The Gender, Culture, and Power Reader

by Hodgson, Dorothy L.

• ISBN13: 9780190201777
• ISBN10: 0190201770
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2015-10-30
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Gender, Culture, and Power Reader explores different approaches to the study and conceptualization of gender, the value and limitations of gender as an analytic category, and the theoretical insights about gender produced by ethnographic research into the everyday lives, labors, loves, and livelihoods of people throughout the world. Why does gender "matter"? How are dominant ideas and practices of gender perceived, produced, experienced, and contested in different societies? How does ethnographic research provide access to these stories, perspectives, and experiences? What is the relationship between evidence and theory? The Gender, Culture, and Power Reader addresses these questions and more. Expertly edited by Dorothy L. Hodgson, this diverse reader includes both classical debates and relevant contemporary topics like gender-based violence and human rights.

Author Biography

Dorothy Hodgson is Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She is the author of several books, including Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World (2011) and The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries (2005).

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Key Terms
About the Editor

Part I. Key Debates, Past and Present

1. Challenging Universals
1.1 Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? ~ Sherry B. Ortner
1.2 Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance: A Model of Female/Male Interaction in Peasant Society ~ Susan Carol Rogers
1.3 Lifeboat Ethics: Mother Love and Child Death in Northeast Brazil ~ Nancy Scheper-Hughes

2. Power, Agency, Structure
2.1 The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women ~ Lila Abu-Lughod
2.2 Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival ~ Saba Mahmood
2.3 Transnational Surrogacy in India: Interrogating Power and Women's Agency ~ Daisy Deomampo

3. Gender, Sex, and Sexuality
3.1 The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes ~ Don Kulick
3.2 "Playing with Fire": The Gendered Construction of Chicana/Mexicana Sexuality ~ Patricia Zavella
3.3 On the Edge of Respectability: Sexual Politics in China's Tibet ~ Charlene E. Makley

4. Complicating Gender
4.1 "Like a Mother to Them": Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York ~ Shellee Colen
4.2 Ethnically Correct Dolls: Toying with the Race Industry ~ Elizabeth Chin
4.3 "Strong Women" and "Pretty Girls": Self-Provisioning, Gender, and Class Identity in Rural Galicia ~ Sharon R. Roseman

5. Politics of Representation
5.1 Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses ~ Chandra Mohanty
5.2 A Home Girl Goes Home: Black Feminism and the Lure of Native Anthropology ~ Cheryl R. Rodriguez
5.3 Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? ~ Lila Abu-Lughod

Part II. Becoming/Being Gendered

6. Growing up Gendered
6.1 Growing Girls/Closing Circles: Limits on the Spaces of Knowing in Rural Sudan and U.S. Cities ~ Cindi Katz
6.2 "Do it for all your Pubic Hairs": Latino Boys, Masculinity and Puberty ~ Richard Mora
6.3 Trans Youth, Science and Art: Creating (Trans) Gendered Space ~ Alison Rooke

7. Language and Performance
7.1 Anger, Gender, Language Shift and the Politics of Revelation in a Papua New Guinean Village ~ Don Kulick
7.2 Performing Gender Identity: Young Men's Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity ~ Deborah Cameron
7.3 Do Clothes Make the Woman?: Gender, Performance Theory, and Lesbian Eroticism ~ Kath Weston

8. Bodies / Embodiment
8.1 Weighty Subjects: The Biopolitics of the US War on Fat ~ Susan Greenhalgh
8.2 Middle-Class Compassion and Man Boobs ~ Thaïs Machado-Borges
8.3 The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia ~ Aihwa Ong

9. Mediated Lives
9.1 Warriors, Hunters, and Bruce Lee: Gendered Agency and the Transformation of Amazonian Masculinity ~ Casey High
9.2 Women on the Market: Marriage, Consumption, and the Internet in Urban Cameroon ~ Jennifer Johnson-Hanks
9.3 Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online and the Remediation of the Coming-Out Story ~ Mary Gray

Part III. Gendered Negotiations

10. Gender at Home
10.1 "Gone to Their Second Husbands": Marital Metaphors and Conjugal Contracts in the Gambia's Female Garden Sector ~ Richard Schroeder
10.2 Black Women Have Always Worked: Is There a Work-Family Conflict Among the Black Middle Class? ~ Riché J. Daniel Barnes
10.3 Scoring Men: Vasectomies, Gender Relations and Male Sexuality in Oaxaca ~ Matthew C. Gutmann

11. Gender at Work
11.1 Designing Women: Corporate Discipline and Barbados's Off-Shore Pink-Collar Sector ~ Carla Freeman
11.2 Mothering, Work, and Gender in Urban Asante Ideology and Practice ~ Gracia Clark
11.3 Man Enough To Let My Wife Support Me: Gender and Unemployment Among Middle-Class U.S. Tech Workers ~ Carrie M. Lane

12. Gendered States
12.1 State versus Islam: Malay Families, Women's Bodies, and the Body Politic in Malaysia ~ Aihwa Ong
12.2 Creating Citizens, Making Men: The Military and Masculinity in Bolivia ~ Lesley Gill
12.3 The Intimacy of State Power: Marriage, Liberation, and Socialist Subjects in Southeastern China ~ Sara L. Friedman

Part IV. Gender Matters

13. Global Connections of Life, Labor and Love
13.1 Filipina Migrants in Rural Japana and Their Professions of Love ~ Lieba Faier
13.2 "Now I Am a Man and a Woman!": Gendered Moves and Migrations in a Transnational Mexican Community ~ Deborah A. Boehm
13.3 Homeland Beauty: Transnational Longing and Hmong American Video ~ Louisa Schein

14. Structures of Violence
14.1 The Intimacies of Power: Rethinking Violence and Affinity in the Bolivian Andes ~ Krista Van Vleet
14.2 Reconstructing Masculinities: The Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration of Former Combatants in Colombia ~ Kimberly Theidon
14.3 The Construction of Indigenous Suspects: Militarization and the Gendered and Ethnic Dynamics of Human Rights Abuses in Southern Mexico ~ Lynn Stephen

15. Politics of Human Rights and Humanitarian Interventions
15.1 Feminist Negotiations: Contesting Narratives of the Campaign against Acid Violence in Bangladesh ~ Elora Halim Chowdhury
15.2 "These Are not Our Priorities": Maasai Women, Human Rights, and the Problem of Culture ~ Dorothy L. Hodgson
15.3 International Human Rights, Gender-Based Violence, and Local Discourses of Abuse in Postconflict Liberia: A Problem of "Culture"? ~ Sharon Abramowitz and Mary H. Moran

Author Bios
Additional Resources for Teaching and Learning