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Publisher description
Looking at the households where Javanese women live and the factories where they labour, Diane Wolf reveals the contradictions, constraints and changes in women's lives in the Third World and identifies the complex dynamics of class, gender, agrarian change and industrialization in rural Java.
Fieldwork poses particular dilemmas and contradictions for feminists because of the power relations inherent in the process of gathering data and implicit in the process of representation. Although most feminist scholars are committed to seeking ethical ways to analyze women and gender, these dilemmas are especially acute in fieldwork, where resear
Fieldwork poses particular dilemmas and contradictions for feminists because of the power relations inherent in the process of gathering data and implicit in the process of representation. Although most feminist scholars are committed to seeking ethical ways to analyze women and gender, these dilemmas are especially acute in fieldwork, where research often entails working with those who are in less privileged positions than the researcher. Despite attempts by feminist scholars to conduct more interactive and egalitarian research, they have rarely been able to disrupt the hierarchies of power. This book offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the kinds of dilemmas feminist researchers have confronted in the field, both in the United States and in Third World countries. Through experientially based writings, the authors unravel the contradictions stemming from their multiple positions as "insiders," "outsiders," or both, and from attempts to equalize the research relationship and, in some cases, to ameliorate the situation of those studied. The introductory essay includes an extensive review of the literature.
Naples draws on different research topics, such as welfare, poverty, sexual identity, and sexual abuse, to illustrate some of the most salient dilemmas of feminist research: the debate over objectivity, the paradox of discourse, the dilemma of "standpoint," and the challenges of activist research. By linking important feminist theoretical debates with case studies, Naples illustrates the strategies she developed for resolving the challenges posed be postmodern, Third World, postcolonial, and queer studies.
Both personal and theoretical, autoethnographic and analytical, this book offers a performative, arts-based narrative about the aftermath of abusive marriages, using the stories, drawings, songs of other women to compare with Tamas's own lived experience.
An ethnographic account of indigenous artisans in Nicaragua and the complex ways they have understood and constructed their own identity from the period of the Sandanistas to the present.
In the past, many Native American cultures have treated women and men as equals. In A Necessary Balance, Lillian A. Ackerman examines the balance of power and responsibility between men and women within each of the eleven Plateau Indian tribes who live today on the Colville Indian Reservation in north-central Washington State. Ackerman analyzes tribal cultures over three historical periods lasting more than a century--the traditional past, the farming phase when Indians were forced onto the reservation, and the twentieth-century industrial present. Ackerman examines gender equality in terms of power, authority, and autonomy in four social spheres: economic, domestic, political, and religious. Although early explorers and anthropologists noted isolated instances of gender equality among Plateau Indians, A Necessary Balance is the first book-length examination of a culture that has practiced such equality from its early days of hunting and gathering to the present day. Ackerman's findings also relate to an examination of European and American cultures, calling into question the current assumption that gender equality ceases to be possible with the advent of industrialization.
In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women—mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army—endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative. Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women—a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases ...
At the heart of feminist theory lies the seemingly intractable issue of essentialism. Feminism has thus far failed to transcend critiques of essentialism and currently offers only two inadequate positions against it. One response reifies the category "women," representing the experience of oppression of privileged women as archetypal for feminism, and the other denies the category because it unjustly overgeneralizes, thus undercutting the possibility of a robust theory of gender oppression. To spur anti-essentialist methods and practice around such issues as sexual violence, feminist theory crucially needs a constructive and politically powerful strategy for defining women.Cressida J. Heyes ...