WOMEN There is a fourth aspect for observation in this laboratory. It has to do with the aspect of the social fabric among women, its strengths and its fragilities. In our experience women from diverse cultural and academic backgrounds joined forces to carry out a project of research whose challenge was to combine research on women’s knowledge with the political practice of bringing together women from a wide array of cultures and hierarchical positions. Their diversity can be measured both in terms of the variety of women’s academic passions and in terms of where, in a hierarchical scale, such passions fit and overlap with other differences having to do with class, social and economic possibilities, and with all the power that comes from money, class, and knowledge.

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The observation of dynamics was very instructive and unexpected. As I said before, meeting knowledge is a form of entering a public space, the world. What happens in this situation is very similar to what happens when women approach a public space where they find themselves torn between two different faithfulnesses: the one to their sex and the one to the sex which is setting the rules of the game. In this world, the edge between transgression and inauthenticity is even clearer. It is a common experience to observe lacerations among women who rapidly break the early dreams of sisterhood. How to explain the gap between the strength of the awakening and the quick accumulation of shadows in women’s groups? Analyzing the behaviors of teachers and pupils we can observe a parallel and mirroring characteristic. I have called this a process of ‘‘crossed maternity,’’ making the hypothesis that learning in these conditions means being legitimated by a mother figure and, vice versa, that teaching in this context makes it impossible to cancel the mother figure. The interplay and the importance of this aspect cannot be underestimated, mostly in an intergenerational perspective. How does it play, today, in our attempt to pass on feminism and knowledge revisited through feminism to the new generation? Behind the exhilaration caused by women’s reunification lurks another scenario that still needs to be elaborated, with all the shadows of the primary relationships. The ambivalence running through mother/daughter relationships, the question of the quality of the maternal power appears in a pre-oedipal scenario, before the oedipal solutions. This primitive scenario helps us understand why women’s common journey is charged not only with happiness but also with violence. Fatigue, anger, and greediness surface. Behind the trust awarded to other women surfaces anger for a ‘‘breast that will never give enough nourishment,’’ a dependency and a desire to detach oneself. Receiving, knowledge in this case, is accompanied by desire and envy. Giving and teaching evoke being depredated. All the problems caused by strong idealization processes occur, making it difficult for women to appreciate and accept real, non-idealized, different women. Control, whose purpose is to prevent both detachment and women’s rivalry, emerges. Mother and child constantly switch camps and roles: women’s mutual mothering causes fatigue. Fatigue is also caused by always trying to impersonate a powerful being for the benefit of others. The limits set by this powerful being are experienced with fear and rancor. Coaching other women brings back childhood feelings of unmediated affection. Hopes, requests, nourishment are then absolutely mutual and mirror-like, even if they are not always distinguishable.

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It seems almost impossible, even in the most intellectual scenery, to get rid of this primitive scenario organized around the impossible mother–daughter relationship. This relationship demands to be examined and interpreted in its duplicity, because it refers to a crucial point today. Which kind of motherhood is active between old feminists and the new generation of feminists, the young ones? Which ‘‘crossed difficult motherhood’’ are we experiencing from both sides? Behind ‘‘teaching’’ or ‘‘passing on’’ feminism there is a secret layer of crossed maternity, of reciprocal requests, of images of childhood and motherhood that are secretly happening, occurring and working throughout our meeting each other in an intergenerational setting. Giving them words and reciprocal communication is the only way to continue feminist transmission as a research project.

REFERENCES Balandier, G. (1985). Anthropologiques. Paris: Librarie Generale Francaise. Fox Keller, E. (1983). A feeling for the organism: The life and work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W.H. Freeman. Fox Keller, E. (1986). Il Genere e la Scienza. Milan: Garzanti. Fraire, M. (1989). Una pratica per una politica. In: C. Cotti & F. Molfino (Eds), L’apprendimento dell’incertezza (pp. 126–136). Roma: Centro Cultrale Virginia Woolf. Melchiori, P. (1986). (Available from Paola Melchiori, Via Lancieri Novara 22, 31100, Treviso, Italy.) Weil, S. (1982). Quaderni (Vol. 1). Milan: Adelphi.

SPY OR FEMINIST: ‘‘GRRRILA’’ RESEARCH ON THE MARGIN Elizabeth L. Sweet ABSTRACT Even in the context of marginalization, agency as a feminist academic exists and, in some cases, the marginalization enables us to continue our feminist projects. This paper describes my experience as a marginalized feminist academic. It is based on fieldwork practice, academic training, and encounters as a professor at several universities in the United States, Russia, and Latin America. Currently, in the milieu of the USA Patriot Act, when academic freedom seems to be on the cutting block, we must, more than ever, continue to be grrrila fighters in order to continue our feminist projects and move feminist perspectives from the margins to the center.

INTRODUCTION The marginalization faced by many feminist scholars in terms of teaching assignments, research opportunities, conference presentation times, representation in faculty unions, and publication opportunities is still a factor and a burden in many disciplines, even though we are more than 30 years into the recognition and study of these discriminatory and sexist environments in which we try to grow and develop as scholars (Etzkowitz, Gender and the Local-Global Nexus: Theory, Research, and Action Advances in Gender Research, Volume 10, 145–161 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-2126/doi:10.1016/S1529-2126(06)10007-7

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Kemelgor, Neuschatz, & Uzzi, 1994; Stout, Straiger, & Jennings, 2002; Svarstad, Draugalis, Meyer, & Mount, 2004). By marginalization I mean that gender research or feminist perspectives are physically, philosophically, ideologically, and financially marginalized. For example, the University Program of Gender Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico is fighting to maintain its small office space on campus, while other departments such as the University Program for City Studies have lavish facilities and are not in any danger of losing their space. In several schools in the Chicago area there are no advanced degree options in gender studies. At most, one can have a Women’s Studies concentration noted on a transcript. However, in some instances, the marginalization can present opportunities for agency or grrrila research without appearing to challenge more mainstream approaches and the so-called gender-blind perspectives. When I talk about ‘‘grrrila’’ resistance, I am referring to the ways in which feminists have to operate in order to survive. The word combines girl and guerilla to make it gender specific and was inspired by the Riot Grrrl movement in the 1990s and the Guerilla Girl art movement of the 1980s. Grrrila modes of operation include lots of volunteer work without recognition or pay, slipping feminist perspectives into grant proposals, curriculum, and faculty meeting agendas even when formats and forums are not explicitly feminist, as well as ‘‘officially’’ refraining from feminist gender work until tenure or academic security is achieved. For example, one colleague in planning shared with me that she was told only a few years ago that if she wanted to get tenure she should not do gender research. While this warning was certainly valid in the 1970s, we should be appalled that it is given now, in the new millennium! This paper describes my experience as a feminist professor, ethnographer, urban planner, and policy analyst in Russia, Latin America, and the United States and the challenges I faced and continue to face in these roles, challenges that even led to accusations that I was a spy. Based on my experience in these areas, I will describe how I have been able to (almost unintentionally) buck the academic system and continue to find ways to generate feminist gender-focused research without the safety of being a ‘‘star’’ academic or of being in a feminist-friendly environment. My focus is on Urban Planning programs and its close cousin Architecture, because this is where I have the most experience. This is not to say that they are the worst programs, in fact they may represent a middle ground as far as what many women experience in academia. I argue that even though there is a great ‘‘intellectual’’ base of knowledge about the faulty, unequal, and discriminatory state of academia as well as the policies informed by

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academic research, little has been done to really eradicate these negative structures from policymaking or academia. However, we feminists have been able to eek out a space for ourselves in non-traditional ways while not seriously challenging the status quo in academic inquiry. I conclude by suggesting that we need to think about how we can challenge the system and not have to be grrrila researchers in the margin but feminist researchers legitimately permeating throughout academic circles. Extrapolating from academic research and knowledge, we need to develop structural remedies that get us out of the margin and to recognize the importance of gender as a real and unavoidable force in the academy and policymaking. In this paper I will first describe my brush with fame as a feminist (or was that a spy?) in Siberia. Next, I present examples of marginalization from Mexico and the United States. Finally, I provide an overview of gender in academia as well as recommendations for remedying the situation.

SPY OR FEMINIST ‘‘Spy or Feminist?’’ was the headline on the front of the Rossiskaya Gazeta, a national Russian newspaper on June 14, 2001 (Vladimirov). The article was about allegations that I was a spy for the United States, incorrectly reporting that I was expelled from the country. The implication of the headline at best expressed a disinterest in feminism and, at worst, a general societal hostility toward feminism. Is she a spy (dangerous) or a feminist (meaningless)? Alternatively, which is worse, to be a feminist or a spy? These readings of the headline reflect the different responses to feminism and gender research globally. I have encountered very hostile and direct reactions by some students and faculty, including personal attacks that are, in some ways, easier to address than more subtle or passive-aggressive responses. The process that led to the headline speaks of a lack of academic freedom as well as an intense marginalization of feminist and gendered ethnographic research in Russia. While my experience in Omsk, Russia as an accused spy could be seen as an extraordinary episode, I have come to realize that there are some parallels between Russia, the United States, and Latin America in terms of the limitations that scholars face about particular methods and areas of inquiry. Perhaps because ‘‘what women anthropologists write is so easily dismissed as subjective,’’ and ‘‘ethnographies written by women are consigned to the margins of what is valorized’’ (Visweswaran, 1994, p. 17), being a woman may have worked to my advantage in this case. Had my own feminist, economic-planning, ethnographic study been

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valorized by the Federal Security Service (FSB) (the successor to the State Security Committee (KGB)), I would have been prevented from writing it. At that time, I was teaching economic development and qualitative methods in the School of International Business at Omsk State University in the heart of Siberia as a visiting professor for the Civic Education Project (CEP). This organization sends faculty to Eastern European and Central Asian countries in transition to ‘‘strengthen democracy through education’’ (CEP Annual Report, 2001, p. 8). It is a Peace Corps for academics. I arrived in Omsk on a Friday in the September of 2000 and, by Monday, I was teaching International Economic Development Theory and Practice to 22 sophomore college students. The course included discussions of a list of readings on mainstream economic theories such as neo-classical economics, structural adjustment, free trade, import substitution industrialization, export-oriented industrialization, and dependency theory. Later in the class, when examining the interrelationships between gender, development, socialism, and postmodernism, as well as other theories of gender and economic development, discussions became heated and uncomfortable for the students because these were completely new and unfamiliar areas of inquiry. Although some students (both male and female) decided not to read the material because of its gender content, I was able to coax most of them into at least reviewing the ideas. Many of the students still had serious reservations about the legitimacy of gender issues in a class dealing with international economic development. When the time came to prepare for the second semester, I proposed a class on qualitative methods in economic development analysis. The Dean suggested that the students use these methods for their year-end projects and that I supervise their work. Thus, I gave students the task of developing a research plan, carrying out the plan, and then writing a report on their findings. The only requirement was that they choose a business-related topic and, if possible, include a global component. After all, this was a school of international business. The methods I covered in class included case studies, oral histories, participant observation, collaborative/action research, surveys with open-ended questions, and focus groups. The students were free to choose which method(s) they wanted to use and the direction of their research. I asked the Dean about research procedures for the protection of human subjects. He said there were none, so I discussed Institutional Review Board procedures in the United States with the class. During the fourth week in the semester we discussed the research plans. The range of topics was impressive. One student interviewed immigrants (including me) to see how they were affecting business in the region. A male

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student who was one of the most resistant to gendered theories of development decided to examine the role of women in business and the impact of their business activities on their lives. This was encouraging; I had finally helped broaden the perspective of at least one student. Another student compared the energy system in Omsk, then in the process of privatization, to the one in France. Yet another student was interested in interviewing workers at a manufacturing plant near her home. Although the students were timid about interviewing, they were amazed and proud after they began conducting their research; they were succeeding in recruiting people to talk to them even though they were ‘‘mere students.’’ After the students presented their papers at a mini conference, the Dean asked me to give him all the papers because he wanted to read them. When he returned them to me a few days later, the title pages had been removed and were in a separate package. He explained that the Rector/President of the university wanted to see them and the Dean did not want the students’ names associated with the work. I thought that was a little odd but not particularly alarming. Later I found out that, in fact, the FSB had made copies of all the students’ papers. A week later, on May 29, the Dean requested a meeting with me. When I went to his office, he informed me that the FSB wanted to talk to me about my students’ work. The agency was concerned that I was using my students to collect information for improper use back in the United States. The Dean had already explained that it was his idea that I supervise these projects and that the university fully backed my work. FSB agents still wanted to talk to me. For the next two hours in the international students’ service office, I was interrogated by the FSB. Most questions were in Russian and were translated by a university employee who spoke some English. Thus, between my Russian and the ‘‘translator’s’’ English we got through it. The young FSB official questioned me repeatedly about my background and credentials as an ‘‘economic specialist’’ and the possibility that I had broken my contract with the university. He quoted the contract, which stated that I should abide by university policy and Russian federation laws. At no point did he mention which policy or law I might have broken. He claimed, however, that my students’ work could have a negative effect on the ‘‘image and competitiveness’’ of firms in Omsk as well as cause harm to United States–Russian relations. When I asked the officer how my students’ work could do this, he pulled out a letter from the director of a firm where one of my students had interviewed three workers. The letter alleged that information collected by my student about the firm was incorrect. They referred specifically to the workers claims that, after the Russian economic crisis in 1998, they received

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their pay late or not at all and were still due some back pay from that period. The letter additionally claimed that the salary range reported by the workers to the student was incorrect. The information in question, however, had been widely printed in newspapers and is known to almost everyone in Omsk. In the end, the FSB official could not explain exactly how this common knowledge, as described in the student’s paper, could hurt the image or competitiveness of the Omsk Region. He asked if I was carrying out any other ‘‘scientific’’ research. I mentioned that I was doing ethnographic research that included my personal observations, oral histories, and focus groups with women in Omsk about how they were experiencing the transition from a planned to an open market economy. He, like some of my students, thought gender issues were unimportant, not to be taken seriously, and in no way a threat. The qualitative methods that I used in my research outside the university were only threatening or unsanctioned when used to examine non-gendered or male-centered economic development in the region. In other words, feminism and gender issues are non-threatening; they were met with indifference and not hostility by the Russian authorities in Omsk. I was asked to sign a statement indicating that I would not teach this class again and/or have the students do this kind of research without the permission of the FSB and the director of any company where its workers might be interviewed in the Omsk region. It further stated that these qualitative methods were not approved by the FSB and that I could not quote from my students’ work in any of my published work or take the students’ papers off university property. The document officially warned me that this kind of research could hurt the image and competitiveness of the region. While the second officer, who had been silently taking notes throughout the interview, prepared the official statement, the interviewing officer started asking me informal questions in English about my experience in Omsk. Then he gave me a few hints about local customs such as how to collect the birch branches used in Russian bathhouses. After the interview, I was worried, but several colleagues assured me that the FSB agents were just doing their job, which included calling the Dean every week to find out what kinds of international activities the school was involved in. FSB agents have to prove to their agency at the end of each month that they have earned their relatively high paychecks. Others said they just wanted to practice their English. In a few days, I was granted an extension of my visa, which led me to conclude that the incident was over. Then I left to give a couple of lectures at a Summer School on Social Policy in the Southern Russian city of Saratov.

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After a short visit to Helsinki, I traveled back to Omsk, arriving on June 13, 2001.The phone kept ringing and I ignored it, trying to sleep after the long flight. When I finally answered a call in the afternoon, I was surprised to hear the voice of a CEP program official. She said that according to Moscow newspapers, I had been kicked out of Russia on suspicion of spying. The papers also reported that I was sending students to steal industrial secrets and that they were in fact working for the CIA. When the students learned this, they jokingly asked for their paychecks from the CIA. The CEP official wanted to make sure that I had not been expelled from the country. She assured me that if Russian officials had not expelled me by then, they were not going to do it. The incident was reported on local and national TV and radio, all over the Internet, as well as in the international press, including CNN, BBC, and the New York Times. I could not even go to the gym without acquaintances asking me what was going on. I received many more phone calls and e-mails from people I did not know, either asking for interviews or just sending notes of support. The reactions from various sectors were diverse. One phone call was from the United States’ consulate in Yekaterinburg where the embassy official told me in a paternalistic manner to ‘‘keep your nose clean.’’ Different Russian newspapers ran stories including the one titled ‘‘Spy or Feminist?’’ (Vladimirov, 2001). In this article they questioned my credentials and suggested that I was inexperienced and naı¨ ve, therefore I could not be a spy but was a feminist. The insinuation here, according to Russian friends, was that I was not really a spy but an unskilled and inexperienced economic development professor, who should stick to women’s studies and not try to mix economics and gender studies. About a week later another article compared the Omsk spy hunt to witch-hunts, suggesting that the FSB was inventing spy stories (Kondratovskaya, 2001). This article suggested that the Omsk FSB was incapable of finding a good scandal and instead embarrassed the region by bringing these false allegations to light. Finally, the story ended and my 15 minutes of fame thankfully faded and I was able to resume my work as a grrrila fighter.

EVIDENCE FROM EXPERIENCE Originally, I was certain that my experience in Omsk was an anomaly in the global context. Upon reflection, however, my experience can be used to show how gender continues to be marginalized in academia and policy

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research. I will provide several examples in different contexts to show how marginalization happens. I hope that, by providing these examples, other women will be able to recognize their own experiences. In Omsk, my credentials were often challenged. This experience has re-occurred in other contexts. For example, I participated in a planning, architecture, and landscape architecture program in Costa Rica. Sixteen students from four United States universities were putting their academic training into practice. For the two weeks I was there, the educational format included actual planning and architecture projects along with frequent lectures. Throughout those two weeks of teaching, I endured looks of disdain from students when I corrected sexist language; however, the real challenge came during a lecture based on Leslie Kanes Weisman’s 1992 book, Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment. I was on the second slide of a PowerPoint presentation when the attack started. A student asked for my credentials and wondered if I had ‘‘the right’’ to discuss or criticize architecture and design. None of the male presenters in the previous two weeks had been asked to display their credentials. There were comments rejecting the importance or even the need to consider gender in architecture, design, or planning. I was told that ‘‘my presentation was too aggressive,’’ that ‘‘I was shoving feminism down their throats,’’ and that ‘‘universal design took care of all discriminatory practices in Architecture and Design, so my discussion was of no real importance.’’ At one point a Latina on the staff of the hosting institution asked the offending students to show me respect. The challenge of a feminist perspective was clearly dangerous to these students. After I finished my presentation, a 23-year-old student told me that he had dedicated his whole life to architecture and asked how I dared to challenge his assumptions and understandings of the field. In an attempt to address the many examples I used to show how gender affects architecture, this student proposed that these examples were not really architecture. A Latina urban planning student responded sarcastically saying, ‘‘Yeah, that would be great. I would love to be able to discount any planning I didn’t like as not really planning.’’ The male student was offended by her response and demanded an apology in an obvious attempt to silence her and reject her participation in the conversation. The next evening, I went to a nightclub to say goodbye to the students and I found that my presentation had a more positive effect than I had first thought. Three women students yelled over the music that they enjoyed my presentation and were impressed with my calm classroom demeanor. One student also said ‘‘woman power,

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I like that!’’ They were, in a way, grrrila fighters resisting by stating their perspectives and support of feminism and gender issues under the cover of loud music, so only sympathetic ears could hear. In the Costa Rican classroom, both the feminist message and messenger posed a challenge to students. I believe that by merely being women, others discredit or marginalize our scholarship. When the time came to write and defend my dissertation, the man who was then my chair went on sabbatical. He decided to work with only one person during his sabbatical and chose the white male candidate who interviewed Tony Blair rather than me, the Native American woman who interviewed indigenous Mexican women. The marginalization continued and so did I. I found another chair and successfully completed the dissertation. I always seem to find an alternative method to continue researching with minimal or no funding. Perhaps the most blatant case of being marginalized because of my gender came from a source that one might least expect, a progressive academic union at a Chicago university. The union held several general membership meetings during heated contract negotiations, which eventually led to a three-week strike. Although we won substantial concessions from the administration, gender discrimination plagued the process. This discrimination took several forms. For example, women were rarely called upon in the general meetings. Although we were all being asked to voice our opinions and raise concerns, when I raised my hand, I was not called on. Meanwhile, the men sitting near me were almost always recognized. At some points I actually stood up and waved both my arms to get attention. This usually worked, as a friend on the executive committee brought my waving to the attention of the meeting facilitator. Other women also were marginalized by this repeated and shared experience of invisibility. After the strike, a high-ranking union official forwarded an article to the union listserv that argued that the union’s future depended on recruiting women into the ranks. I responded to the article, encouraging this perspective and pointing out that, although our union has many women in leadership roles, we could do more. I described my experiences in meetings and suggested that we remedy this inequality and set up a women’s committee to address issues of inequality in the union and the university as a whole. A senior white male faculty member wrote in, saying that my comment was a slap in the face to all the active women in the union and we should make a list and thank them. There were a large number of responses to the white male, naming the women who had participated in union activities as strike captains, ‘‘strike divas,’’ etc. A few people called for a more thoughtful response. However, my original concerns and those of the few others who

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responded thoughtfully were ignored. It was painful to endure the ensuing week and a half when the union e-mails were full of individual names but almost no constructive discussion of structural inequality within the union. Finally, a senior faculty member suggested that the marginalization I outlined in my first e-mail was confirmed by the lack of substantive responses to my concerns and the flurry of responses to the white male. Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story. The union listserv is controlled. All participants send messages to the union president who administers the listserv and he, in turn, forwards them to everyone on the list. Another professor was regularly attacked for her political beliefs via the listserv, and she recommended that we need a social justice committee. I agreed and suggested that, in the context of discrimination before, during, and after the strike, we needed new leadership. Suddenly, our messages and all other dissenting messages disappeared from the list. However, messages by faculty members that suggested my concerns were trivial and threatened the unity of the union were sent out to everyone. I was no longer marginalized; I became completely invisible. Sometimes, the marginalized feminist messenger remains, but the message disappears. After completing my dissertation and returning from Omsk, I opted for an English as a second language teaching job in a community organization in Chicago. Although it was not part of my job description, I started a new research project. I convinced the director to let me use my observations and interview the participants in a new bilingual manufacturing training program. John Betancur, a founding member of the organization and professor, and I produced a report that assessed the impact of bilingual manufacturing technology bridge training on a group of almost monolingual Spanish speaking immigrant women from Mexico. (Sweet & Betancur, 2003) Our assessment documented how the training failed to help them penetrate the male dominated manufacturing sector, although there were some non-tangible positive outcomes like increases in self-esteem and an enhanced ability to help children or grandchildren with homework. The study was suppressed by the organization. Subsequent reports and proposals written by the organization stated that no evaluation of the program had been done. After my research disappeared, I was moved to a satellite office, away from the organizational center, which physically marginalized me. The director said they needed my space for workforce development counselors. The counselors never arrived after my removal. While the disappearance of this research could be attributed to its negative evaluation of the program, I have found that research that focuses on women or that uses a gender analysis is often minimized or trivialized. For

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example, in Mexico, when I casually talked to people about my dissertation research, ‘‘The Gendered Affects of NAFTA and Neo-Liberal Economic Policies’’ (Sweet, 2000), many responded with the question: what do women have to do with NAFTA or with the economy? Even some of the subjects and collaborators in the village where I carried out the research said that the importance of gender and the economy was minimal. Although their dismissal of gender as a relevant field of inquiry was personally difficult, it also allowed me some freedom to pursue my interests. The village elite did not scrutinize me as they did other researchers, including the famous Oscar Lewis. Many people were suspicious of researchers because they felt they had been misrepresented. Village residents pointed out that they were not stupid; they could read and obtain copies of researchers’ reports. However, I was never put into the category of researcher. I was marginalized along with my research, but this gave me the opportunity to conduct research without the inspection of village men. This, in turn, gave the village women I interviewed and collaborated with more freedom to structure the research according to their own interests. Together, we performed grrrila research without being noticed or controlled by village men. As an adjunct professor at the university where I did my doctoral work, I have found that gender analyses continues to be marginalized. My dissertation is the only one to date that has focused on gender. Currently, there is one course, ‘‘Race and Class in Planning,’’ that focuses secondarily on gender and is used to meet gender requirements for accreditation purposes. I offered to develop a new course that focused on gender and planning. Despite evidence that there was desire on the part of students for such a course, officials rejected my offer pleading lack of money in the budget. However, I have taught an international planning course there. When I suggested that it have a gender focus, I was told that would not be acceptable. Regardless, I chose to include gender issues. After the class, a student suggested to the department director that I had perhaps given him a lower grade than he expected because he was a white male; in other words, he claimed that I discriminated against him because he was a white male. He later dropped the charges after I presented him with evidence of his poor performance. Most recently, I went to Mexico on a Rockefeller resident fellowship. I met a faculty member of the National Autonomous University of Mexico at a planning conference and, since my research took place near Mexico City, I offered to teach a seminar on the gendered city, focusing on gender sensitive planning. While the faculty member at first seemed enthusiastic, he did not return repeated e-mails. However, I also contacted their University Program of Gender Studies and they were happy to organize the seminar.

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When I arrived in Mexico, I went to see the planning faculty member. At first he did not remember who I was; after I reminded him of our conversation, he decided he was not even willing to promote the class to his students. Even without the help of this key individual, the seminar generated so much interest that we needed to expand the enrollment limit and find a bigger classroom. So, I taught the class but not in the planning program. I had to look for alternative ways to push the gender agenda in planning, taking grrrila action and sneaking my way into a different department.

EXPERIENCE IN CONTEXT There are many well-known cases of gender discrimination in the Academy. These provide a context for my own personal experience. Several departments at MIT have documented that women receive less lab space, research money, and lower salaries (Hopkins, 1999). In the planning department at MIT only one woman has been tenured and that happened in 1978. At University of Texas, Arlington, in 2003, the woman Dean of the School of Architecture was removed; she claims it was sex discrimination. Recently she reached an out of court settlement with the university (Buskey, 2005). The advancement and tenure process for women is more difficult and publishing takes longer than it does for men. Departments that are traditionally more male dominated, such as business, economics, and the ‘‘hard’’ sciences are paid higher salaries and remain male dominated (Wilson, 2004). Women remain underrepresented at the top research universities and overrepresented in part time position and community colleges (Wilson, 2004). In terms of pay, women earn less than men in all ranks, but the greatest wage gap occurs for the few women who become full professors (Curtis, 2004). If we add the dimension of race and ethnic background, the situation gets even worse. For example, a minority professor at a southern planning school was slated for a tenure-track position upon the expected completion of her PhD from a prestigious East coast school. However, she was scheduled to defend her dissertation two weeks after the southern university’s deadline. Because of this two-week delay, she lost her position and was not considered for tenure. She has had two equally disturbing experiences at schools in the west as an adjunct or visiting professor where her extraordinary scholarly work, teaching, and community activism were used against her. At a recent interview she was asked to change her job talk three times, the last request made one hour before she was to give it. Needless to say, she did not get an offer there. She has a book published by a respectable publishing house but

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she is without a teaching job and is considering leaving academia (personal correspondence). I believe these situations and many more demonstrate the structural systems in place to marginalize all women and especially women of color. Nevertheless, we are surviving and even thriving.

GRRRILA RESISTANCE IN MARGINALIZATION Recently, in a national listserv for women planning faculty, a woman faculty member described how she was on her way to a committee meeting and was told by a white male colleague that she was only picked to be on the committee because she was a woman. While the comment is offensive, it is an accurate description of the state of affairs in academia and, at the same time, an opportunity. Had she been a man, she might not have been picked to serve on the committee. She was marginalized, but in that marginalization had the opportunity to participate and contribute at some level. I would also suggest that our marginalization and power on the edge gives us the ability and sensitivity to see how women in less privileged positions tease power from the margin. Patricia Hill Collins described this power from the margin in her 1986 article ‘‘Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.’’ She talks about the marginalization of Black women academics and their ability to use it ‘‘to enrich contemporary sociological discourse’’ (Collins, 1986, p. S15). For example, in Morelos, Mexico, while maintaining the appearance of subordination, women were invisible but active participants in meetings where the men were discussing how to handle new changes in ejidal loan programs. The women stayed in the kitchen and voiced their opinions, which the men adopted as their own, through the window. I think this suggests that there is grrrila activism at many different levels and, if we recognize this activism, we can reinforce it and support one another. Maybe because of my own marginalization I was able to capture the meaning of the Morelos women’s interaction. In Russia too, my marginalization sensitized me to the marginalization of others and enabled me to look for and in many cases find grrrila activism, response and agency.

IN THE END I thought the accusation of being a spy would not happen in the United States, but now I am not so sure. While in the end it was not a serious

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incident for me (no Russian jail time), it may represent the extreme marginalization of feminists on campuses and feminist research, thereby placing it in a category that receives less scrutiny, enabling feminists to be more experimental and take more research risks. While the damage of this marginalization is obvious, including lack of publishing opportunities, lower tenure possibilities, and fewer grant opportunities, the ability to do grrrila research, to engage in more subversive, less scrutinized collective and creative work could benefit the academy in a very real qualitative way. But we have another obstacle now, the governmental attack on academic freedom via the USA Patriot Act. While the issue of gender oppression in academia is obvious to many (Etzkowitz et al., 1994; Stout et al., 2002; Svarstad et al., 2004), the presence of government oppression in academia is less obvious especially in the western system that purports to value ‘‘academic freedom.’’ In this arena we may share more with the former Soviet Union than we believe. In Russia, the FSB believes it has the knowledge base, right, and credibility to make decisions about methodology and research processes. Despite the long roots of academic freedom in western academic institutions, the federal government has determined that some aspects of stem cell research are not appropriate and the National Endowment for the Arts has made decisions about what art is. In a 2001 report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (Cheney 2001), academics were criticized for expressing their critical analysis about the attacks in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania; other professors have been reprimanded or suspended by university officials for similar ‘‘crimes against patriotism,’’ that is, expressing their opinion. These incidents have taken place in the context of the USA Patriot Act. The act has several unsettling implications including: y the ominous mingling of law enforcement and intelligence gathering activities, the impairment of public access to vital information and the questionable efficacy of these measures in combating terrorism. Specific concerns include the loosening of standards under which the government authorities can compel disclosure of electronic communication. (American Association of University Professors, 2003, p. 2)

Generally, the USA Patriot Act is seen as a threat to academic freedom (American Association of University Professors, 2003; Office of the PresidentHarvard University, 2003; American Studies Association, 2003; Glod, 2005). Additionally, there are even more restrictions for international students from certain countries and the kind of research they can do (American Association of University Professors, 2003, p. 2). Anyone who challenged the War in Iraq is labeled unpatriotic by the Bush administration and their followers.

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Recently, while in Mexico, I met an old friend, who is a Dean at a prestigious eastern college. She and I talked about the political situation and she expressed relief that she could be critical with me, suggesting that in the United States it was difficult to know to whom you could say certain things. The war on terrorism is being used to curtail academic freedom. Some would argue that the means justify the ends, but our fragile democracy is at risk, and we need to avert a new incarnation of McCarthyism (American Association of University Professors, 2003; Office of the President-Harvard University, 2003; American Studies Association, 2003). We must recognize the imperative value of rigorous debate about issues including politics, gender, feminism, class, and race. Freedom is being curtailed in the name of freedom: we are becoming less free because of an attempt to address terrorism and that is a real threat to academic freedom. For those of us already marginalized it makes matters worse. In my department two years ago all faculty were sent an e-mail by a senior professor telling us how we should talk about the war in Iraq with our students. Whether a patronizing act or an attempt to prevent complaints from students who might not agree with the way the war was being approached, the end result is the same; a professor’s freedom to teach a class as she or he feels is appropriate is being challenged. In the United States, the FBI may not yet be calling the deans of schools (or if they are, we are prevented from knowing about it by the USA Patriot Act) on a weekly basis finding out what the faculty is doing and how they are doing it, but there are restrictions placed on academics. Issues of gender and qualitative methods are still areas that require extra explanation and support as parts of legitimate academic labor in many fields, including economics, urban planning, architecture, and policy analysis. However, given that gender studies is not on the list of prohibitive areas of study for foreign students, and not on the list of areas necessitating background checks, the USA Patriot Act (American Association of University Professors, 2003) is further evidence of our marginalization. It does mean, however, that we have some breathing room to continue our grrrila research. Some university administrations, both in the United States and the former Soviet Union, are still very hostile to gender and qualitative methods as well as other legitimate areas of inquiry. Chauvinist attitudes exist toward gendered issues in the United States and academic institutions. While the situation in Omsk may be particularly difficult because of its regions’ social, historical, and political contexts, at some level, people pursuing these interests in most academic institutions around the world have to justify their work more and receive less funding than those doing positivistic regression

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analyses of non-gendered policy issues. Some schools may force scholars to choose between feminist research and women subjects and tenure opportunities. We should not be bound by exclusionary canons or politically driven ideologies. We need to develop ways of using all the knowledge and data we have that demonstrates the marginalization of women and feminists in academia to change academia. While marginalization has not completely hampered feminist research and teaching, it has negatively impacted it. How can we change the academy? What is it that will make gender research and feminist frameworks a ‘‘natural’’ part of academia? We need to talk about our personal stories more; especially the stories that can help us identify the patterns of marginalization and resistance. As I have sent out drafts of this paper for comment and talked about it with women colleagues, the response has been the same: ‘‘That has happened to me!’’ Others have said that I am brave to write this, indicating that there is some inherent danger in sharing these experiences. But I am not brave – I am just a feminist. While I am no longer a ‘‘spy,’’ I headed back to Siberia last fall on a Fulbright Grant scholarship to continue using grrrila resistance in the struggles for gender equity in economic policy planning. Just don’t tell the Fulbright folks about my grrrila agenda.

REFERENCES American Association of University Professors. (2003). Academic freedom and national security in a time of crisis. Retrieved on April 26, 2005, http://www.aaup.org/statements/ REPORTS/911report.htm American Studies Association. (2003). Intellectual freedom in time of war. Retrieved April 26, www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/AmericanStudiesAssn/newsletter/archive/ 2005, newsarchive/freedom.htm Buskey, N. (2005). UT Arlington settles discrimination lawsuit: Former dean files after August 2002 contract dispute. The Daily Texan, July 1, p. 1, Austin, Texas, http://www. dailytexanonline.com/media/paper410/news/2005/02/09/StateLocal/Ut.Arlington.Settles. Discrimination.Lawsuit-857118.shtml, retrieved July 3, 2005. Cheney, L. V. (2001). Defending civilization: How our universities are failing America and what can be done about it. American Council of Trustees and Alumni, 1–28. Civic Education Project. (2001). Annual Report, http://www.cep.org.hu/aboutus/doc/ AR-2001.pdf Collins, P. H. (1986). Learning from the outsider within: The sociological significance of black feminist thought. Social Problems, 33(6), S14–S32. Curtis, J. W. (2004). Faculty salary and faculty distribution fact sheet 2003–04. American Association of University Professors, http://www.aaup.org/research/sal&distribution. htm, retrieved July 3, 2005.

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Etzkowitz, H., Kemelgor, C., Neuschatz, M., & Uzzi, B. (1994). Barriers to women in academic science and engineering. In: W. Pearson Jr. & I. Fechter (Eds), Who will do science? Educating the next generation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Glod, M. (2005). GMU faculty decries Patriot Act: Resolution warns of threat to academic freedom. Washington Post, April 14, retrieved April 26, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/articles/A51216-2005Apr13.html Hopkins, N. (1999). MIT and gender bias: Following up on victory. Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v45/i40/40b00401.htm Kondratovskaya, T. (2001). We are not guilty, she left on her own. Oreol, p. 8, June 20, Omsk, Russia. Office of the President- Harvard University. (2003). Statement on the Patriot Act and academic freedom. Retrieved April 26, 2005, http://president.harvard.edu/speeches/203/ patriod.html Stout, P., Straiger, J., & Jennings, N. (2002). Promotion and senior women faculty: A study of the status of tenured Faculty in six academic unites at the University of Texas. Paper published on this web site http://www.utexas.edu/faculty/fwo/ceilingrpt.pdf, pp. 1–27. Svarstad, B. L., Draugalis, J. R., Meyer, S. M., & Mount, J. K. (2004). The status of women in pharmacy education: Persisting gaps and issues. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 68(3), Article 79. Sweet, E. (2000). Gendered effects of structural adjustment: A case study in Mexico. Dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL. Sweet, E., & Betancur, J. (2003). Bilingual community workforce development: A qualitative analysis of Latinas in Chicago. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois at Chicago. Visweswaran, K. (1994). Fictions of feminist ethnography. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Vladimirov, D. (2001). Spy or feminist? Rossiskaya Gazeta, June 14, Moscow, Russia, P:1 No 111(2723). Weisman, L. K. (1992). Discrimination by design: A feminist critique of the man-made environment. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Wilson, R. (2004). Women Underrepresented in Sciences at Top Research Universities, Study Finds. Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, http://web.lexis-nexis.com.proxy.cc.uic.edu/ universe/document?_m=a4706b3e25f0fea0c1457d77461b6eb1&_docnum=2&wchp= dGLbVtb-zSkVb&_md5=52f6736102c3e4a2c866b76902afc073, retrieved July 3, 2005.

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MARKETING SOCIAL CHANGE AFTER COMMUNISM: THE CASE OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN SLOVAKIA Magdalena Vanya ABSTRACT Most studies of postcommunist Eastern Europe provide macro-economic and political analyses of the democratic transition. This paper uses the case of feminists publicizing efforts around domestic violence in Slovakia to explore how people express and sustain collective action in transitional democracies without established traditions of civic engagement. The analysis is situated in the complex historical juncture of the 1990s, which includes Slovakia’s impending admission to the European Union, while its population remains politically apathetic and suspicious of mass movements and organizations as a result of the country’s communist legacy. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews, it is argued that feminists’ strategic issue networks in the particular historical circumstances facilitated the speedy criminalization of domestic violence, but could not generate a cultural transformation of public and political attitudes. Sudden progressive legislative changes and the simplistic marketing campaign in a conservative political climate impeded the diffusion of a feminist definition of violence against women in related policy areas. Gender and the Local-Global Nexus: Theory, Research, and Action Advances in Gender Research, Volume 10, 163–194 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-2126/doi:10.1016/S1529-2126(06)10008-9

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I use the case of the fifth woman campaign1 publicizing domestic violence in Slovakia to explore how people express and sustain collective discontent in transitional democracies without established traditions of civic engagement. I situate my analysis in the complex historical juncture of the 1990s. This juncture includes Slovakia’s impending admission to the European Union, while its population remains politically apathetic and suspicious of mass movements and organizations as a result of communist legacy. Drawing on participant observation in feminist organizations and interviews with feminists, elected officials, and representatives of Western funding agencies, I argue that feminists’ strategic networking, while avoiding publicization in the particular historical circumstances, facilitated the speedy criminalization of domestic violence, but could not generate a cultural transformation of public and political attitudes. Moreover, sudden progressive legislative changes, in addition to the simplistic marketing campaign, impeded the diffusion of a feminist definition of violence against women in related policy areas. The fifth woman campaign reached approximately two million people through media ads and billboards, made domestic violence into a topic of political debate, and facilitated progressive legislative changes in the Penal Code of Slovakia (Iniciatı´ va piata zˇena, 2002). In order to comply with the funding requirements of a Western non-governmental agency,2 Slovakian feminists formed a coalition with a limited purpose and time frame, exclusively employing the marketing techniques of a professional advertising agency, as required by their Western funder. Feminists thus embarked on disclosing the taboo of wife abuse by selling it via billboards and ads announcing that, ‘‘every fifth woman is abused’’ in Slovakia. In addition, during and after the campaign, activists targeted key political actors privately with a well-developed draft of possible domestic violence legislation. The draft passed relatively quickly, and the term ‘‘fifth woman’’ became a widely known expression in Slovakian media. However, after criminalizing domestic violence, the government rejected implementation of feminist principles into the subsequent policy document outlining national strategies for the elimination and prevention of domestic violence. Consequently, despite the speedy criminalization of domestic violence, the marketing campaign and the government’s subsequent antifeminist attitudes left many feminists disillusioned about the possibility of grassroots social change in postcommunist Slovakia. Due to the communist legacy of weak civil society and the public’s distrust of mass movements and organizations, Western conceptual models of social movements provide inadequate explanation for Slovakian feminists’

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organizing around domestic violence. In order to account for the historical and cultural specificity of Slovakian feminists’ collective efforts, I propose the concept of strategic issue networks. Strategic issue networks are typically utilized in settings where mass mobilization through collective strategies is not a culturally and historically available option. They represent a limited number of goal-oriented connections with influential political actors that are coordinated and activated temporarily for a single issue-driven goal. After single-issue networks achieve their pre-defined, often legislative or policyoriented objective, they tend to fade out. Strategic networks’ exclusive focus on an issue-oriented objective undermines their potential for a broader transformation across all sectors of society. Finally, strategic issue networks emerge in settings without established cultural and historical traditions of community-based, grassroots activism, and organizing.3 Slovakia as a former communist country is an ideal case to illustrate the importance of strategic issue networks for collective efforts in non-Western societies. Slovakia as part of the Czech and Slovak Socialist Republic between 1918 and 1989 experienced forty years of authoritarian communist history, where protests orchestrated by the central planning committee of the Communist Party were a regular occurrence. After the fall of communism in November 1989, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech and Slovak Republics in 1993, inheriting a paralyzed civil society and an apathetic population suspicious of any collective efforts (Bu´torova´, Dianisˇ ka, & Dobrovodsky´, 1996; Einhorn, 1993). Consequently, Slovakian feminists were attempting to generate public and political concern for the issue of domestic violence in a politically disillusioned and socially indifferent civic context. Drawing on participant observation in a feminist organization located in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, as well as transcripts from organizational meetings, interviews with feminists, elected officials, and representatives of Western funding agencies, I explore the strategies and outcomes of a collective effort in a non-Western location. My research reveals that publicizing domestic violence via marketing campaign, imposed from the West, succeeded in initiating a broad, but short-lived public discussion around the issue. However, I argue that the media-oriented campaign’s temporary and simplistic nature, in conjunction with the populations and political establishment’s traditional attitudes, inhibited the broader diffusion of a feminist understanding of violence against women. Next I will show how Slovakian feminists achieved speedy legislative success by mobilizing their pre-existing networks with key political actors without a public discussion of these efforts. While feminists’ strategic issue networks facilitated the

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criminalization of domestic violence in Slovakia’s recuperating civil society, they proved to be inadequate for diffusing feminist principles into other legislative and policy fields. I conclude with a discussion of strategic issue networks’ utility and future implications for diffusing broader social change in societies without established traditions of collective contention.

WESTERN ASSUMPTIONS OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: CIVIL SOCIETY AND MODULAR REPERTOIRES The initial emphasis in Western literature on social movements has recently expanded from collectively experienced grievances and political opportunities to include cultural and historical aspects of collective contention. Many students of Western social movements became interested in how people use and combine particular elements of culture and language to mobilize others for a particular cause (e.g. Snow & Benford, 1992). Furthermore, other scholars have explored how successful contention is diffused and sustained over time (e.g. Tarrow, 1998). A host of new concepts, such as collective action frames, repertoires of contention, and modular repertoires, emerged from these new discussions. While the aforementioned concepts represent empirically rich, useful analytical categories, they rest on Western assumptions that complicate and limit their applicability for non-Western settings. The first assumption of Western social movements is the existence of an autonomous civil society with ‘‘mobilizeable’’ constituencies, who are potentially willing to engage collectively for a communal interest. However, in many postcommunist countries, forty years of repression disrupted the development of a consistent tradition of civic engagement. The reconstruction of a vibrant civil society became more complex, ambiguous, and difficult task than the transparent procedure of implementing democratic elections through a pluralistic party system. The steadily increasing number of nonprofit organizations in the region, resulting in part from Western funders’ efforts to reconstitute civil society, has not necessarily increased the general population’s willingness to engage on a community level (Fazekas, 2003). For example, a study conducted in the mid-nineties found that both Slovakian men and women considered their ‘citizen role’ one of least importance, and rated their interest in public issues as an unimportant characteristic in an ideal woman or man (Bu´torova´ et al., 1996).

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Consequently, theories of collective behavior in postcommunist societies cannot assume the existence of the same kind of civil society and civic engagement as in Western liberal democracies. In order to understand the emergence, strategies, and outcomes of collective action in the region, social movement theories need to consider the different trajectory and characteristics of postcommunist civil societies. Scholars who study social movements in Latin, America’s formerly authoritarian regimes have called for a similar revision of Western theoretical concepts (Noonan, 1995; Hipsher, 1998; Moodie, 2002). I extend their revisionist call to transitional democracies in East-Central Europe, whose emergent civil societies are constituted of different processes and publics. The second assumption of Western theories on social movements relates to the concept of modular repertoires of contention. Collective action repertoires are broader collections of the ‘‘ways that people act together in pursuit of shared interest’’ (Tilly, 1995, p. 41). They include not only symbolic resources, such as cultural frames, but also specific protest tactics, such as strikes, petitions, or public meetings. Modern repertoires of contention are typically modular as they are general enough to be replicated across different settings, distinguishing them from the more provincial and spontaneous pre-modern rebellions (Tarrow, 1998). Modular repertoires are thus cultural repositories of effective mobilizing strategies and frames, which emerge gradually over time. However, Slovakia’s forty year repressive communist past disrupted the accumulation of modular repertoires (Dudekova´, 1998). This lack of emergence of modular repertoires has been further exacerbated by the public’s general aversion to public protest and mobilization, a historical legacy of the past regime that imposed public actions in support of the dominant state ideology (Einhorn, 1993). Consequently, feminists underwent a difficult process of deliberation before deciding to launch an awareness-raising campaign using Western marketing strategies. Despite the short-lived public discussion facilitated by the campaign, many of the organizers’ preliminary concerns about the appropriateness and effectiveness of the Western campaign format materialized. Nevertheless, the campaign did create political leverage which feminists were able to use to activate their pre-existing networks with key politicians to criminalize domestic violence. Consequently, strategic issue networks focusing on specific legislative reform generated more visible and immediate success than the awareness raising campaign designed by advertising professionals. However, neither the campaign nor the progressive legislative changes succeeded in diffusing a broader feminist understanding of gender relations across all the sectors of society.

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‘‘ISLANDS OF FEMINIST DEVIATION’’ – FEMINISM IN SLOVAKIA BEFORE THE FIFTH WOMAN CAMPAIGN Before the fifth woman campaign in December 2001, an average Slovakian would not have known the meaning of the concept of ‘‘domestic violence,’’ although research indicates 28 percent of men and 40 percent of women know an abused woman in their close environment (Iniciatı´ va piata zˇena, 2002). Even the justice professionals and police officers I interviewed in 1999 considered domestic violence to mean Slovakian national security politics. Moreover, the vast majority of my interviewees considered marital ‘‘quarrels,’’ the family’s private trouble and vehemently opposed any state intervention into a married couple’s privacy, referring to the past regime’s intrusive state control (Vanya, 1999). Doma´ce na´silie, a direct translation of the English ‘‘domestic violence,’’ was first introduced in print in 1998 in Aspekt, the one and the only Slovakian feminist magazine founded in 1993. Due to the magazine’s academic language, Aspekt’s readership has remained limited to women intellectuals and academics with university degrees. While the magazine’s literary publishing strategy did not generate a public debate on domestic violence, it facilitated loose networks among similarly minded feminist women in and outside of Bratislava. Some of these intellectuals later established their own feminist organizations, such as Aliancia zˇien Slovenska [Alliance of Women in Slovakia] founded in 1994, Klub feministicky´ch filozofiek [Feminist Philosophers’ Club] officially registered in 2001, and Esfem, active since 1999. These feminist organizations met occasionally at seminars organized by the magazine in Bratislava, but they did not organize or participate in joint projects. The nascent feminist community thus remained fragmented and invisible on the mainstream political landscape due to a lack of coordination and collaboration. While tensions and disagreements in voluntary, including feminist, organizations are not uncommon in other geographical contexts as well, specific historical conditions underlie Slovakian feminists’ difficulties of organizational collaboration. As discussed earlier, revitalizing voluntary organizing and civic engagement on a community level became an arduous, complicated task in the postcommunist region due to the widespread of anticollectivist public attitudes. Feminists themselves shared the general public’s discomfort with creating and joining organizations as well. Nad’a4 is a feminist writer and translator who has been actively involved with Aspekt

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since its inception. Her recount of discussing the founding of Aspekt with Western funders illustrates feminists’ initial anti-collectivist attitudes. I still remember how someone from a Western foundation sat around with us, a group of women interested mainly in literature, philosophy, and arts y trying to convince us to create an organization because otherwise we weren’t going to get money. We debated for an incredibly long time about how it’s not that simple to establish an organization in a country with a legacy of the socialist association of women, where anything that was announced as an organization created a terrible fear in us.5

Despite feminists’ initial fears about formalizing their feminist interests, the prospect of continuous Western funding compelled them to create locally based non-profit organizations, but they avoided unifying their organizational resources in a larger collaborative project. Publishing feminist theory, human rights documents, or providing counseling limited to a particular region appeared to feminists as more feasible and appropriate for the politically disillusioned context of Slovakia than organizing public rallies and demonstrations. Nad’a reveals a sad nostalgia about the impossibility of grassroots organizing in postcommunist Slovakia: ‘‘I have always felt a sad nostalgia about never having experienced that real kind of action-oriented activism. We have never really experienced anything similar to that, and I feel sorry about that.’’ Aspekt’s and other Slovakian feminist organizations’ focus on publishing rather than public action resembles feminist strategies in other countries of the post-Soviet region. For example, Sperling (1999, p. 46) characterizes Russian feminists’ collective efforts as a ‘‘nonmobilizational movement holding a few rallies and focusing entirely on nondisruptive means of creating change.’’ In addition to the ‘‘nonmobilizational’’ character of Slovakian feminist projects, they also remained isolated from other organizations’ projects, and limited to a single topic and region of Slovakia. For instance, in 1998 Fenestra, Pro Familia, and Aspekt organized a locally based campaign against domestic violence entitled ‘‘Sixteen Days of Activism.’’ The campaign was timed for December to overlap with other global feminist anti-violence campaigns. As part of the campaign, the organizations presented lectures on domestic violence. In addition, feminists sent a petition to the Slovakian Prime Minister criticizing ‘‘the long-lasting and permanent unwillingness of the government to actively deal with the state of women’s human rights and the situation of the battered women’’ (Iniciatı´ va piata zˇena, 2002, p. 2). Justifying official concern for domestic violence as a human rights issue represents Slovakian feminists’ first attempt to align themselves with the global feminist movement’s agenda. However,

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the campaign’s limited regional focus, proved to be insufficient for eliciting public and political concern for domestic violence. Feminist organizations’ attempts to change the public and legislative discourse on domestic violence failed, in part, because of feminists’ reluctance to combine and coordinate individual initiatives. Nevertheless, while these feminist activities lacked a coordinated, unified agenda, according to Renata, a feminist sociologist, they created ‘‘small islands of feminist deviation,’’ each active in different fields and regions. Nikoleta, a battered women’s counselor, discusses with some nostalgia in her voice how the less coordinated and unified feminist community was functional and productive in the particular postcommunist context of Slovakia. Between 1996 and 1998 we started to get to know each other and provide strong support to each other. It was so nice that we all had a different approach. Some of us were interested in practical issues, others in methods and future visions and research, while [some] were interested in publishing. We all felt really good about having it all covered so well. It was a very nice period of time, it gave us a lot.

The nostalgic period of diverse and scattered feminist projects described by Nikoleta ended in 2001, when Slovakian feminists formed their first larger, joint organization. The first and largest fifth woman campaign, launched in 2001, represented Slovakian feminists’ real public breakthrough that created a ‘‘shock,’’ as one feminist put it in Slovakian media and society. Given that the subsequent awareness-raising campaigns organized in 2002 and 2003 were much smaller in terms of their effect and extent, this paper concentrates on the strategies and outcomes of the first fifth woman campaign.

SOLIDIFYING OF A SCATTERED COMMUNITY – THE EMERGENCE OF THE FIFTH WOMAN CAMPAIGN The organizations, Altera, Aliancia zˇien Slovenska, Aspekt, Eset, Fenestra, Mozˇnost’ vol’by [Pro Choice Slovakia], and Pro Familia had never before collaborated on a project, nor had they planned to join forces over the specific issue of domestic violence.6 Anka, a feminist writer, has always felt disgusted by public campaigns ‘‘because they’re so terribly simplifying y and activism is so primitive in Slovakia,’’ implying the lack of activist tradition and civic engagement in the country. In addition to historical reasons, L’uba, who has worked with battered women, provides another reason against massive, collaborative campaigns ‘‘Our long-term position

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was that campaigns should be done only after services have been established, because informing the public about [domestic violence] and then not have services doesn’t make any sense y we didn’t think it was the right time yet.’’ Most feminists thus rejected the idea of a unifying organization or project because they found local organizations more effective and feasible in the contemporary Slovakian context than a more general, all-encompassing organization. The primary impetus for the creation of a larger umbrella organization came from a Western non-profit funder, who announced a call for proposals in early 2001 to fund a campaign to raise awareness around domestic violence. Feminist organizations felt compelled to apply for the Western grant for various reasons.7 First, they felt concerned about other, non-feminist organizations grabbing the funding opportunity to organize a campaign more damaging than helpful to victims. Furthermore, Nora, the director of the funding organization’s women’s program and a cheerful Slovak woman who studied feminist philosophy, ‘‘pushed’’ key feminist organizations to apply through personal phone calls and e-mails. Although she was aware of feminists’ dilemmas concerning the lack of shelters, she felt convinced that the campaign represented a unique ‘‘opportunity when all these organizations that hadn’t collaborated in the most effective ways could now get a chance to form a uniform view and goals within Slovak society.’’ When I asked what she meant by not collaborating in ‘‘the most effective ways,’’ Nora explained that feminist organizations’ effectiveness was hindered by their scattered, uncoordinated, regionally focused activities. By personally encouraging specific feminist organizations to apply and connect with other organizations, Nora activated the loose networks between scattered feminists in and outside of Bratislava. The prime incentive to apply specifically as an officially registered coalition of five (later expanded to seven) organizations came from the application requirements, which stated that, ‘‘the precondition of getting a grant is the collaboration of two or more NGOs’’ (For Democracy Foundation, 2001a, p. 2).8 Consequently, grant requirements pushed feminist organizations to solidify their networks into the formal structure of a non-profit coalition entitled Iniciatı´va piata zˇena [Fifth Woman Initiative]. By requiring the formal unification of formerly loose and uncoordinated feminist networks, the Western funding agency not only activated informal connections among feminists, but also imposed a particular organizational structure, viewed as more effective in engendering social change. While most Slovakian feminist organizations considered a mass organization and campaign format inappropriate for the given historical and

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cultural context of Slovakia, the Western funders held a different opinion. According to them, Slovakian feminists could not become influential players in civil society unless they formally unified their goals and visions. Nora, the Slovak director of the Western funding organization’s women’s program, recalls how various ‘‘donors longed for an initiative that isn’t one organization trying to get money for itself, but an initiative that is finally coming from multiple sides, and is able to unite around one topic or one goal.’’ In fact, Nora explains, three other larger funding agencies agreed to fund the fifth woman campaign after they learned that it united the interests and resources of multiple organizations. Nora’s organization thus required the formation of a coalition for two reasons. First, the coalition format secured the endorsement of other important Western funders. The second reason Nora alludes to be a larger concern about the long-term sustainability of the scattered, not coordinated or unified, feminist community in Slovakia. Some of the biggest U.S. funding agencies, including Nora’s employer, are gradually removing their resources from Eastern European countries as their ‘‘democracy-building’’ mission is nearing its end. Many of these U.S. funders assume that their funding role will be replaced by the European Union, as most East Central European countries, including Slovakia, became European Union members in the Spring of 2003. Nora felt concerned that similar to U.S. funding agencies, funders affiliated with the European Union will prefer to support more solidified, formally unified non-profit organizations as the only guarantee for effective, wide-ranging social change. The unifying element of the fifth woman coalition was particularly appealing to Katherine, the director of a subdivision of a supranational nonprofit organization. When discussing her perceptions of the campaign, she underscores significance of the project’s collective format in the Slovakian context. And when I say that it brought several groups together, I think it was an issue and it remains an issue, in terms of the way women’s organizations that are doing advocacy for gender equality are able to come together to do some sort of collective action, because for our organization, we feel whereas there is room for a lot of organizations to do a lot of work, sometimes, in order to influence policy and to really create the institutional changes that are needed in this country, groups need to come together, and here it has been a very difficult process in order.

Katherine’s account sheds light on Western funders’ assumption about the necessity of unified organizational and symbolic resources for effective social change, regardless of historical and cultural circumstances of the postcommunist region. Consequently, Katherine’s organization would not have

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provided funding to any of the organizations in the fifth woman initiative had they applied individually. On the other hand, Slovakian feminist organizations considered their diverse activities less focused on collective organizing and more on education through publishing to be the only historically and culturally viable option. Western funders and Slovakian feminists thus had divergent definitions of an effective feminist nonprofit community.

‘‘EVERY FIFTH WOMAN IS ABUSED. DO WE CARE?’’:9 MARKETING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE After the five feminist organizations jointly formed and officially registered the fifth woman initiative, they had to comply with further requirements imposed by the Western funder. The call of the For Democracy Foundation (FDF) stipulated not only the organizational form, but also the language and strategies of the campaign. The announcement’s introduction provided the following theoretical conceptualization of violence against women: The right to be free from violence is a fundamental human right. Violence against women is gender-based violence that results in physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women. Gender motivated violence is an abuse of women’s human rights and is a primary cause and symptom of women’s unequal status in society. (For Democracy Foundation, 2001a, p. 1)

The call thus utilized the human rights language and interpretation of domestic violence, which considers any form of violence against women more than a manifestation of unequal gender relations. As a result of decade-long feminist networking and lobbying in supranational organizations such as in the United Nations (UN) the original feminist explanation of violence against women as an expression of patriarchy was expanded to denote a violation of human rights (Keck & Sikkink, 1998, pp. 165–198). The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, ratified in 1993 by the UN, officially codified this broadened definition of domestic abuse (Declaration on the Elimination of Violation Against Women, 1994). After a brief paragraph about the weakened political and social status of women after the fall of communism, the call reiterates the human rights interpretation of domestic violence by highlighting November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, officially designated by the UN General Assembly in 2000. Moreover, the call obliges successful applicants to time their campaigns with other globally organized campaigns

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entitled Sixteen Days of Activism Against Gender Violence that run from November 25 to December 10 every year.10 Borrowing language from social movements literature, FDF identified human rights as the master frame for making domestic violence into a social problem. Master frames indicate more generic and flexible collective action frames that are used successfully across cycles of protest in the same or different geographical areas (Gamson, 1992; Benford & Snow, 2000; Tarrow, 1998). By emphasizing the human rights interpretation of domestic violence, FDF encouraged the alignment of Slovakian feminists’ framing efforts with other global campaigns against violence against women. In sum, by imposing the organizational structure of a coalition and the human rights master frame, FDF intended to increase Slovakian feminists’ effectiveness in generating public and political concern to domestic violence. Furthermore, the Western funding agency’s call required participants to rely primarily on media, described as an ‘‘ideal tool to raise public awareness,’’ which ‘‘has the power to reach out to millions of people’’ (For Democracy Foundation, 2001a, p. 1). FDF thus assumed the media’s transformative capacity in Slovakia, where pluralistic society, democratic media, and civil society represent relatively recent concepts and newly learned and applied practices. For instance, while Slovakian nonprofit organizations have grown and diversified steadily since the end of communist rule, they continue to encounter difficulty in using the media to mobilize the public for various causes. In a study on the development of the ‘‘third sector,’’11 activist comments on the state of Slovakian non-profit organizations: The [non-profit] sector has not been able to utilize sufficiently the potential it gained four years ago to become more accepted by politicians and the public. Politicians use the [non-profit] sector to advance their own goals y and it seems like the public cannot connect non-profit activities with real people and real actions. The non-profit sectors communication with the public is fairly complicated and clumsy. (Demesˇ , 2002, p. 328)

In addition to neglecting Slovakian nonprofits’ difficulties in reaching the public, the Western funder failed to sufficiently credit Slovakia’s long-held traditional attitudes toward domestic violence (Bodna´rova´ & Filadelfiova´, 2002). The combination of victim-blaming attitudes and a strong rejection of state interference into the private are typical views not only among the general public, but also among criminal justice professionals and elected officials (Krchnˇa´kova´, Farkasˇ ova´, Gyarfa´sˇ ova´, & Centrum praw kobiet, 2002; Vanya, 1999). Gabriela, one of the spokespersons of the fifth woman campaign, told me a story about an MP that illustrates well the extent of

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ignorance about domestic abuse among elected Slovakian officials. At a conference organized by the European Commission in Cologne, Germany, in 1999 a Slovakian MP announced that Slovakia does not have a domestic violence problem, despite the statistical evidence about rising trends of violent crime in the private sphere of the home at the end of the nineties (Ministerstvo pra´ce, socia´lnych vecı´ a rodiny, 2004a, pp. 3–5). Similarly, a content analysis of mainstream Slovakian media revealed that newspapers tend to avoid writing about domestic violence completely, despite the persistent efforts of feminist organizations to publicize the widespread nature of the problem. The few cases reported by newspapers tend to be written in victimizing language that reinforces traditional myths about women and their marital roles (Cvikova´ & Jura´nˇova´, 2001, pp. 37–48). Although the grant announcement alluded to the relative weakness of the emergent Slovakian civil society, it did not discuss the widespread cultural taboo and ignorance surrounding domestic abuse. Instead, the call continued arguing that the media, ‘‘if used in an appropriate manner,’’ could not only change popular attitudes about domestic violence, but also strengthen the negotiating position of feminist organizations in the political decisionmaking process (For Democracy Foundation, 2001a, p. 1). Successful applicants were to learn the ‘‘appropriate manner’’ of using the media to change public attitudes and increase their organization’s political influence in specialized workshops led by U.S.-trained marketing experts. These workshops would teach participants ‘‘the different approaches to the planning, implementation, tools, and effectiveness of media campaigns,’’ which would also improve participants’ media relations and campaigning skills in general. By teaching the nuts and bolts of media campaigning, FDF also wanted participants to gain better access to the media to be able to ‘‘promote their messages’’ in general (For Democracy Foundation, 2001a, p. 2). Western marketing experts emphasized the importance of a single, clear, concise, and simple message that is focused on a strictly defined target and driven by concrete, measurable goals (For Democracy Foundation, 2001c). Arrows on the fancy Powerpoint slides used by the marketing experts connected the purpose of communicating easily and quickly understandable messages while selling an issue, in this case domestic violence. One of the slides revealed the connection between the media and social change by explaining that the media give voice to social problems, and by reading the media, the public forms an opinion, which automatically motivates them emotionally to engage in social action and public debate (For Democracy Foundation, 2001b). Finally, all workshops emphasized the necessity for

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funded projects to consult with a professional advertising agency about specific campaign details on a regular basis. By requiring feminists to reduce their cause to a single, precise message, their multiple audiences to a distinguishable target, and their broader feminist mission to measurable outcomes, FDF promoted a marketing approach to domestic violence. According to a workshop manual, a clearly defined message, target, and set of goals will generate a ‘‘solid, determined, credible, and committed campaign, [which] will help attract new adherents to [the] cause’’ (For Democracy Foundation, 2001c, p. 10). FDF thus expected that a media campaign emulating marketing strategies would change traditional public and political perceptions of domestic violence, and result in broader policy changes. To ensure the consistency of this marketing approach, FDF recommended a particular advertising agency from Bratislava to the fifth woman initiative, and required regular reports about meetings with the agency. In addition to suggesting one of the most renowned advertising agencies in Bratislava, FDF also required the initiative to consult with FDF’s own board of media experts. Hana, a board member, explains with the help of flashy English terminology that the board’s role during the campaign was to provide ‘‘know-how, guidance, and technical support y so that maximum efficiency is achieved in the [Slovakian] environment.’’ According to Hana, feminist organizations definitely needed professional guidance, as they had no experience in the field of media. She found working with women’s organizations very frustrating. I had a very strong feeling that the campaign organizers’ vision was so extreme and strong, particularly regarding how things should be done, that I felt like they thought we had no idea what it was about. As a result, these organizations were not open to communication.

Hana’s frustration about feminist organizers’ ‘‘extreme’’ vision refers to feminists’ staunch determination to retain control over how domestic violence is visually represented. Hana’s and the other consultants’ standardized, simplistic marketing approach and feminists’ subjective, emotional identification with the topic became a source of ongoing tension during the two months of the campaign. This tension resulted in the disillusionment of the feminist community with both joint campaigns and using marketing strategies for changing public attitudes. By following most of the funding conditions, feminists embraced the role of social marketers selling the issue of domestic violence as a serious issue to change the victim-blaming attitudes of the politically

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indifferent Slovakian public. However, while the social marketing of domestic violence generated a temporary public debate and the passage of progressive domestic violence legislation, the reduction of feminist principles to a single issue, target, and tactic complicated the political acceptance and diffusion of feminist principles across diverse policy sectors. Although the role of social marketers as a result of funding stipulations constrained feminists’ creativity and agency in publicizing domestic violence, feminists applied a number of specific target-oriented strategies to affect the discourse and legislation about the issue. Consequently, depending on the intended target of change, I distinguish two broad categories of strategies, discursive and legislative strategies. Discursive strategies aimed at changing the discourse of domestic violence, what we know about domestic violence and how we know it. These strategies concentrated primarily on changing the individualistic victim blaming, pathologizing discourse of domestic violence present in the media, helping professions, and political establishment. Legislative strategies, on the other hand, focused on changing legislation related to domestic violence. Legislative and discursive strategies are not mutually exclusive, but rather represent intertwined analytical categories. Accordingly, institutions, such as the law, family, or education, always operate and are maintained through particular discourses, while discourses produce particular institutional practices (Foucault, 1991, p. 71; Profitt, 2000, pp. 3–4; Thayer, 2000, pp. 5–7). While feminists’ discursive and legislative strategies appear intricately entwined, distinguishing between the two illuminates their different emergence and levels of effectiveness. As a result of their clearly defined target as well as particular historical conditions, feminists’ legislative strategies produced more success than their discursive strategies. On the other hand, due to their more diffused and imperceptible target, it is questionable whether discursive strategies were able to transform the pathologizing discourse of ‘‘wife beating’’ into a more feminist interpretation of violence against women.

SELLING ‘‘THE FIFTH WOMAN’’ – DISCURSIVE STRATEGIES Discursive strategies targeted key sites of popular discourse formation, which included the nation-wide distribution of billboards, radio and TV spots, as well as regular press conferences, press releases, televised discussions, public seminars, and lectures on various aspects of violence against women. In addition,

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the initiative launched a temporary phone line during the campaign period intended to provide general information about violence against women. While the fifth woman initiative’s final report lists only the aforementioned activities, all directed at the popular discourse, two organizations in the coalition attempted to affect the attitudes and approaches taken by professionals working with domestic violence cases as well as by organizing professional workshops. These two organizations used their own limited funding to educate police officers and social workers about the social causes of violence against women. However, since the coalition’s overall funding was limited to using and working with the media, professional trainings remained a marginal, sporadic tactic, organized only in a few selected cities. The overall campaign was divided into two stages to maximize the effect of advertising. The first stage of the campaign was organized between November 23 and December 10, 2001, and comprised primarily ‘‘explanatory activities.’’ A few academic lectures and TV discussions, featuring the organizers of the fifth woman campaign, explained the causes and effects of violence against women, highlighting the role of traditional gender stereotypes in public and private violence against women. Additionally, the fifth woman initiative published numerous specialized articles and books on the issue during the first half of the campaign. The second stage of the campaign, which took place through most of January, incorporated a massive media campaign consisting of billboards, TV and radio spots as well as print ads. While the campaign’s first half focused on the theoretical foundations of violence against women, the second stage served to publicize, or in the initiative’s terminology to ‘‘medialize,’’ the gravity of the phenomenon. The first stage of the campaign attempted to ‘‘advertise’’ a more sophisticated, feminist, and human rights-based explanation of violence against women. In a press release launching the campaign, the fifth woman initiative legitimizes public concern for violence against women by employing a human rights framework with a feminist twist. An individual’s human rights cannot be guaranteed unless everyone’s human rights are respected, including the human rights of women. Women represent more than half of the Earth’s population, yet they have a much less say in decisions about their own lives and relationships, as well as the society in which they live. Women’s discrimination is a direct consequence of the unequal and unjust distribution of power between men and women. This injustice can be called many different ways – traditional values, cultural heritage, the natural course of the world, but in reality it’s an injustice that threatens the rights and lives of women. (piata zˇena, 2001a)

Similarly, other articles pre-written for the campaign by the feminists and women journalist ‘‘allies’’ combined the general human rights frame with a

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feminist critique of traditional gender roles as sources of domestic violence. However, many feminists felt most articles and press releases during the campaign did not succeed at combining feminist language with a human rights frame. Nikoleta found it very hard and exhausting to maintain a structural, feminist discourse of domestic violence in every public appearance throughout the campaign. The only way to maintain [a feminist discourse] is if one applies a gender-based definition of domestic violence in a thorough and persistent way, in every sentence and every activity that we do. That’s very hard.y. Single cases of violence are often impossible to solve on the individual level, so we insist on contextualizing every case in the context of violence, without focusing on our organization, and that is very boring for journalists. y I think the first fifth woman campaign was only a beginning, but I think we managed to maintain [a feminist discourse].

Nikoleta’s words indicate that, at least during the campaign’s first stage, the discourse of the Slovakian media shifted from individualizing cases of ‘‘wife beating’’ to situating violence against women in the context of unequal gender relations. However, Nikoleta’s account needs to be contextualized within the peculiar emergence of the fifth woman initiative’s discursive strategies; most articles published about violence against women during the campaign period were pre-written by feminists or selected journalist ‘‘allies,’’ who were ‘‘pre-trained’’ about the feminist causes of violence against women. Additionally, the Slovak government reports high tolerance to violent acts, particularly physical violence against women among the general population (Ministerstvo pra´ce, socia´lnych vecı´ a rodiny, 2004b, pp. 6). Consequently, it is questionable to what extent the ‘‘explanatory’’ articles published during the campaign’s brief first stage altered the deep-rooted traditional, individualizing perceptions of the general public. The campaign’s second stage consisted of a massive media campaign marketing domestic violence as an issue of public concern. The campaign was preceded by months of extensive preparation, monitored by the coalition’s Western funders, who wanted to be informed regularly about each stage of campaign development. Nora, the FDF’s program director, fully admits that her organization became ‘‘the police officer in the particular country where the grant was awarded.’’ FDF’s authoritative position as the monitor of the campaign created many ongoing tensions among feminists. One of feminists’ biggest frustrations was generated by the funders’ insistence on collaborating with a professional marketing agency, whose experts dismissed feminists’ knowledge about domestic violence. Nad’a reveals her irritation with marketing experts’ ignorance and superficial approach.

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What we know is simply not valued as expert knowledge; while a person who y works in the advertising business, and has a flashy English label describing their work is considered an expert. That made me think that perhaps it would be a good idea to call myself the ‘‘creative director’’ [uses English phrase] of Aspekt [audience laughs] y. That just represents the clash of two worlds, which is in some ways interesting, but it also brings a lot of tension.

Feminists found it extremely difficult to cooperate with an agency that ignored feminist expertise about the issue. Advertising experts wanted to market domestic violence as they would yoghurt or any other consumer item, arguing ‘‘one doesn’t need to know a lot about yoghurt to create a good advertisement’’ (Nora, FDF’s Program Director). Nad’a can still recall vividly her internal conflicts while adjusting to the rough rules of the reductionist marketing world. I still remember how hard it was to articulate our order to the agency, and how hard it was to maintain our demands. We formulated a huge amount of really clear and important limitations or prohibitions regarding all the things the spot was not allowed to contain y of course after we listed them all, the agency panicked. But it was very hard for me y that the spot was going to be done by men, since my vision used to be that it would be done by women activists who work in the media and are familiar with the topic.

However, since Slovakia had no advertising or marketing agency with a feminist leadership or an activist base, feminists had to challenge opposition from predominantly men marketers about the necessity of their advertising ‘‘prohibitions.’’ Some of these prohibitions included avoiding the focus on unprivileged social backgrounds, and on womens’ or childrens’ bodies with or without injuries. The only common ground both parties could agree became the quantitative information about every fifth woman being abused, which was based on statistical data from Western European countries (European Women’s Lobby, 1998). After feminists and the agency agreed on centering the campaign around this quantitative information, feminists’ central challenge became simplifying the abstract, sophisticated feminist language to a clear, widely understandable, quickly selling, attractive message. The minutes of a meeting with the agency detail how every instruction of the marketing experts emphasized ‘‘having a message as clear and transparent as possible, with as little facts as possible,’’ while reminding feminists that most of their ideas were too sophisticated for the general population. Feminists soon realized that complying with marketing requirements entailed reducing not only their language, but also their broader mission into a single message. L’uba’s

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recalls gradually adapting to the marketing approach through constant reduction and simplification. The agency we worked with also told us that it could not be a lot in the first year of the campaign, and that it had to be concentrated. At [their] suggestion we chose the slogan ‘‘every fifth woman is abused,’’ which provided a strong unifying element and prevented the dispersion into many messages y. During the preparations of the campaign we kept constantly reducing what we want to do and how we want to do it.

L’uba’s words reveal the process through which feminists gradually accepted the necessity of multiple message reductions in the interest of quick and widespread publicity. The agency’s marketing experts used various arguments to convince feminists that encapsulating a feminist message in one piece of numerical information is the best solution for raising public awareness. For instance, marketing experts argued, based on the results of their focus group research, that the general population responded to numerical information the most. In addition, an expert claimed that numbers are ideal in advertisements because ‘‘they can be remembered, represented, and played with easily.’’ The ad agency thus gradually convinced feminists to concentrate on the single fact of the ‘‘every fifth woman,’’ which omitted the complex sociocultural causes and severe effects of violence against women, including its interpretation as a violation of human rights. Since the agency was not able to produce a visual ad acceptable by feminists’ standards, the final product became a purely textual billboard, containing the campaign slogan ‘‘Every fifth woman is abused. Do we care?’’ By privileging a statistical fact over theoretical complexity in the public ‘‘promotion’’ of violence against women, feminists embraced the role of social marketers of violence against women as in Slovakia’s recuperating civil society. The fifth woman initiative’s members realized the pitfalls of an awarenessraising campaign using a professional marketing model. Their fears and doubts about the appropriateness of a media campaign for creating an alternative discourse around violence against women particularly intensified after the completion of the campaign. Many feminists lamented the difficulty of maintaining control over the introduction and diffusion of feminist ideas through mainstream media. At a seminar evaluating the fifth woman campaign, Nad’a discusses the controversial after-effects of marketing domestic violence through mainstream media. It was very important to us to publicize the things we were doing. But by publicizing they simply slipped through our fingers, and now there are all kinds of things happening to them, mostly things that we would have never imagined y. Because we, the fifth woman initiative, or the larger media circle, succeeded in creating an issue of concern, and that

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was a very, very important step. On the other hand, we need to look at what’s happening with this issue now y what ways of not solving the issue did it create, because I don’t really think we can talk about solving the issue.

Nad’a’s last sentence refers especially to the Slovak government’s subtle resistance to incorporate feminist principles into the National Strategy for the Elimination and Prevention of Violence against Women and in the Family (National Strategy). The National Strategy is a governmental policy document, developed by an interdisciplinary committee consisting of elected officials and activist experts on violence against women, which contains recommendations for various policy areas on how to eliminate and prevent domestic violence.12 After the government passed progressive legislative amendments, drafted largely by feminists, the Slovak government gradually but effectively hindered the incorporation of explicitly feminist, genderbased interpretation of violence against women. The Parliament rejected a legislative proposal to implement and fund police trainings to increase professionals’ awareness and sensitivity about domestic violence, particularly after passing related amendments in the Criminal Procedural Code. Furthermore, the government refused to allocate state funds for creating battered women’s shelters. Both professional trainings and state funded safe houses were goals feminists strongly advocated for in governmental committees13 before and after passing domestic violence related amendments in the Criminal Code. Consequently, while feminist activists considered the passage of amendments an important success in their collective efforts, the Slovak government’s subsequent withdrawal from supporting and implementing a National Strategy informed by a feminist definition of domestic violence. The following section details the emergence and complicated outcomes of feminists’ legislative strategies.

QUICK FIX, SLOW CHANGE – LEGISLATIVE STRATEGIES The fifth woman initiative’s legislative strategies, which extended beyond the campaign period, focused on reforming the legislative framework of domestic violence. Specifically, feminists concentrated on amending specific articles of the Slovak Criminal and Criminal Procedural Code to improve the protection of domestic violence victims. The limited focus and goal of legislative strategies, employed in a particularly favorable historical moment, facilitated speedy success. Within the course of a year, the Slovakian

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Parliament criminalized domestic abuse, passed stricter sentences for batterers, and introduced restraining orders. My findings indicate that while Slovakia’s approaching admission to the European Union and parliamentary elections sped up the amendments’ passage by the Parliament, the same historical conditions delayed MPs’ acceptance of the issue’s feminist explanation as gender inequality. Consequently, feminists’ legislative strategies simultaneously facilitated progressive legislative changes, while also impeded the broader diffusion of feminist principles in subsequent policy decisions. In order to understand the successful outcome of the fifth woman initiative’s legislative strategies, I propose the concept of strategic issue networks. Strategic issue networks denote pre-existing personal connections with strategically positioned elected officials, activated by social movement entrepreneurs for a limited time, issue, and purpose. Since these networks focus on a single issue and goal, they tend to weaken and lose their utility after the goal has been achieved. Consequently, strategic issue networks can be simultaneously effective in achieving immediately identifiable goals, such as legislative or policy changes, but less effective in diffusing and sustaining social change across broader levels of society. In the case of the fifth woman campaign, feminists successfully activated a set of strategic issue networks with MP’s and the Minister of Justice in particular to achieve the criminalization of domestic violence. Feminists’ connections with particular elected officials in the Parliament and the Ministry of Justice were essential to passing progressive legislation, as draft bills can be submitted to the Slovakian Parliament by the governmental representatives, that is, by various ministers, or by MP’s (Kova´cˇechova´ & Zˇilincˇı´ k, 1999, p. 3). The effectiveness of strategic issue networks was further enhanced by the set of precisely defined legislative goals. As Tamara explains, feminists wanted ‘‘to achieve great impact with small changes,’’ therefore they focused on amending a few selected articles in the Criminal Code. Through the enactment of these amendments, feminists achieved the criminalization of domestic violence and the introduction of restraining orders, representing unique legislative improvements in the entire postcommunist region. Feminists’ strategic issue networks emerged from their previous personal and working connections with elected officials. These connections date back to ‘‘times before the revolution,14 when there were these positive islands of civic opposition y or some kind of an underground,’’ explains Tamara, who is both member of the fifth woman initiative and runs her own, small feminist organization. The current Slovakian Minister of Justice, Daniel

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Lipsˇ ic, and Tamara have known each other since the anti-communist opposition of the late eighties in Slovakia. When Tamara wrote a personal letter about the importance of criminalizing domestic violence to the Minister in 2001, the year of the first fifth woman campaign, he immediately agreed to cooperate on drafting necessary amendments. In turn, the influential, Christian-Democratic Minister’s endorsement facilitated the support of the parliamentary majority as well.15 In addition to effective strategic issue networks, two historical factors significantly contributed to the speedy criminalization of domestic violence in Slovakia: approaching Parliamentary elections scheduled for September 20 and 21, 2002 and Slovakia’s pending admission to the European Union, finalized by a national referendum in May 2003.16 Tamara describes with some bitterness in her voice how the support of most MP’s for the amendments was a strategic move to boost their personal popularity before the approaching parliamentary elections. When you think about it, we were really lucky that elections were scheduled for September, because all politicians wanted to look really good. Plus they couldn’t just ignore the billboards we posted all over the country saying every fifth woman is abused. So all politicians figured, ‘‘well, if I support that, I won’t lose anything.’’

Similarly, other feminists expressed their doubts about the sudden political support for criminalizing domestic violence, associating it with the MPs’ moral difficulty in opposing an anti-violence bill introduced by the Ministry of Justice. Consequently, while feminists considered criminalization crucial in making domestic violence a public issue, they realized the limits of legislative strategies in generating the cultural transformation of individual attitudes. The second facilitating factor, Slovakia’s imminent entry to the European Union, significantly contributed to the speedy enactment of legislative changes as well. Part of the preparation process for being admitted to the European Union includes legal and institutional harmonization, or the standardization of domestic legislation with European standards. As part of the harmonization process, the Ministry of Justice needed to standardize the Slovak Penal Code with international law, which, in Kveta’s words, created ‘‘a fortunate coincidence of circumstances’’ for criminalizing domestic violence. Many of the necessary changes involved the ratification of better legislative mechanisms for the protection of human rights (Kusy´, 2002), which for feminists represented an opportunity to raise concern for the issue of domestic violence. For instance, in one of the coalition’s few press releases alluding to the needed legislative changes, feminists legitimize the

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human rights interpretation of domestic violence by appealing to more ‘‘developed,’’ Western countries as models to follow: It is y legitimate to ask why the government, our Ministers, have been so persistent in refusing to consider violence against women a violation of human rights. The situation in Slovakia indicates that women’s abuse is not a governmental priority, even though many developed countries are actively dealing with this issue (piata zˇena, 2001b).

Slovakian feminists thus framed domestic violence as a human rights violation, whose criminalization was essential to becoming ‘‘European.’’ Europeanization, or Slovakia’s process of adapting ‘‘European’’ values, often dominated elected officials’ public statements toward the end of nineties. For instance, Prime Minister Mikula´sˇ Dzurinda, in a speech given at the Humboldt University in Berlin, equated being European with being part of a different, ‘‘higher’’ civilization ‘‘Europe, Europeanism mainly means for us a cultural and civilisation model. To be a European means to commit oneself to certain values – liberal democracy, civil society, individual rights.’’ (Dzurinda, 2002, p. 2) Admission to the European Union thus provided a political opportunity to put the criminalization of domestic violence ‘‘on the table’’ (McAdam, 1996). Appealing occasionally to the cultural narrative of Europeanization helped feminists amplify the resonance of domestic violence as a human rights issue among political circles. Consequently, in contrast to the difficulty feminists faced in selling domestic violence as a human rights violation to the general public, the human rights frame was an ideal ‘‘marketing’’ strategy to activate feminists’ strategic issue networks with key political actors. In addition to activating strategic issue networks in auspicious historical circumstances, another particular feature of legislative strategies facilitated the speedy criminalization of domestic violence, avoiding publicization. While feminists’ discursive strategies focused on publicizing violence against women as the every fifth (abused) woman on billboards and in public debates, legislative strategies concentrated on the back stage of political meetings. According to the feminists I interviewed, the success of legislative strategies was rooted precisely in the avoidance of a wide-ranging public discussion about the criminalization of domestic violence before, during, and after the campaign period. Instead the fifth woman initiative concentrated on activating strategic issue networks in governmental and parliamentary committee meetings. When I ask Nikoleta about the ‘‘secret’’ of sudden criminalization, she underscores the significance of persistent backstage feminist networking. Since 1999 Slovakian feminists’ tactic has been to do their own thing quietly, without calling any attention to it, to avoid lobbying and publicizing in advance, and just prepare

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those law proposals, and insert them quietly into a governmental proposal. I have actually recommended this technique to other younger colleagues abroad as well y [Slovakian] MPs didn’t really know what they voted for, what [the bill] was really about.

Consequently, both eschewing publicization and the conscious exploitation of Slovakian politicians’ indifference regarding violence against women contributed to the sudden legislative success. After gaining the support of a few enthusiastic women MPs and the Ministry of Justice, the coalition intentionally avoided educating other elected officials about domestic violence. In fact, many feminists I interviewed suspected that most MPs did not fully realize they were voting for progressive domestic violence legislation when they passed a larger crime bill, mentioned by Nikoleta above, as part of the European harmonization process. Paradoxically then, feminists successfully exploited the government’s ignorance to criminalize domestic violence. However, the government’s involvement and interest increased significantly during the process of drafting policy measures, which aimed at implementing new legislation and preventing violence against women. Specifically, the government failed to apply the feminist definition of violence against women consistently in the National Strategy for the prevention and elimination of violence against women and in the family. Moreover, the document conflates violence against women and family violence, including child abuse, elderly abuse, and violence against disabled people (Ministerstvo pra´ce, socia´lnych vecı´ a rodiny, 2004a, pp. 1–6). Finally, the government failed to allot state funding for the establishment of battered women’s shelters and police trainings. Feminists considered the government’s sudden combination of family violence with violence against women a covert intention to suppress an exclusively feminist interpretation rooted in gender inequality, and replace it with a traditional family rhetoric assuming the sacrosanct unity of marriage. Some feminists, I interviewed, also referred to the experiences of the battered women’s movement in Western Europe and the United States, whose strategies and goals became gradually depoliticized over the past three decades as they became co-opted by federal agencies (Schechter, 1982; Tierney, 1982). As a result, individualizing psychological explanations came to constitute the common knowledge about domestic violence in the United States, directing public and scholarly attention to the interiority of women (and men) experiencing domestic violence. In order to prevent the triumph of individualizing explanations, Slovakian feminists were determined to maintain a feminist, gender-specific interpretation of violence against women in

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every policy document. Gabriela, one of the spokespersons for the fifth woman initiative angrily describes the Slovak government’s betrayal of feminist principles in the National Strategy. The Ministry [of Labor] drafted another version y whose goal is to suppress every measure aimed specifically at violence against women y. Apparently the Ministry doesn’t want to get into an argument with the Christian Democrats, so women will be neglected.

Alica, a civil servant working for the Division for Equal Opportunities and Antidiscrimination at the Ministry of Labor, also confirmed the stark opposition of the family oriented Christian Democrats. The National Strategy as a multi-tiered policy document demanded the collaborative effort of multiple ministries, including the Ministry of Education dominated by a Christian-Democratic leadership. Alica remembers the Ministry’s opposition particularly against educational workshops that aimed at eliminating gender stereotypes at high schools, which were part of the original version of the National Strategy. ‘‘[Feminists] would visit the Minister, who would tell them how happy he was to see them, but as soon as the door closed the Minister wouldn’t like [their proposals], so he would put them in another drawer and just leave them there.’’ In a public statement critiquing the government’s sudden change of ‘‘heart,’’ the coalition argued that conflating multiple kinds of family violence ‘‘creates an obstacle to meaningful help to victims of all kinds of abuses.’’ In addition, feminists accused the Ministry for ignoring women’s diverse backgrounds and human rights principles in general (Hromadna´ obcˇianska pripomienka k Na´rodnej strate´gii na elimina´ciu a prevenciu na´silia pa´chane´ho na zˇena´ch a v rodina´ch, 2004, p. 1). However, feminists were concerned primarily about the suppression of feminist, gender-specific interpretation of violence against women, and the subsequent reinforcement of conservative, Christian values promoting traditional gender arrangements in and outside the family. As one of the Christian-Democratic MP’s argues, the ideal family, based on heterosexual marriage ‘‘contributes to a healthy, integrated development, and prevents children from poverty, drug addiction, and committing crimes.’’ (Brocka, 2000) Consequently, feminists were concerned that subsuming the genderspecific category of violence against women under the broad, depoliticized terminology of family violence would further reinforce conservative, patriarchal interpretations of women’s role in the Slovakian family and society. Feminists’ frustration echoes their initial doubts about the effectiveness of legislative strategies to change traditional public and political attitudes

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toward domestic violence. While the criminalization of domestic violence became the token, most frequently referred to achievement of the fifth woman initiative, it also became a political alibi for neglecting other important, related policy measures. The Slovakian Parliament refused to create and support police trainings and battered women’s shelters, which would have ensured the effective implementation of new legislation.17 The government’s lack of commitment to preventing and eliminating domestic violence elicited much public criticism from the fifth woman coalition’s members. In a presentation at an interdisciplinary conference on violence against women organized by the Ministry of Labor, Nad’a from the fifth woman coalition openly questioned the government’s intentions behind criminalizing domestic violence. We need to have a consensus if we want to implement any effective measures. This cannot be just a bureaucratic machinery which will only pretend to be a part of the EU [European Union]. But I haven’t really seen any other type of efforts so far, nor, excuse me, any results.

Consequently, while legislative strategies, employed through strategic issue networks at the dawn of entering the European Union facilitated the speedy criminalization of domestic violence, they also complicated the political acceptance and diffusion of feminist principles in strategies of elimination and prevention. Feminists’ strategic issue networks were effective in mobilizing the support of key political actors for a single legislative goal, but the networks’ effectiveness faded after the Parliament passed the set of amendments. Consequently, legislative strategies changed the legal discourse of domestic violence without altering the phenomenon’s political and public discourse.

CONCLUSION The concept of domestic violence did not exist in the Slovak language and legislation until a small group of Slovakian feminists organized a nationwide, awareness-raising campaign aimed at changing the discourse and legislation of domestic violence. Conforming to a Western funding agency’s requirements, the previously fragmented feminist community formed an official coalition, and hired professional advertising experts to design a broadly appealing media campaign. While the campaign facilitated a temporary upsurge of newspaper articles and TV debates on the issue, I argue that its reduction in marketing strategies were less successful at diffusing the more complex feminist and human rights explanations of violence against

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women. Consequently, many feminists felt dispirited after the campaign, and questioned the utility of imported Western marketing models to change public perceptions in a postcommunist society. In contrast to discursive strategies, the fifth woman initiative’s legislative strategies produced more immediate, visible success; they achieved the criminalization of domestic violence and the introduction of restraining orders. In order to explain the greater effectiveness of the coalition’s legislative strategies, I proposed the concept of strategic issue networks. In a politically disenchanted postcommunist country without an established tradition of civic engagement and available action repertoires, feminists could not rely on mobilizing grassroots constituencies through conventional collective strategies. I argue that by activating issue-oriented networks with important political actors, feminists facilitated the speedy criminalization of domestic violence. Furthermore, Slovakia’s impending admission to the European Union increased the feminist coalition’s political leverage, thus significantly contributing to the sudden political willingness to criminalize domestic violence. However, my findings indicate that while Europeanization expedited the passage of progressive domestic violence legislation, it complicated, if not stalled, the political acceptance of feminist principles, and thus their implementation into other legislative and policy fields. This research provides some initial answers to the overarching question; how do individuals in postcommunist societies with recuperating civil societies, suspicious of massive organizations, and public demonstrations, engage in collective action? Many feminists, I interviewed, discussed their own and their country’s discomfort with any public expression of political ideals. In the context of civic ‘‘paralysis’’ after the fall of communism, the abrupt nationally appealing media campaign with its clear, simple slogan brought immediate public attention to domestic abuse. However, as many of my interviewees painfully explain, the campaign’s massive proportions and simplistic marketing approach impeded the diffusion and acceptance of broader, feminist understandings of violence against women. Feminists were more strategic around changing domestic violence legislation, but due to their negative campaign, they purposefully avoided publicity. Instead they utilized their pre-existing connections with former anti-communist organizers, now members of the parliament and legislators, to gain their endorsement for the criminalization of domestic violence. While some feminists I talked with felt positive about progressive legislative changes, others expressed their general frustration over the lack of effective collective strategies in facilitating grassroots social change in Slovakia. As one feminist put it at a conference evaluating campaign outcomes, the

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Slovakian feminist community will need to ‘‘reinvent creative grassroots strategies’’ if they want to achieve a cultural transformation of attitudes. Reinventing grassroots collective strategies in an anticollectivist society will not be an easy task, but likely necessary for ‘‘the gender-sensitive approach to become a part of everyday politics, of all things and all decisions,’’ as Alica, the civil servant, reminds us. Perhaps the retreat of the fifth woman initiative’s member organizations to individual organizational projects and local activism after becoming disillusioned with massive media campaigns and limited legislative strategies may be the answer. Future research is needed to determine the effect of these local activities on civic revival and grassroots engagement in Slovakia.

NOTES 1. The usage of small capitals in the campaign title was the organizers’ conscious decision to indicate the widespread but random occurrence of domestic violence. 2. The terms non-profit and non-governmental organizations are used interchangeably. The abbreviation NGO is a term frequently used for non-governmental organization. 3. The Slovak language does not contain an equivalent for the English term ‘‘grassroots.’’ 4. All names are pseudonyms. 5. All quotations are the author’s translations from Slovak. 6. Fenestra and Pro Familia are feminist human rights organizations in north and northeast Slovakia, focusing on direct service provision. They each run a counseling center for battered women, but they are not shelters. The remaining four organizations are all based in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Aspekt is a feminist publishing company run by two women writers and translators. Aliancia zˇien Slovenska [Alliance of Women in Slovakia] is a feminist human rights organization. Eset focuses on primary prevention of violence against women by organizing workshops and seminars for teachers as well as students of elementary and high schools. Mozˇnost’ vol’by [Pro Choice Slovakia] advocates for women’s reproductive rights in Slovakia. Altera represents an organization of lesbian and bisexual women. It is important to note that Altera provided mostly symbolic suppport to the campaign as their participation in actual campaign activities was minimal. 7. The grant amount was $5,000. 8. I changed the funding agency’s name to preserve anonymity. 9. The quotation is from the campaign ad. 10. Sixteen Days of Activism Against Gender Violence was first initiated in 1991 by the First Women’s Global Leadership Institute at Rutgers University (Cvikova´ & Jura´nˇova´, 2001, p. 8–9). 11. The term ‘‘third sector’’ is commonly used to denote the non-profit or nongovernmental sector on Slovakia.

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12. The governmental committee’s full title is Expert Committee for the Prevention of Violence Against Women and in the Family. The committee operates under the auspices of the Slovak government’s Council for Crime Prevention. 13. Governmental committees, which operate under the auspices of various ministries, draft policy measures often aimed at preventing a social problem (Kova´cˇechova´ & Zˇilincˇı´ k, 1999, p. 6–7). 14. Revolution, often called the Velvet Revolution due to its peaceful course, refers to the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in November 1989. 15. The Slovak government is headed by a coalition of four center-right parties: the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKU´), the Hungarian Coalition Party (SMK), the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), and the Alliance for New Citizens (ANO). The KDH is a conservative party with a strong, family oriented politics (Brocka, 2000; Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE), 2002). 16. Over 92 percent voted in favor of joining the European Union, while 6.2 percent were against. Voter turn-out was much lower than predicted: approximately 52 percent (Vy´sledky referenda o vstupe do Euro´pskej u´nie, 2003). 17. During my fieldwork at a feminist organization, I observed various difficulties in implementing new legislation; authorities refuse to follow or are not aware of new domestic violence laws. Intervening police frequently attempt to convince victims not to file their case, even though after the legislative amendments it is the state’s responsibility to initiate prosecution.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to thank Marcia Segal and Vasilikie Demos for their helpful comments and suggestions. The author also wishes to express her gratitude to Jaime Becker, Zach Schiller, and Clare Stacey for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article.

REFERENCES Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. Bodna´rova´, B., & Filadelfiova´, J. (2002). Doma´ce na´silie na Slovensku. Priebezˇna´ spra´va z vy´skumu. [Domestic violence in Slovakia. Preliminary Research Report]. Bratislava: Medzina´rodne´ stredisko pre sˇ tu´dium rodiny. [International Center for the Study of the Family]. Brocka, J. (2000). Rodinna´ politika sˇ ta´tu – socia´lne zabezpecˇenie, pracovne´ vzt’ahy, danˇova´ politika. [The family politics of the state – social security, work relations, tax politics]. [On-line]. Available at http://www.kdh.sk Bu´torova´, Z., Dianisˇ ka, I., & Dobrovodsky´, M. (1996). Zˇena a muzˇ v priesecˇnı´ ku spolocˇensky´ch ocˇaka´vanı´ . [Women and men at the intersections of societal expectations].

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LIFE HISTORY AS NARRATIVE SUBVERSION: OLDER MEXICAN WOMEN RESIST AUTHORITY, ASSERT IDENTITY, AND CLAIM POWER Tracy B. Citeroni ABSTRACT Using the concepts of resistance, identity construction, and communicative democracy, I explore the possibility that older women’s life histories create and occupy a potentially transformative space within global research on gender. First, such narratives challenge existing hierarchies of age and gender that systematically disadvantage older women. Second, older women use them to assert their own more complex identities (in opposition to those limiting identities assigned to them by others). Third, through their life stories, older women can contribute to democratic dialogue in society at large. I use life history interviews conducted with older women in Cuernavaca, Mexico from 1995 to 1997 as a specific case that supports my overall argument. I contend that the first two processes are already taking place through the act of storytelling and life history narration itself. The more radical methodological claim of this paper is that

Gender and the Local-Global Nexus: Theory, Research, and Action Advances in Gender Research, Volume 10, 195–218 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-2126/doi:10.1016/S1529-2126(06)10009-0

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the act of constructing and communicating life stories is a legitimate and valuable exercise of (political) power. ‘‘Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless y . In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses.’’ John Berger (1984)

Storytelling is a potentially liberatory, empowering, transgressive act. Victims telling stories of torture, genocide, and mass rape reveal the horror of such acts of violence and collectively challenge the power of the perpetrators. Storytelling is also often an oppressive normative act. Nationalistic stories of threats against ‘the motherland’ inspire an intense hatred and fear of the other that seeks to justify those very same acts of violence. The former seek to expose the cruelty and injustice of repressive social forces. The latter attempt to reinforce the status quo and reinscribe dominating power relations. Such competing and differently valued stories are, in many ways, the melancholy hallmark of our contemporary world. Social inequalities that operate in a more subtle fashion are reflected in the everyday stories of ordinary people. Pervasive systems of relative privilege and disadvantage, organized along axes of age, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, write themselves into the experiences and memories of individuals. Here again, there exists a distinction between individual biographies and the official tales of a society. Even as individual stories also tell of these injustices, they do not routinely get written into the public record. In fact, such claims are frequently neglected, dismissed, or outright objected to by those in power. Many people, in that case, cannot have their observations and experiences confirmed as mirrors of the social world within which they live. In the realm of political power, some stories are legitimized and many others dismissed. Legitimate political speech is granted almost exclusively to formal public statements by career politicians, their advisors, lobbyists, and some activists. This political speech is predominantly wealthy, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, and middle-aged. Claims made by the rest of us in our private everyday lives, if noticed at all, are treated as entirely inconsequential in the political power play. Our stories may be occasionally useful

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in formal political discourse, as colorful anecdotes to elicit an emotional response from voters. Otherwise, we are relegated to the margins of political discourse. Women, older women in particular, are routinely excluded from political discourse (Arber & Ginn, 1991; Rosaldo & Lamphere, 1974). Lingering sexist assumptions about women’s work in the private sphere and a tendency to undervalue women’s political claims, coupled with ageist beliefs that people retreat from public life in old age, together serve to reinforce the notion that older women are not significant players in the political life of a nation. Even some feminist thinkers and activists are not fully conscious of ageist conjecture that leads them to disregard older women’s self-defined needs and concerns. This marginality is evident to varying degrees in societies throughout the world and is compounded dramatically by poverty among older women. All stories are cultural scripts, the analysis of which reveals a complex code of symbols, values, and meanings. The stories people construct communicate volumes about the larger social landscape within which they live in addition to the specific circumstances under which the stories are told. Storytelling may be particularly salient for women and for older people, given their historic marginality in most societies. Older women’s stories reflect a distinctly gendered and aged discourse and are often delivered in a style of speech that is informal, non-confrontational, and self-revelatory. Storytelling provides a unique social moment in which people can speak at length and in depth and others will listen to them far more carefully than is usually the case. Interviews in general follow this mode of discourse, with one person eliciting stories from the other. The life history interview is a perfect instance of this kind of careful and attentive communication. In this paper, I analyze life history interviews conducted with older Mexican women from 1995 to 1997. My analysis develops specific interpretive threads that reveal the political challenges posed by older women’s life stories. I argue that these politicized life histories should occupy a central position in our global research on gender and age. In a broader methodological sense, I aim to contribute to an ongoing discussion of the place of interviews/narratives in the production of knowledge. Life histories are co-constructed stories. It is not true that an interviewer simply pulls stories out of cooperative and submissive research subjects. The interviewer and interviewee together create a narrative account centered on particular themes. These themes may be introduced by the interviewer but are to some extent negotiated in the interview setting as well. The person being interviewed will always reject some themes in favor of others, often

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substituting those of her or his own choice. The resulting representation of the interviewee’s life is then a co-creation of those two people in that specific setting. Each has a hand in shaping the overall narrative. The communicative potential of the life history method is central to my argument in this article that life history interviews provide an unusual but promising forum for democratic practice. Using the concepts of resistance, identity construction, and communicative democracy, I explore the possibility that life histories occupy a potentially transformative space within global research on gender. First, such narratives challenge existing hierarchies of age and gender that systematically disadvantage older women by revealing oppressive situations and sharing strategies for resistance. Second, older women use them to assert their own, more complex identities in opposition to those limiting identities assigned to them by their culture. Third, through their life stories, older women can assert democratic dialogue in society at large. I refer in my analysis to a specific case study of older women in Mexico. I contend that the first two processes are already taking place through the act of storytelling and life history narration itself. The more radical methodological claim of this article is that the act of constructing and communicating life stories through non-positivist qualitative interviews is a legitimate and valuable exercise of political power. I conclude with a call for critical feminist gerontological research the world over to create, open, and amplify democratic spaces for dialogue among older women and others.

CRITICAL VIEWS OF THE LIFE HISTORY INTERVIEW Qualitative researchers have long recognized that life histories are socially constructed (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995; Rosaldo, 1993). Life histories are not objective in the sense of neutral, uninterested, purely factual accounts of a person’s life. Rather, they are rich and complicated tapestries of experience, woven with meaning and emotion. Documentary details of a life are processed and interpreted by the teller. Reflections on the past coalesce into a particular narrative structure. Emphases shift, timelines merge, characters morph, and memories blur. A positivist social science decries the uncertainty associated with such a notion of life history (Huber, 1995). Qualitative researchers who employ life history techniques are occasionally criticized for their inability to make, and

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frank disinterest in, universal truth claims. The hegemony of instrumental positivism in sociology and gerontology throughout the latter half of the twentieth century has pressured researchers to treat the life history interview as a simple documentation of the factual occurrences of a life (Birren, Kenyon, Ruth, Schroots, & Svensson, 1995; Butler, 1963; Myerhoff, 1992). Consequently, social gerontology has to some extent resisted critical sociology and social constructionism (Katz, 1996). Feminist researchers have conceived of a variety of methodological innovations that have resulted in a profound reformation of the disciplines of sociology and gerontology (Calasanti, 1992; Minkler & Estes, 1991; Oakley, 1981; Reinharz, 1992; Reinharz & Rowles, 1988; Smith, 1987). They have championed a non-positivist qualitative social science that recognizes the politicized nature of our work and redefines the relationship of researcher and research participant under a model of shared power. Feminist social scientists are keen to develop research agendas that matter to people in their everyday lives and that contribute to the pursuit of democratization and social justice. New, critical life history techniques and applications effectively advance these causes by harnessing the process of investigation to relevant social change projects. Individuals have many versions of their life stories to tell. The condensation of many decades of living to a few hours of audio tape recordings obviously requires a certain selectivity. Life stories are fluid and ever changing, from one situation to another and over the life course as well. What emerges from a life history interview depends heavily on the social context within which it is elicited and the agency of the interviewee in choosing a particular narrative construction (Behar, 1993; Behar & Gordon, 1995; Tierney, 2000). As in any conversation, intersubjectivity directs the outcome. Differences in wealth, education, gender, age, sexuality, and nationality between the two people involved all impact the content and flow of the interview. Individual life histories have important implications at a collective level. As C. Wright Mills (1959) insisted in his classic discussion of the sociological imagination, individual life experiences could and should be read through their connections to the social. Individual lives are meaningfully linked to society and the larger course of human history. The experience of one person is shaped by the social context within which she or he lives. Social forces certainly limit opportunities, but they also guide a person’s dreams and desires. Therefore, the life history of one person speaks to the condition of entire groups of people. The contemporary usage of testimonios rests on this principle. Testimonio, a politicized first person account or witnessing,

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presents an important instance of a single person telling the story of an entire group of people (Beverly, 2000; Tierney, 2000). The analysis of several life histories reveals interesting patterns of experience that adds to our understanding of people’s everyday actions as well as their strategies for coping with adversity.

CASE STUDY AND METHODS My empirical research for this article is based on analyses of data generated through life history methods (Atkinson, 1998; Holstein & Gubrium, 1995). The specific case study I refer to is a selection of 26 women aged 55–97 living in Cuernavaca, Me´xico. I made initial contact with older women in the city through two local community organizations operating there at the time, one state-sponsored club and another non-governmental organization. I then used a snowball-sampling technique to locate additional women to interview. Throughout my 10 months of fieldwork over two years, I engaged in participant observation, as well as informal and formal interviewing of many women in the community. I purposely sought out women from a variety of social backgrounds. My research participants range, in the extreme, from an impoverished woman who lives in a squatter’s settlement near the railroad tracks to a wealthy woman who lives in a mansion overlooking the nearby countryside on the outskirts of the city. They include women who clean other women’s homes, women who make a living selling tamales and roasted corn just outside their front doors, women who raise and sell chickens from their homes, women who have never worked in the formal labor market, professional women, women who are extensively educated and women with little or no formal education. In an effort to learn about their networks of social support, I conducted formal life history interviews with each of the 26 women in the final sample during the period 1995–1997. I tape recorded my conversations (in Spanish) with each participant and later transcribed and translated the interviews into English. I protect the anonymity of the women I interviewed by using pseudonyms to refer to them or to quote them directly. Mexico provides a particularly compelling context for aging research because its population remains relatively young and, even as the percentage of older people has risen, age continues to rank rather low on the public policy agenda (Contreras de Lehr, 1992; Instituto Nacional de Estadı´stica, Geografı´a e Informa´tica, 1993; Instituto Nacional de la Senectud, 1993; Nyer,

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1994). Researchers from Mexico and the United States, mostly demographers, have taken an interest in the elderly over the past 10 years or so. Their work, however, centers on the belief that aging is fundamentally a social problem, and/or the root cause of several other problems (Ham-Chande, 1995). My research, in a far more critical and hermeneutic tradition, rejects such core claims. My interest in old age in Mexico stems from a hope to understand the aging experience of women, from their own perspectives, in a society rife with inequalities and little or no formal welfare state provisions. Research with older women in Mexico is relevant not only to the study of older women elsewhere but to gender research around the world. Population size does not in and of itself portend doom (Robertson, 1999). Growing numbers of older people though, women especially, in societies replete with ageism and social inequality require the attention of social scientists. Our research with older women in both wealthy and impoverished societies is imperative, not because we need to address aging as a social problem, but because we need to challenge ageism and social injustice for the old. Some social gerontologists in the humanistic tradition, mostly anthropologists by training, have used ethnographic techniques to gain subjective understanding of the lives of older people (Lamb, 2000; Sokolovsky, 1997). They do not, however, always explicitly embrace an agenda of social justice. We need to develop more research projects that do. Gender research should not only heighten understanding of older people, it should also seek to establish public dialogue with and about old age, encourage cooperation between researchers, and forge ties between researchers and older people in various societies. Critical life history practice, I argue, is an effective method to advance these goals. I adopted a feminist stance in designing the methodological framework for my study and in conducting life history interviews with older women in Mexico (Behar & Gordon, 1995; Gluck, 1984; Gluck & Patai, 1991). My goal, first and foremost, was to assume the role of inquisitive learner and relinquish as much as possible my control over the research process. I strove for balance in power relations with the women I interviewed. Rather than impose my expectations on them, I purposefully shelved my agenda in favor of letting each respondent develop her story as she preferred. These principles guided the questions I asked and the manner in which I listened to responses. Consequently, my participants challenged my beliefs and left me with far more questions than answers. Reading through the various life histories, I analyzed them to find common patterns and themes as well as important points of divergence (Josselson, 1996; Josselson & Lieblich, 1993, 1995, 1999; Riessman, 1993). As I was

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interpreting each woman’s representation of her life in story, I noticed deepseated concerns about issues of inequality and social justice, the implications of which reach far beyond their individual lives. I also became interested in the way they constructed their stories. I discerned that these women were communicating far more through their narratives than appeared on the surface. This discovery led me to carefully examine the unobtrusive symbolic messages beneath their principal tales. My argument unfolds into three primary and interrelated dimensions: resistance, identity, and democratic discourse.

TOOLS OF RESISTANCE In telling me their life stories, the women I interviewed become the authors of their own lives. This is possible because life narratives are not mere factual accounts of the details of one’s life. This coincides with the discussion of narrative as a subjective interpretation of the events of one’s life. In Catherine Kohler Riessman’s words, ‘‘Informants stories do not mirror a world ‘out there.’ They are constructed, creatively authored, rhetorical, replete with assumptions, and interpretive’’ (Riessman, 1993, pp. 4–5). So it is with the stories of the women I interviewed. They exercise author-ity in writing and rewriting, constructing, and reconstructing the events of their lives. Their life narratives reveal patterns of oppression for women in Mexico across the life course. Each story explicitly or implicitly positions a woman within systems of domination based on a masculine order and class privilege or disadvantage. These narratives are also structured to share strategies of resistance against such systematic oppression (Fisher & Davis, 1993). Women talk about how they have used formal education, work, divorce, and woman-centered networks to confront the injustices they face. As I sat across from each older woman I interviewed, encouraging her to share her life stories with me, a curious pattern emerged. The memories they invoked, the recollections they wanted me to document, often relegated men to the margins of the narrative text. They were, by and large, stories of each woman’s confrontation with and triumph (however partial) over male domination, even as it was compounded by economic hardship. The women I interviewed were socialized into and spent most of their adult lives in a Mexico that was not merely patriarchal but explicitly and vehemently so. Their generation grew up in a time when the casa chica, a practice whereby married men set up separate households and families with

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other women, was not only a common occurrence but was generally expected. Women did not often go to school. Marriage and motherhood were the sole pillars of feminine identity for middle class women. Work outside the home was out of the question. There was a clear distinction between women ‘of the home’ and women ‘of the street.’ Poor women have always been subjected to a different set of gender expectations. They, of course, had to work outside their homes. Marriage, if available to them, was certainly not a protection, economically or otherwise. Here they were then, in the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth decades of their lives, most having survived husbands or partners if they had them, sometimes by as much as half a lifetime. Each reflected on her life and the relationships she had had, the networks of support that had sustained her. They were, undeniably, woman-centered stories. The stories they told me were not necessarily stories of feminist consciousness and resistance to patriarchal oppression. However, the development of those female networks, and the very act of constructing their life histories with those networks at the center, were indeed an assertion of power, a wresting away of control from those who sought to dominate them throughout the course of their lives the documentation of lifelong strategies and patterns of resistance against oppression. One notable case is the story of Analaura, now a middle class college professor. Analaura had been married twice, once to a former priest, and had four children. Both of her husbands consistently cheated on her (she called them ‘‘playboys’’) and that was the cause of each separation and divorce. At the time of our interview, she was single but involved in a relationship with a male friend and colleague. She has no desire to marry again. The central narrative theme of Analaura’s story is her repeated and insistent claim that women must rely on other women in order to overcome male domination. She begins by reminiscing about a childhood spent mostly in the company of women. She describes her great-grandmother’s house as always being full of women and recounts the pleasures of spending time with her many aunts: This was the most pleasant house because it was full of women y and you would love to go there because one aunt would teach you one thing, another aunt would comb your hair, another aunt would heal you if you were sick. So to arrive at this house y my mother would arrive and abandon us, abandon me to the other women. My brothers didn’t like it y but I did because they were all so much fun.

Analaura attributes her lifelong reliance on women to these early moments. I asked her how growing up in the presence of all of these women affected

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her life. She told me that these experiences had created in her a sense that women must help other women: This affected my life because I realized when I began to have problems because I was a woman, for instance when I wanted to study a career and everything, I realized that those people who helped me the most were always women. Then I understood, and so I always say that women who want to accomplish something have to help women, that they can’t support men because men only help other men, so women have to support other women y.

As a young woman, Analaura was denied support for college from a father who insisted that she marry instead. During her first marriage, however, she decided to enroll at the university without telling anyone. She says that her family was furious with her, but she continued her studies. Because she was the primary caregiver for her children, she often had to bring them to classes with her. Her stories at this time detail the support she received from many women, friends, and acquaintances alike. For example, Analaura often counted on female secretaries at the university to look after her children for short periods of time. She recalls how enthusiastic and supportive they were. It took her 10 years to complete her undergraduate degree. When she had finished and gotten a job, she divorced for the first time. This first job was offered by several of her more financially stable female friends and involved teaching: So, the day that I finished the degree and they gave me work, I divorced. I completed the degree and they gave me work and I said goodbye. I divorced and one more time y the support of women.

Analaura was adamant about the importance of women helping each other to deal with and often escape gender oppression. She even claimed that her two mothers-in-law, rather than being antagonistic or engaging in power struggles with her, had been the most influential supports during the course of her married life. Once again, she calls for women to work together: If we women unite, we worry about and care for each other. We construct a feminine culture, a special language. All of this is important.

In talking to me, Analaura weaves a tale of resistance that begins in childhood, highlights strategies to defy male power throughout her life, and extends well into the future. Our final conversation centered on her plans for her old age. How does she imagine this period? She has carefully designed her current home with old age in mind. She asked me to notice that her house was designed for older people with restricted mobility, all on one floor and easy wheelchair access from the outside. Her ideal living arrangement in

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old age would be sharing her house with close female friends, dividing expenses, and caring for each other the best they can. The experiences of working class and poor women of course differ dramatically. For these women, working outside the home was not often an option. Rather, it was a necessity. Even so, I find similar emphases on the resistance to male power in their stories. Clarisa was a woman who was born to a single 14-year-old domestic servant working in the home of a wealthy family at the time. Her narrative reveals that Clarisa’s father was a young man from just such a family. She never knew him until years later. When her mother later legally married a man other than her father, they had a child of their own. Clarisa remembers lots of conflict with her stepfather and attacks toward her during this period. Her mother decided to send her to live with her grandmother, who was the head cook for a very rich family in Mexico City. She lived with her grandmother, in the house of her employers, until she was about six years old. At that point, her grandmother took a job with a family that did not accept servant’s children, and she was almost sent to an orphanage until her first grade teacher decided to take her in: But then my first grade teacher found out and said, ‘No, Clarisa is not going to an orphanage. I want to have her in my house.’ She was single. She talked it over with her family and they let her take me in. And it was the happiest year of my life, because I was in the bosom of a family, of someone who worried about me, bathed me, combed my hair, cut my hair, made me beautiful clothes y I was very content there.

After a year with her teacher, and rejecting the offer of formal adoption by an older aunt of the teacher, Clarisa was sent by her grandmother to live with another relative whom she refers to as a godmother. She reflects on the inequality she faced in the households where her godmother worked: I went to live with a single, older godmother, a relative of my grandmother. And there I was again, going from house to house. In that situation, in that time, when you were the granddaughter or goddaughter of the cook or the servant y well, it wasn’t like it is now, now that people treat each other as equals. In that time there was very blatant racism. So in the kitchen one had to speak softly. In the kitchen one ate differently than at the ‘big table.’ And you lived always with this kind of y well, of racism, of y discrimination is the word.

Later on, Clarisa took some business classes with the financial help of her biological father’s family. She could not finish the three-year degree, however, when they withdrew their support. She found a job at a bank, working as a secretary, and this was a major turning point for her: And there, blessed be to God, it went well for me. It went very well for me. I went far very quickly y without speaking English y to this day I do not speak English. But

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what excites me is that despite such little formal education I could occupy important posts in the bank and then better support my family.

The family she was supporting included her grandmother and godmother, both of whom moved in with her after the death of her mother. They lived with her until they each died. While she was working at the bank, she also began her own small business on the side: I wove bags and sold them to my colleagues to make extra money. My future mother-inlaw, the mother of my husband y we had begun dating then y I found out that she went to the U.S. and brought clothes from there. And so, I bought things y stockings for example y I bought them and resold them for a profit in the bank.

This entrepreneurial practice would serve her well later on. Clarisa then married, had six children, and worked in the household. She credits an aunt of her husband with helping her the most during those years: She was the godmother of all of my children y. She taught me. I copied her system of organization for the household y. She cooked delicious food. She gave me many of my recipes y . I could not know her better if she was my right arm y. I went to the hospital to have my babies and she stayed with the others, to take care of them. It was like that always. Never a word about the impossible. Everything was possible with her.

The aunt’s support was crucial to Clarisa, because her relationship with her husband was somewhat problematic. She saw him as a spoiled child who never grew up and remarked that she had to act as his mother. She talked about him as though he were just another child to take care of. In fact, she seemed to be less bothered to take care of six children than she was to deal with this one adult man: One could overestimate him. I married him thinking he was very intelligent, very capable, very y do I make myself clear? Little by little, the longer I was married to him, I got to know him better. I don’t blame him. I blame myself in the sense that, well, I should have paid better attention or, I don’t know, had more sense. So, what happened is that I replaced his mother. What’s more, at the beginning of the marriage I pampered him a lot y the best of everything was for him. If there were two steaks, the biggest was for him and the smallest was for me. If there was something to do, for example to paint the house, I painted it. Even if he was sitting down it didn’t bother me. I gave myself a role that later it was very difficult to give back. He became accustomed to it.

After her children were grown, she opened her own small businesses, a deli stand and jewelry counter in the market. The income from her businesses granted her substantial autonomy and economic power in the household. Her husband had been retired for years. She decided to open her own business in the market because she felt she needed to work. ‘‘I know that if I don’t work I will die. Work is my joy, is my life,’’ she told me. She opened

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the deli first and found genuine pleasure in her autonomy there. The business was so successful she was able to open a jewelry counter nearby. She emphasized why her independence from her husband was really the best thing: Well, we have frictions. And I think that he has all the right to plan his life and I to plan mine. We have really separated already. Yes, separated. My purse is forever closed to him. There are no more loans. There were loans at one point, but he never repaid them. I reacted in time and I said, ‘Enough, enough.’ Because it is like I have seven children instead of six. He is like a big kid to me.

This independence extends beyond the financial realm. When I ask Clarisa about any arrangements she has made for her old age, she explains to me that she and her husband do not have plans to care for each other in the case of chronic illness or disability. Each has already agreed to go to a nursing home, rather than burden the other with their infirmity. She insists this is the most fair and sensible route of action, and that she is very content with the plan. Clarisa constructs a narrative of lifelong struggle and conflict. The central theme of her life is her constant effort to overcome inequalities due not only to her gender but also to her social class. She eventually overcomes adversity, with hard work and the economic support of others, and becomes a successful small business owner. However, her gender conflict remains in the form of her husband, whom she sees as irresponsible, infantile, and a nuisance. Ironically, the result has been an almost perfect inversion of household gender power relations. Other women developed different strategies for facing their various experiences of gender, class, and other oppression. For several of them, work was integral to their ability to resist male and middle class power. Diana, who was still a domestic worker at the age of 74, told me the story of how she first entered this line of employment. She had been abducted from her home by an older man in her village when she was a teenager. He kept her in his house, demanding sexual and household labor, for six months. She described her mother as helpless to intervene. It was her sister, who knew of the opportunity for domestic workers in Mexico City, who aided in her escape. Diana spoke fondly of the woman who first employed her, after so many decades still lamenting her death. Paid domestic work, in her eyes, had rescued her from male oppression. Some women seized abandonment or widowhood, otherwise traumatic moments, and wrote them as liberatory experiences. For these women, the final phase of the life course served as a liberation from men and from other

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decidedly female responsibilities. Men seemed to represent the most direct embodiment of the patriarchal order. Women, even those who were abandoned or widowed relatively early in life, repeatedly insisted that they had no space for men. One woman, when I asked her if she missed her husband, told me, ‘‘I hated sleeping with him. I really hated it. Every time I slept with him I became pregnant.’’ Several others, refusing the possibility of another relationship with a man, said, ‘‘It is much better to be alone than to be badly accompanied.’’ One woman balked at the thought, ‘‘Why would I want the hassle?’’ Yet another told me, ‘‘Why would I do that? It was so much work with the first one. It would be like starting all over again.’’ Rather, all of these women reveled in the company of their children, grandchildren, and surviving female friends. I read across these stories with the same resistance to oppressive patriarchal forces executed through different strategies of subversion, particularized in terms of type and timing. Telling their stories in old age gives women the opportunity to think about and share the strategies they have used to survive structural inequalities, such as reliance on women-centered networks of social support or escape (even through their deaths) from antagonistic men in their lives. Jean Franco’s metaphor of liberation from the patriarchal order is fitting here: But this is the other side of the macho myth, for the authoritarian personality produces a concealed resentment and a desire for revenge that can only be satisfied when he is finally dead and buried. At that moment, Catalina feels amused as she faces her future, ‘almost happy.’ This is the antinational allegory, the moment when woman is liberated because the old macho order is dead. (Franco, 1989, pp. 183–184)

In this sense, old age emerges as a time not only to reflect on past experiences, but also a time to construct and communicate narratives that confirm and assert one’s own power as a social agent to act in response to the conditions of social inequality. One can read in these life histories repeated challenges to the status quo. Older women often write powerful, dominating, oppressive figures out of their stories or diminish their impact by relegating them to the margins of a tale. Being more or less cognizant of social inequality along axes of age, gender, class, and sexuality in Mexico (some axes are more salient than others of course), they use the narrative space of the life history interview to declare their resistance. These women use the act of storytelling to assert control over their own lives and to announce their autonomy. They subvert social hierarchies through narrative.

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COMPLEX IDENTITIES Older Mexican women questioned and sometimes rejected the narrow and stereotypical identity assigned to them. Using a constructionist model of identity formation, I read in their life histories the assertion of alternative identities (Cornell & Hartmann, 1998; Lieblich & Josselson, 1994). This process is, of course, similar to the systematic resistance described in the previous section in that women are challenging predominant views of the role of older women in Mexican society. The assertion of alternative identities, however, speaks to a process of negotiation that occurs between others’ perceptions of who these women are and their own ideas about who they are (and want to be). I conceive of two basic archetypes, Sage and Servant as I have named them, that represent socially acceptable roles for older women in Mexico. Both of these feminine characters are imagined in the private sphere and, as such, are largely invisible to and excluded from the public sphere. Each is, of course, an ideal type. The Sage is a culturally revered figure. She invokes the ideal of respect for elders and the wisdom of older people. The Sage conjures up images of the oldest generation as the keepers of tradition charged with socializing younger generations of Mexicans. She is embodied in the wise old grandmother who counsels children and young adults in the right way to live and the right decisions to make, in keeping with the traditional values and beliefs of Mexican society. The Servant, another paragon of elder womanhood, is a culturally exploited figure. This character represents the everyday responsibilities placed on older women in particular: caring for grandchildren, cooking, cleaning, and other daily tasks within the family household. The older woman as Servant is the epitome of selfless service to others in the family. For older women who must continue to work due to poverty, often as domestic servants in other women’s households, this metaphor becomes quite literal. These domestic workers, at the same time that they play the role of the grandmotherly caregiver, often endure denials of their full adult selfhood. Consider the story of an older woman working as a live-in domestic worker whose employer does not permit her lover in the house. Think of older servants called to in the diminutive, mi hijita, literally ‘my little daughter.’ The women I interviewed find themselves navigating between these two ideals, breaking down this cultural dichotomy, maneuvering through this world of unrealistic and limiting expectations that are placed on them by others. This is evident in the stories they tell about their lives.

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Each woman makes a special effort to define her life and her self, if not always in direct opposition to, at least in a more expansive light than the cultural stereotypes of older women would allow. I contend that, in doing so, they are able to challenge existing hierarchies and power relations (those rooted in age, gender, class, sexuality) that have so strongly defined their lives thus far, and that continue to define them as such in old age. The older women who participated in my research are, through their narratives, confronting social perceptions of themselves, resolving contradictions between social perceptions and their own self-understanding, and asserting their own identities. They are demanding recognition and narratively resigning their position as a marginalized social group. They neither see themselves exclusively as keepers of tradition (Sage) nor as household helpers/caregivers (Servant). Rather, they explore a wide range of identities that should be socially recognized. Several non-archetypal dimensions of identity emerge from the life history interviews to illustrate this point, however, two in particular stand out: work in the paid labor force and singlehood or independence. At some point in their lives almost all of the women I interviewed have worked for pay outside of the home. Whether their work activity was a professional career or service labor, it was central to each woman’s sense of self. One could argue work had been as influential as, and in a few cases more so than, marriage and motherhood in shaping their identities. Work was obviously central to the identities of Analaura and Clarisa. For Analaura, who is now a well-respected university professor, just going to school and getting a job were crucial to her development into an autonomous person. For Clarisa, who worked for much of her youth out of sheer necessity, her small businesses allowed her to secure financial independence from her husband and resulted in her exercising control over her own life. She goes so far as to describe herself as someone who ‘cannot live without work.’ Another middle class woman, Queta, began to paint professionally after her children were grown and has become a relatively famous artist. Even those like Diana, who have done service work all their lives and need to continue to do so in old age, express pride in their jobs and note the satisfaction it gives them. Independence, often in the context of singlehood, is another recurrent theme throughout the life histories. Those women who never married (very few), were divorced, or who became widows talked about this state of being single as extremely important to their sense of self. Rather than reflecting on loneliness, they dwelled on the comfort of solitude. They did not define themselves in relation to a male partner. They identified as autonomous

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subjects. This theme of independence is prevalent in the narratives of Analaura and Clarisa (even though she is still married) described at length earlier. Other women (Julia, Katia, Ofelia) who expressed a keen desire to avoid living with their children, even in the case of infirmity, also established their sovereign selves in narrative. Reina, who spent many years of her married life caring for her own ailing parents, refused to impose the same on her children. Sandra expressed concern about ‘butting into’ her children’s lives, but she also feared losing her ‘freedom’ to do what she wants. One woman in her mid-80s, whom I met at a potluck luncheon, whispered to me with a wink that she liked to turn up the stereo and dance in her living room at night. ‘I couldn’t do that in my daughter’s house,’ she said. Some women had conceded that they might accept one or more of their children moving in, but rejected the idea of changing residences themselves. When I did observe such arrangements, economic and other support was just as likely to flow from mother to child as the reverse. Consequently, women in this situation maintained their status as head of the household. Because the home was hers, a woman reserved for herself a space of autonomy that allowed her to live independently of her children, even though they may have been sharing the same house. Not only did older women seek to retain independence through their living arrangements, but they also wanted to avoid too much responsibility in the care of their grandchildren. Those women with grandchildren loved them dearly, were proud of them, and enjoyed their visits. Still, many adult children assumed that their mothers would eagerly take on full-time child care duties. This was not the case for most of the women I interviewed. They believed that their job was to enjoy the company of their grandchildren rather than to assume direct responsibility for their upbringing, in either their general education or their daily maintenance. Analaura summed up this sentiment well in her comment on the writing of Rosario Castellanos: She has several verses and they all say that the grandmother is the one who closes the door, turns out the light, and goes to bed y because now she has no life, she doesn’t exist. This is what we have to change.

Women’s stories in many ways answer to stereotypical portrayals and popular caricatures of them. They often told me how others view them, how Mexican culture claims reverence for the old but that the reality is occasional caricature and frequent dismissal. In response to these perceptions, older women assert the complexity of their identities through in-depth accounts of their life experiences and observations.

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The open structure of the life history interview permits this in a way that other forms of interviewing (and certainly surveys) do not. The intersubjective manner of doing life history hands over much of the control of the agenda to the interviewee, so that she dictates/negotiates the actual content and the narrative flow to a great extent. Women can make/take the opportunity then to introduce facets of their personal experience that would not otherwise enter into the interviewing discourse. Collectively, these stories rewrite the social script in such a way that insists that we recognize the complexity of older women’s identities.

DIALOGUE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Here, I unfold my last and perhaps most radical claim about life history interviews. Creating and disseminating such narratives is a crucial first step for social scientists, as we acknowledge and share older women’s self-authored stories beyond the so-called private realm. We should further legitimate these narratives by recognizing them as vital to public democratic discourse. Iris Marion Young considers storytelling an act of communicative democracy, which is an enhanced and more inclusive version of public deliberation. Deliberative democracy, as an alternative to interest-based politics, y conceives of democracy as a process that creates a public, citizens coming together to talk about collective problems, goals, ideals, and actions. Democratic processes are oriented around discussing this common good rather than competing for the promotion of the private good of each. Instead of reasoning from the point of view of the private utility maximizer, through public deliberation citizens transform their preferences according to public-minded ends, and reason together about the nature of those ends and the best means to realize them. (Young, 1996, p. 121)

Young agrees that a deliberative model of public discourse is far more legitimate than interest-based models (of the liberal or republican tradition) because it advances the goals of democratic decision-making in a more sound and transformative way. Her objections are not intended to undermine the deliberative project itself, but rather to improve it. She then proposes an expanded notion of communication to overcome what she sees as the unduly rationalistic bent of current notions of public deliberation. Communicative democracy stems from Young’s critique of deliberative democracy as being too exclusionary in its focus on rational discourse. In other words, she makes the claim that other forms of communication, aside from rational debate, are also acceptable forms of democratic dialogue and

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that by disregarding them we are excluding whole groups of people whose style of communication does not fit the dominant rational model. Young points out that deliberative theorists’ attempts to neutralize economic and political power through the process of argumentation with the goal of consensus is fundamentally flawed. Putting a check on economic and political power does not at the same time eradicate social and cultural differences. The alternative she offers addresses this flaw directly: A theory of communicative democracy that attends to social difference, to the way that power sometimes enters speech itself, recognizes the cultural specificity of deliberative practices, and proposes a more inclusive model of communication.’’ (Young, 1996, p. 123)

If, as she further claims, deliberation is normatively competitive, formal, general, and only recognizes speech that is dispassionate, disembodied, and literal, this serves to silence groups such as older women. The violence of this dismissal is magnified by other systems of inequality such as social class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Communicative democracy, then, is a more inclusive model of deliberative democracy. At the same time, it openly challenges masculinist expectations of public dialogue. Young claims that greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling are communicative forms that supplement rational argumentation by providing ways of ‘speaking across difference’ in the absence of significant shared understanding. Each admits into the deliberative process elements of communication that have been ignored by deliberative theorists. Bodies and care for bodies are legitimated through ‘greeting.’ Emotions, figurative language, listening, and desire are legitimated through ‘rhetoric.’ Narrative is legitimated through ‘storytelling.’ Here I would like to emphasize the political import of narratives produced through life history interviews. Storytelling can be a useful and legitimate mode of communication between groups where class or culture separates parties, or where there is a misunderstanding or complete lack of understanding of the other. People share particular experiences; reveal values, culture, and meaning; and explain their view of others through narratives: I discussed earlier how deliberation can privilege the dispassionate, the educated, or those who feel they have a right to assert. Because everyone has stories to tell, with different styles and meanings, and because each can tell her story with equal authority, the stories have equal value in the communicative situation. (Young, 1996, p. 132)

This model of democratic dialogue, with its implicit critique of privileged and exclusive public spaces, illuminates the political possibilities inherent in

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life histories of older women in Mexico. The Mexican government, in fashioning public policies, often makes the assumption that older people are excused from public life and are absorbed by the family. The most frequent assumption, and this extends well beyond the government and formal policymakers, is that the family will take care of older people. Officials and society at large assume that the family will provide older members all that is needed in the way of food, clothing, shelter, support, and care. ‘‘How great that we have family to care for our old people,’’ everyone says. Many of the women I met marveled at this claim. This is a classic example of misunderstanding or the complete lack of understanding that Young targets in her explication of communicative democracy. We need to be able to understand the positions of other social groups in order to have democratic dialogue or reach consensus on social issues. We need to establish a meaningful exchange of ideas and experiences to facilitate this understanding. How can the rights of older people be protected? How can the government or society better serve the needs of older people, particularly women, without first knowing their unique social location and experiences? In making their voices heard, in telling their life stories, which do not on the whole fit the cultural ideals for older women in Mexico, older women are claiming power for themselves in society. They are communicating to others in society the meaning of marriage, children, and work in their lives. They are revealing their experiences of oppression on the basis of their gender and social class. They are sharing strategies of resistance. They are constructing sufficiently complex identities. Older women are, in effect, demanding the recognition and respect, their rights as human beings and full citizens of Mexico, that ordinarily get lost between the ideological exaggeration of the Sage and the everyday oppression of the Servant. In listening to their stories, we cannot deny the diversity of their experiences. We cannot limit them with our one-dimensional conceptions of old age for women. We cannot legitimately exclude them from public discourse. Life histories, then, can be interpreted as a legitimate form of public discourse. As such, they provide a kind of dialogical space within which older women can share their experiences, garner recognition, express their desires, and otherwise exercise power. Including older women’s voices, through life history, in political discourse contributes to the ongoing struggle to establish democracy and social justice in Mexico and elsewhere around the world.

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CONCLUSION Life history interviews, when they are conducted following critical feminist principles and are interpreted as social constructions, can indeed be subversive. As a category, life histories have the potential to disrupt the ordinary, that is, unjust, mechanics of public discourse. Older women, as any marginalized group, become the authors of their own stories. Others are dared to listen to their experiential claims in comprehensive narrative form. The stories women tell challenge hegemonic power relations and reveal numerous strategies to overcome subordinate status. From the perspective of dominating power, these stories are unruly narratives not worthy of serious public consideration. They are deemed subjective, rife with emotion, and lacking in reasoned argumentation. Such assertions would have us condemn life histories to irrelevance by allowing them to be defined as quaint personal stories for private consumption. Our social gerontological study of life histories is just as misguided when we deny their general applicability and seek to confine them to the illusory realm of disinterested examination. If we read women’s narratives as inconsequential data mines to be dug through for pertinent facts, we strip them of their inherent political provocation. More social gerontologists must explicitly acknowledge this, must cease denial of the political nature of life histories, and must adopt a non-positivist critical feminist stance. The fact is that older women, in constructing their life stories, can and do speak effectively about far more than their health and a limited number of predictable interest-based issues. With our collaboration, such narrative accounts will occupy privileged public spaces and may influence politics, both formal and cultural. Our research can, through them, assist in the deconstruction of unjust power relations. Narrative claims to justice and claims to narrative justice will be more likely to prevail. In this article, I have focused on the specific manifestations of this dissident bent, which emerged from my own case study of older women in Mexico. My interpretive analysis of the life histories generated in that research revealed three patterns of narrative subversion. First, the structure of women’s life stories disclosed a tendency to resist and actively undermine hegemonic patriarchal and class-based power. Second, their richly descriptive and meaningful scenarios communicated the lifelong development of complex, multidimensional identities. Finally, these older women’s narrative declarations unveiled an implicit political project that ought to be affirmed as legitimate democratic speech.

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We need to open more spaces for authentic democratic dialogue and practice. The generation, analysis, and public dissemination of life history interviews are mechanisms whereby feminist social gerontological research can and shall contribute. I encourage our explicit recognition of the multiple possibilities inherent in, and the broadscale adoption of, an overtly democratizing and justice-seeking life history methodology.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Lois Elaine Hamilton Citeroni (1928–2005), to whom I owe all manner of thanks. Chief among her loving gifts to me was a passion for reading and intellectual pursuits. I am also indebted to her for my keen sense of social justice and the importance of democratic dialogue. Our lifelong efforts to care for one another in democratic and empowering ways, despite repeated challenges, came to fruition over the last six years as we both underwent significant life changes. Our poignant relational journey culminated in the final weeks of her life. I am deeply grateful for all the times we spent together, fighting a path through the pain and sharing with each other the hard-earned joys of caring. The lessons in democratic communication and transformation I received through my relationship with you, Mom, live on in my life and my work. Thank you. I thank Alejandro Cervantes-Carson for his insightful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. I would also like to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Social Science Research Council for the field research upon which this analysis is based.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Paul J. Bryan is currently employed with Bromley Communications, the largest U.S. advertising agency with a focus on the Hispanic consumer. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Political Science from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1996, where he studied under Richard J. Harris and Juanita M. Firestone. As a group-planning director, he works to oversee and guide the process of unearthing key consumer insights that serve as the basis for the creation of powerful, culturally sensitive messaging. With more than 10 years of experience in marketing and market research, he has worked across industries, including packaged goods (Procter & Gamble, Nestle´, Dial and Ross Products); social marketing (truthsm/American Legacy Foundation, CDC-HIV); destination (Simon Properties and San Antonio Convention & Visitor Bureau); apparel (Levi’s) communication (Sprint); and insurance (Nationwide). Chilla Bulbeck holds the chair in women’s studies at Adelaide University’s School of Social Sciences, where she teaches gender studies and social science subjects. She has taught overseas at Beijing Foreign Studies University and the University of Tokyo. She has published widely on issues of gender and difference, including Facing the Wild: Ecotourism, Conservation and Animal Encounters (2005), Earthscan; Re-Orienting Western Feminism: Women’s Diversity in a Post-Colonial World (1998), Cambridge University Press; Living Feminism: The Impact of the Women’s Movement on Three Generations of Australian Women (1997), Cambridge University Press; Australian Women in Papua New Guinea: Colonial Passages 1920–1960 (1992), Cambridge University Press. Her research on young people and gender issues has been published in Australian Feminist Studies, Gender, Work and Organization (2005), Cultures of the Commonwealth: Essays and Studies (2004) and JIGS: Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (2003). The research discussed in this paper was conducted under the auspices of a large Australian Research Council grant. Tracy B. Citeroni is an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Recipient of a fellowship 219

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from the Social Science Research Council, she earned her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Texas, at Austin. She specializes in the Sociology of aging, health, gender and the body. She has published in the area of gender and sexuality and has presented numerous conference papers on such topics as the social support networks of older women in Mexico, sexual rights, and discursive practices related to bodies at work. She is currently engaged in several research projects, which apply her core theoretical interests to specific cases and areas of study: (a) a long-term ethnography of a transnational community of Mexicans in the United States; (b) a normative and political proposal for international sexual rights; (c) an auto-ethnographic analysis of gender and body in the experience of cancer; and (d) pro-anorexia websites as a contested cultural discourse on women’s bodies. Vasilikie Demos is professor emerita of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Morris and senior research fellow at the Center for Conflict Resolution at Salisbury University. She has studied ethnicity and gender in the United States, Greece and Australia. She is co-editor of this series, and has published in the areas of race/ethnicity and gender. Currently she is teaching courses on conflict and conflict resolution at Salisbury University in Maryland and is co-editor of ‘‘Race, Gender and Class For What?’’, a special issue of Race, Gender & Class. She was the past president of the North Central Sociological Association and Sociologists for Women in Society. Juanita M. Firestone is professor of sociology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. She has over 20 years experience in evaluation and survey research, quantitative analysis and computer applications (both mainframe and microcomputer). She has published extensively in professional journals and chapters in edited books, and has been Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator in 20 community research projects. She has developed and managed all aspects of research projects including initial grant proposal, designing research instruments, selecting analysis techniques and use of a variety of computer applications to organize, analyze and report data. During Spring 2002, she was a Fulbright distinguished chair in gender studies and taught at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. Her substantive research specializations encompass issues related to gender inequality, military sociology, health disparities, sexual harassment and intimate partner abuse. Recent studies include (1) the impact of acculturation and country of origin on reported spouse abuse; (2) the impact of the ‘‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue Policy’’ on the extent to which

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individuals in the military experience or observe harassment based on sexuality; (3) occupational change and the gender-based wage gap; and (4) minority health disparities. Sharyn Graham Davies is senior lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Her Ph.D., entitled Hunters, Wedding Mothers, and Androgynous Priests: Conceptualising gender among Bugis in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, was undertaken at the University of Western Australia. Sharyn’s academic interests center on notions of gender and sexuality in Indonesia and she has published several articles on these topics and presented at international conferences hosted by King’s College London, Leiden University, the Australian National University, Auckland University, Indonesia’s Muhammadiyah University, the National University of Singapore and Witwatersrand University in South Africa. Sharyn is the recipient of a number of awards, including a Reginald Savory award and an Asia:NZ grant to conduct research in Indonesia on developing ways to increase women’s political participation. Richard J. Harris has over 25 years of experience in survey research, social demography, demographic techniques and quantitative analysis and computer applications (both mainframe and microcomputer). He has been Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator in 22 community research projects. He has developed and managed all aspects of survey and other research projects including initial grant proposal, designing research instruments, selecting analysis techniques and use of a variety of computer applications to organize, analyze and report data. His publications have used a range of data sources including the Current Population Surveys, the General Social Surveys and the Department of Defense Sex Role Surveys conducted in 1988, 1995 and 2002, the World Values data set and data from a large sample of Mexican-origin respondents in California. In addition, original data were collected for research on occupational attainments in San Antonio, research on undocumented migrants, attitudes about organ donations and research on high school dropouts. Paola Melchiori holds the doctor degree in Philosophy and Anthropology. She has been active in the feminist movement since the mid-1970s, while intensively working as a teacher/professor inside the pilot school for adult grass root movements, the trade unions, and the University (1972–1987). She left the university to found the Free University of Women, Milan, serving as its president from 1986 to 1996, when she found the International

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Branch of the Free University of Women, in Milan, Crinali, to be a research and training-oriented feminist association of women from various intellectual backgrounds, social classes and cultures. From the mid–1980s her field of activity and interest has included theoretical and fieldwork in North-South Cooperation projects in the contexts of cross-cultural women exchanges. Currently she is President of WWIFUN (Wise Women International Feminist University Network), which aims at collecting the best of international feminist culture in order to make it transferable to young women. She is the author of several essays, co-author and author of several books on theoretical gender issues, co-founder of the review Lapis. Denise Pahl Schaan is a Brazilian archaeologist, holding a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from University of Pittsburgh, USA. She is currently a visiting researcher at the Museu Paraense Emı´ lio Goeldi teaching at the Graduate Program in Social Sciences of the University of Para´, Brazil. Her research focuses on precolumbian complex societies on Marajo´ Island and Western Amazonia. Schaan0 s work on Amazonian iconography and gender has been widely published in Brazil and abroad. Edwin S. Segal holds his major appointment in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky. He also holds an Associate Faculty appointment in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and is associated with the Department of Pan African Studies. Professor Segal has conducted research in Nigeria, Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya, South Africa and Kyrgyzstan. He is currently involved in a collaborative research project with colleagues at the American UniversityCentral Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, exploring the relationships among Islam, ethnicity and gender in Kyrgyzstan. His major research interests are focused on gender, ethnicity and national development. Marcia Texler Segal is professor of sociology and dean for research emerita, having recently retired from Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, Indiana. She is co-editor of this series and of Race, Gender, and Class in Sociology: Toward an Inclusive Curriculum, 5th edition, published by the American Sociological Association (2003). She is currently developing an anthology of readings from an integrated race, gender and class perspective. Her research, teaching and administrative consulting have taken her to sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. She was the past president of the North Central Sociological Association and has held elected and appointed

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positions in the American Sociological Association, Sociologists for Women in Society and Research Committee 32 (Women in Society) of the International Sociological Association. Elizabeth L. Sweet was raised in New York City. After receiving her undergraduate degree from Boston University in Soviet and East European Studies, she worked for several state and federal agencies including child support and social security, as well as volunteered in various community development organizations. She went back to school and obtained a Masters of Urban Planning and Policy and then a Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Throughout her organizing and educational endeavors, economic development and its gender components have dominated her passions and goals. While in Mexico, for 3 years, she studied how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was affecting women. From 2000 to 2001 in Siberia, while teaching at Omsk State University, she collected data about how women were faring under transition. Following that, at Instituto del Progreso Latino as Action Research Director she worked on research projects and program development that addressed the needs and desires of low-income Latinas. Most recently in the spring semester of 2005, she was a Rockefeller Resident Fellow in Mexico where she looked at changing labor strategies of women in the south central region, including cooperative work, land and business ownership, as well as national and international migration. She holds the position of Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urban-Champaign in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. Magdalena Vanya is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California – Davis. Her dissertation explores collective action and strategies after the fall of communism in two East-Central European countries, Hungary and Slovakia, by examining their newly emerging discourses on domestic violence.

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SUBJECT INDEX Costa Rica 152 Critical gerontology 198 Cuernavaca 200 Culture 5, 26–31, 33, 38–40, 47, 56, 88, 92, 98, 126–131, 133–136, 138, 140, 142, 166, 198, 211, 213

Academia 129, 146, 147, 151, 157, 158, 160 Activism 156, 157, 165, 169, 170, 174, 190 Age 3, 31, 37, 48, 54–56, 102, 104, 105, 108, 112–120, 136, 196–201, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 214 Agency 15, 47, 48, 55, 146, 149, 150, 157, 164, 171, 176, 177, 179–181, 199 Ageism 201 Amazons 33 Archaeology Feminist 46, 49, 53, 54, 56 Gender 46, 49, 50, 57 Architecture 146, 152, 156, 159 Attitudes Cross-cultural 47, 48 Gender 62, 64, 81, 89, 101–103, 106, 112, 115, 118, 120 Australia 20, 62, 77, 88

Dahomey 27, 32, 33 Democratic Dialogue 195, 198, 212, 213, 216 Practice 198, 216 Democracy Communicative 148, 195, 198, 212–214 Deliberative 212, 213 Discourses 4, 14, 19, 20, 69, 92, 177 Discrimination 49, 104, 152–154, 156 Division of labor 46, 49–53, 102 Divorce 61, 202, 203 Domestic violence 164–171, 173–186, 188, 189

Berdache 7, 27, 37, 41 Berlin 134, 185 Brazil 8, 16, 18, 35 Burgis

Economic development 148, 150, 151 Emic 3, 19, 20, 26, 34, 38, 39 Ethiopia 31 Etic 26, 34

Canada 89, 98, 102–104, 108, 111–114, 118–120 Chicago 146, 153, 154 Civil society 164–167, 172, 174, 175, 181, 185 Congo, Democratic Republic of 31, 32 Conscious(ness) raising 131–133, 138 Construction(ism) 6, 16, 26, 27, 35, 37, 38, 45, 46, 54, 66, 77, 195, 198, 199

Femininity 4, 12, 14, 19, 33, 137, 138 Feminism Critical 198, 215 Feminist Archaeology 46, 49, 53–54, 56 Cultural practices 125, 130 Knowledge 125, 126, 134 225

226 Pedagogy 125, 127, 134, 136, 139, 140, 143–145, 156, 160 Research methods 134, 146, 147, 158, 160, 198, 199, 201, 216 Theory 46, 54, 58, 169 Freie Universitat 134 Gabra 31, 32 Gender Archaeology 46 -based differences 34, 47, 48, 52, 68, 89, 92 dimorphism 9, 39, 42 hierarchies 47–50, 55–57, 195, 198 inequality 183, 186 poles 26, 30 role(s) 47–49, 57, 65, 79, 97–99, 101, 102, 112, 115, 116, 118, 179 relations 40, 45, 47, 48, 51, 61, 62, 64, 65, 68, 167, 173, 179 in the household 53, 61, 92, 102, 207 Ghana 33 Globalization 66, 120 Grrrila 146, 147, 151, 153, 155–160 Homosexual(ity) 6, 30, 31, 37, 40, 41, 57, 78–81, 88, 89 Housework 62, 64, 66–69, 76, 77 Hungary Identity Construction 195, 198, 209 Igbo 30 India 10, 56, 67, 76, 78, 80, 81, 88, 89 Indonesia 2, 6, 32, 67, 68, 76, 77, 81, 88, 89 Intersexed 29, 30 Italy 126, 131 Japan 67, 81

SUBJECT INDEX Kenya 29, 31 Kinship 48, 55 Korea, Republic of 63 Life history Interview 195, 197–201, 208, 210, 212, 213, 215, 216 Machismo 98, 104, 118 Mandan 27 Manly hearted woman 27 Marianismo 98 Marginality 197 Marginalization 145–147, 152–154, 157–160 Marriage 32, 56, 62, 66, 67, 76, 79, 186, 187, 203, 204, 210, 214 Masculinity 4, 7, 10, 12, 14, 18, 19, 32, 79, 98 Mbuti 31, 32 Men 2, 4–6, 8, 9, 12, 14, 16–18, 27, 30, 31, 33, 35, 39, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 56, 57, 66–69, 76–81, 98, 99, 101–103, 119, 120, 132, 139, 141, 153, 155–157, 166, 168, 180, 186, 202, 207, 208 Mexico 53, 98, 99, 102, 104, 105, 108, 111–114, 116, 118–120, 146, 147, 154–157, 159, 198, 200–202, 205, 207–209, 214, 215 Milan 126 Modernization 35, 39, 79 Mohave 30, 41 Nadle 30, 42 Navajo 29, 30, 42 Narrative 132, 185, 197–199, 202, 203, 205, 207, 208, 211–213, 215 Nigeria 30, 33 North America 7, 29 North American Plains 27 Older women 136, 197, 198, 200, 201, 208–211, 213–215

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Subject Index Omani 36 Oppression 55, 56, 129, 132, 158, 202–204, 207, 214 Pokot 29, 30 Policy 76, 103, 146, 149–151, 159, 160, 164, 166, 176, 177, 182, 183, 186–189, 191, 200 Political Discourse 197, 214 Power 196, 198, 213 Pornography 62, 64, 66, 79–81, 88, 89, 92 Power Political 196, 198, 213 Relations 76, 196, 201, 207, 210, 215 Priest 203 Prostitution 79, 80, 88 Race 48, 56, 99, 105, 155, 156, 159 Research Qualitative 148, 150, 158, 159, 198, 199 Resistance 66, 126, 127, 138, 146, 157, 160, 182, 198, 202–205, 208, 209, 214 Role reversal 62, 64, 66, 69, 76, 77 Russia 146, 147, 151, 157, 158 Sex Biological 6, 7, 10, 27, 28, 30, 46, 55 Cultural 27, 28 Sex-gender-sexuality 26, 27, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39–41 Sexual differences 47 Sexuality 6, 15–20, 26, 33, 34, 39, 40, 47, 66, 78, 135, 136, 138, 196, 199, 208, 210, 213 Slovakia 164, 165, 168–170, 172, 174, 175, 180, 184, 189, 190 Social Construction(ism) 35, 199, 215 Gerontology 199 Hierarchy 49 Inequality 201, 202, 208, 213 Justice 154, 199, 201, 202, 212, 214, 216 Location 3, 4, 19, 29, 32, 214

Society 2–7, 10, 13, 16, 18, 19, 29, 32, 33, 35, 47, 52, 55, 56, 62, 79, 80, 88, 89, 131, 132, 136, 137, 164–167, 170–172, 174, 175, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189, 190, 196, 198, 199, 201, 209, 214 Society Islands 32, 38, 39, 42 South Africa 34, 42 Spy 146, 147, 151, 157, 160 Status 3–5, 19, 30–32, 36, 38, 42, 48, 50–52, 56, 89, 100, 104, 105, 113–118, 147, 173, 196, 208, 211, 215 Stories 16, 78–80, 129, 151, 160, 196–199, 202–205, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 215 Story telling 196–198, 208, 212, 213 Sulawesi 2–10, 13–15, 18, 20, 32, 40, 80 Tahiti 16, 38 Testimonio 199 Thailand 35–37, 67, 69, 76, 78–80, 93 Third gender 32, 37, 38, 47, 55, 79 Tradition 69, 88, 98, 127, 128, 141, 142, 166, 170, 189, 201, 209, 210, 212 Transgender 79 Transsexual 29, 35 Transvestite 78 Two-spirit 7 United States 29–31, 38, 66, 98, 99, 101–105, 108, 111–113, 117–120, 131, 146–149, 151, 152, 157, 159, 186, 201 Urban planning 146, 152, 159 USA Patriot Act 158, 159 Vietnam 66–69, 76, 77, 81, 92 Vocabularies 64, 81 Western Culture 25, 37, 40, 41 Europe 29, 180, 186 Society/societies 39, 56, 62, 79 Women in the workforce 67 World Values Survey Zulu 31, 34, 42

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