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Sexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality are seen as successful integration, rejecting them is regarded as a sign of failed citizenship. Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, this book provides an ethnographic account of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. It argues that by embracing, rejecting, and questioning modernity in stories about sexuality, the Iranian Dutch actively engage in processes of self-fashioning.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. The chapters in this volume explore some uncomfortable territories – spaces where desires and practices remain ‘taboo’, pathologised or invisible. Unveiled are premises under which citizenship can be constructed, and the ways that persons can be made valid or invalid as cultural artefacts. This book speaks loudly to our cultural and collective identities. A number of crucial debates that surround relationships between and among gender, sexuality and identity within a global context are discussed across an eclectic array of disciplines, professions and vocations. The result challenges perspectives and provides new and innovative possibilities for future development. The authors’ international perspectives illuminate practices that continue to discriminate and marginalize those identities, behaviours and desires that are seen to sit outside hegemonic cultural norms
The self-identifying Ghanaian-Dutch and Somali-Dutch communities residing in the Randstad area of the Netherlands are deeply impacted by religious beliefs and cultural factors in their approach towards sexual health practices, well-being and pleasure. This book shows how religious sensibilities shape the physical activities, beauty practices, and gendered roles that are adopted into the daily lives of these communities in pursuit of their sexual and general well-being. Through an ethnographic account, it explores and challenges the assumptions held around the complex relationship between religion and sexuality.
Tracing women’s experiences of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly in the second trimester, before legal viability, shows how such events are positioned as less ‘real’ or significant when the foetal being does not, or will not, survive. Invisible Labours describes the reproductive politics of this category of pregnancy loss in England. It shows how second trimester pregnancy loss produces specific medical and social experiences, revealing an underlying teleological ontology of pregnancy. Some women then understand their pregnancy through kinship with the unborn baby.
Love is the most important and intense experience of our life. It pushes us to elation, to heartbreak, to sing for joy and sob in disappointment. Connecting in this way to others is an essential quality of being human: without love, we don’t learn and develop properly as children and we don’t flourish as adults – in short, we’re starved of what we need. But love is on the verge of monumental change. Sex robots are already on the market, polyamory is gaining ground, drugs are being developed that can make you fall in love, and AI and robotics are set to revolutionize how we relate to each other. Debates about whether more than two people should be able legally to get married are heati...
Children are Everywhere engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context. This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and childlessness of ‘ethnic’ Germans in Berlin, who came of age around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brings them into conversation with theories on parenting, waithood, non-biological intimacies, and masculinities. This is the first ethnographic work by a South Asian author on demographic anxieties and reproduction in Germany and reverses the anthropological gaze to study Europe as the ‘Other.’
New parents in the United States are caught between responding to infant needs for closeness and breastfeeding, and cultural and medical norms that emphasize solitary sleep. This anthropological investigation shows that nighttime closeness and breastfeeding are the evolutionary and cross-cultural norm, but recent sociocultural shifts produced novel ideals of separation. The book uncovers how breastfeeding parents rework these cultural ideals. In this new edition, the author describes shifting medical guidance that increasingly supports breastfeeding yet remains largely separated from infant sleep guidance. The volume also provides a path towards more equitable approaches to nighttime infant care grounded in reproductive justice.
This volume consists of narratives of migrant academics from the Global South within academia in the Global North. The autobiographic and autoethnographic contributions to this collection aim to decolonise the discourse around academic mobility by highlighting experiences of precarity, resilience, care and solidarity in the academic margins. The authors use precarity to analyse the state of affairs in the academy, from hiring practices to ‘culturally’ accepted division of labour, systematic forms of discrimination, racialisation, and gendered hierarchies, etc. Building on precarity as a critical concept for challenging social exclusion or forming political collectives, the authors move a...
Everyday Feminist Research Praxis: Doing Gender in The Netherlands offers a selection of previously unpublished work presented during the 2011, 2012 and 2013 Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) conferences. Reflecting the wide spectrum of interdisciplinary gender studies, this volume is organised into four sections along four conceptual knots. These thematic entry-points are space/time, affectivity, public/private, and technological mediation. The central emphasis of this volume is twofold: first, the everyday is approached as a concretely grounded site of micro-political power struggles. Second, the contributors make explicit connections between theory and their everyday fem...
This book examines narratives of individual religious transformation in Western European literature and culture. Religious individuals, themes, experiences and communities are widely represented in diverse literature and culture, including literary texts and visual arts and media. Taking the subject of religious transformation as an angle from which to study constructions of religion, gender and race, this book reveals through various case studies what authors, documentary makers, film makers and playwrights consider to be important (possible) shifts between the old and the new, continuities and discontinuities, and the formation of the self. The chapters demonstrate how individual religious transformations are understood to be shaped by various intersections of difference, and point at the need to consider gender as always related to and co-constructing religion and race. This transdisciplinary and intimate study provides a fresh lens through which to examine pressing questions regarding the place and future of religion, gender and race in contemporary Western Europe.