Love as Emotion and Social Practice: A Feminist Perspective

Author(s): Brook Sadler / Language(s): English Issue: 11 (25)/2018

I argue that love is both an emotion and a social practice. First, I observe that erotic or romantic love is often thought to be a passive, overwhelming, physically intense, a-rational, andindividual experience. In opposition to these assumptions, I sketch a view of emotions that revealstheir rational, willful, and social nature. Seen in this way, the emotion of love is something that can be re-invented through attention to social norms and institutions. Next, I advance the idea that emotions can be social practices. How we think about love, the norms for love, and our ideas aboutlove, including popular ideas about love as an emotion, constitute the social practice of love.Looking at the contemporary American context, I argue that the social practice of love provides a bolster for patriarchy. Because romantic love is closely linked to marriage, it participates in limiting women’s choices about family, career, and civic and political engagement. Thepreeminent place of romantic love in women’s lives diverts women’s attention from other formsof love, including female friendship and love of meaningful work. Discourses of love, which emphasize love as an overwhelming emotion beyond our control, function to foreclose feminist scrutiny of patriarchal practices. Without rejecting the positive nature of erotic love, I recommend a feminist reinvention of the practice of love. My argument draws upon varied resources from philosophy and cultural studies.

Do Subversive Weddings Challenge Amatonormativity? Polyamorous Weddings and Romantic Love Ideals

Author(s): Elizabeth Brake / Language(s): English Issue: 11 (25)/2018

Subversive weddings seem to challenge widespread norms regarding romantic love.Weddings have a social significance as capstones of romantic love narratives; often, they serve as symbols of romantic love. Changing their significance would thus be a powerful tool in changing widespread expectations and beliefs regarding romantic love or committed love relationships more generally. Insofar as amatonormativity (the expectation and normative expectation that everyone seeks and flourishes in the same type of dyadic, romantic, sexual love relationship) is harmful, this is a good thing. Polyamorous weddings, for example, seem to challenge the norm that romantic love relationships must be exclusive, and the prevalence of such weddings could increase social visibility of non-exclusive love relationships. It could also lead to greater visibility for other nontraditional life paths, such as prioritizing friendships over romantic love relationships, or abstaining from romantic love relationships. But can subversive weddings really subvert the prevailing norms? One problem is that if weddings – or attempted weddings – diverge too far from the social norms, they may not succeed in changing those norms because they will not be recognized as weddings at all. A second problem is that such weddings may lead to assimilation to, rather than subversion of, dominant norms. This poses a dilemma: if subversive weddings are not in fact weddings, it seems they cannot change the social significance of weddings in the way they are intended to do; but if they are weddings, their attempts at subversion could be undermined because they bear the social significance of weddings.

Love as an Instrument of Oppression: Plato's Symposium and Contemporary Gender Relations

Author(s): Oana Uiorean / Language(s): English Issue: 11 (25)/2018

This paper proposes a re-reading of Plato’s Symposium through the lens of class theory and materialist feminism. I argue that the speeches contained in the text, and particularly the one delivered by Pausanias, outline a system of social closure designed to pass on privilege between worthy upper-class males in classical Greece, and at the same time to dominate women and keep them in their segregated place in order to exploit their labor for the biological and social reproduction of this class. Within this system, Love (with a capital L) played the role of organizing principle. The way in which love was expected to be offered or withheld structured the reproduction of the society Plato’s characters inhabited. I will argue that the result is a system of gender-based oppression that has undergone few essential changes across millennia and that endures under contemporary capitalism. Homoerotic love no longer plays the role of medium for the passing on of privilege and the adjacent domination of women. That territory is now occupied by heterosexual love, with the social attitudes and beliefs attached to it acting directly towards the oppression of women instead. This is done specifically through household and kinship relations.These are imposed on women through various coercive and cultural instruments, with the aim of appropriating their labor to support the production of surplus. Classical Greece upheld a proto-model of what we observe in contemporary configurations. It is important to recognize the constancy of gender oppression predicated on social reproduction in order to develop a gendered counterhistory of capitalism.

The Freedom to Love: On the Unclaimability of (Maternal) Love

Author(s): Deidre Nicole Green / Language(s): English Issue: 11 (25)/2018

Contemporary Western Love Narratives and Women in TV Series: A Case Study

Author(s): Chiara Piazessi,Martin Blais,Julie Lavigne,Catherine Mongrain Lavoie / Language(s): English Issue: 11 (25)/2018

This paper documents continuities and shifts in love stories unfolding in contemporary North-American TV series. We present results from a 2015-2017 case study on the Quebec TV series La Galère (2007-2013), showcasing four women in their forties as they deal with love relationships and intimate life. Based on the analysis of the four protagonists’ love narratives and of the specific challenges they face when dealing with love, we discuss the features of love as they emerge from the narratives and the temporality of love that structures them. While the scholarly literature generally posits two coexisting, yet concurring love semantics (traditional or romantic vs. modern or partnership), our analysis of the love narratives in La Galère highlights a conception of love integrating tradition with modern reflexivity, idealization with scepticism, romanticism with pragmatism. As to the temporality of love, our research found a similar synergy between traditional and modern motives, which structures a temporal unfolding mixing circularity and linearity. These multiple references are mobilized by the main characters of the TV series to manage conflicting ambitions and to perform relationship work with regard to relational patterns that still entail a heavier workload and higher costs for women.

Repronormativity and its Others: Queering Parental Love in Times of Culturally Compulsory Reproduction

Author(s): Ana Cristina Santos / Language(s): English Issue: 11 (25)/2018

We may have believed women’s (sexual) agency was an established right in Southern Europe. However, the recent history of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in Portugal provides an enlightening example of how sexuality and reproduction have remained bounded. Until 2016, women in Portugal could not access ART unless they were formally partnered with a man (married or in a different-sex de facto union).1 In this paper, I start by exploring the cultural context in which the motherhood regime, understood as both reproduction and parenting, is embedded in Portugal. The motherhood regime puts forward strong expectations about becoming a parent, hence feeding the cultural imaginary that makes reproduction compulsory (Roseneil et al. 2016). Having repronormativity as its backdrop, this section of the paper is in silent dialogue with the legal framework that removed most obstacles to same-sex parenting in Portugal in December 2016. In the second section, I consider biographic narrative interviews conducted with lesbian and bisexual mothers in Lisbon between April and July 2016, with a particular focus on participants’ encounters with dominant ideologies of motherhood and cultural expectations around parental love. Participants in the study often reported situations demonstrating that love was the only emotion that made it culturally acceptable for women to engage in same-sex partnering and parenting. I will advance a reading of queer that can be used in future reproductive studies. I will suggest that in Southern Europe, where reproduction and parenting have been historically constrained by strict rules around gender and sexuality (Moreira, 2018, Santos 2013, Trujillo 2016), failing to be a particular kind of (heteronormative, cisnormative, mononormative) mother may offer a fruitful way for queering parental love through embracing reproductive misfits.

Dating Apps in the Lives of Young Romanian Women. A Preliminary Study

Author(s): Maria Henriete Poszar,Alina Ioana Dumitrescu,Denisa Piticaș,Sorana CONSTANTINESCU / Language(s): English Issue: 11 (25)/2018

The emergent field of study into mobile dating applications has focused primarily on American and Western European young adults, with consistent results. This study is intent on laying forth the basic groundwork for the extension of this inquiry to more culturally conservative groups such as Central and Eastern European young adults. In a culture where one third of adults consider that pre-marital sex is never justifiable1 , can dating apps make a dent in established ‘traditional’ courting rituals and family formation values? By means of self-reported quantitative research, we looked at how young women in Romania (N=155) perceive mobile dating apps, what motivates them to use online dating and what effects this usage has on their sexual and romantic relationships. More than half (54%) of the women who participated in our study reported having engaged in a form of offline relationship as a result of using online dating apps. Their motivations range from the desire to meet partners with similar interests, to simply passing the time. The intention to form a stable romantic relationship is only slightly dominant over finding partners for casual sex. The two intentions are clearly in conflict, resulting largely in quitting the usage of the app. Another reason for withdrawal from using the app has been the frequency of unpleasant experiences that they were exposed to in this medium. This suggests a connection between pursued outcomes and harassment in online mobile dating. Underlying user perceptions and behavior, responses indicate some unease in using online dating against the background of traditional dating. In turn, this leads to devaluing online dating as a desperate measure or an experience lacking in substance. The study offers preliminary insight into whether dating apps disrupt or reinforce values and behaviors commonly experienced by young Romanian women in traditional or offline dating.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF CHANGING PARADIGMS IN SOCIOLOGY

Author(s): Daniel C. Bruch / Language(s): English Issue: 3/1995

Author briefly sketches some of the social forces at work in the development of sociological theory. He analyses more intensively the intellectual and historical roots of structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism and feminist theory. Other contemporary theories like action theory, systems theory, structuralism, structural theory network theory: existential sociology, are briefly noted. Author concludes that “there are multiple paradigm in sociology and that the sources of their differences are their varied interpretations of humankind."

A MURDER IN THE FAMILY –CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND CRIMINOLOGICAL ASPECTS

Author(s): Anita Ilić / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

When studying families, systematic model or approach is particularly important because it examines the family as a system, which is on the one hand part of a larger system, and on the other hand, the same system is observed as a collection of small, mutually conditioned systems. Conflicts and crises in family can cause various disorders, which can even result in a criminal act, such as murder in a family. Although at first sight, these two phenomena seem controversial and opposing, there are more numerous data that testify to this phenomenon. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that family is in crisis, and that there are justified reasons for studying this phenomenon and looking for solution to enhance prevention and protection of its vulnerable members. The goal of research is to point out the existing legislation, previous researches of this problem, its significance and expected improvement after implementing the Law on Prevention of Violence.

KAŽNJAVANJE ŽENA U CRNOJ GORI KROZ ISTORIJU

Author(s): Valentina Smolović / Language(s): Bosnian,Croatian,Serbian Issue: 2/2017

None of the stages of social development, nor social organization were immune to the phenomenon of crime, or violation of its norms of the members of their community. Therefore, the social reaction to this phenomenon were permanent, but because of the diversity and different views of the problem, cultural and other features and differences of the same or a different community groups and organization. In such a social response, any method or means that they are implemented, the joint aspiration has always been how to eliminate violation. According to reaction, all those aspirations can be divided into three groups.Therefore, type of social responses are: punitive or repressive response, preventive and excessive reaction.These responses relate to each other or are parallel with different emphasis depending on social development, cultural and cognitive level of each community where the dominant reaction is the punitive one. Montenegrin is up to the end of the nineteenth century, treated as a thing, as the object of someone else's disposal, and her will is ignored. Personal development of personality of the Montenegrin Women's measure is the development of Montenegrin society. Since the negation of that personality and women for social attachment to the formal recognition of collective manifestation of her own free will, its personality individualization and emancipation of the staff is very complicated and long way.She is now an equal member of the community. She assumes the role previously belonged to men and does them very successfully. Recognizing the role of a modern woman stock company, it raises much more complex and more assignments from those previously filled. Nowadays, she is trying to, as an active member of society, be respected and honored, to be within the framework of their profession and show and prove to participate in public life by accepting public office. In contrast to the period when she was the most important part of the family and had less participation in public life, contemporary women's crime is increasingly becoming equal partners to men in the criminal offenses. However, the ratio of female criminality in relation to the crime of male is not constant but varies depending on the country, onwards and types of criminal behavior. In addition to the criminal acts infanticide, which is specifically for women, in most other criminal offenses motivs identical to the criminal acts of the motives of male criminality. Common law punishments for women in Montenegro were archaic and drastic. Harsh penalties were pronounced for their crimes: stoning, cutting body parts (nose) and exile. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century abolished the archaic punishment for their crimes in imposing the statutory penalty, which is serving in prison. Imprisonment for women are mainly supported herself in the male prison. For the first time in the history of Montenegro, the Department for women was founded in 1995 as a separate organizational unit of the prison in Podgorica. Living and working in the Department for Women is led by corrective treatment, provided by the Rules of the house of the Institute for Execution of Criminal Sanctions, which is in line with international standards and principles of sentencing.

Zastupljenost, reprezentativnost i vidljivost kandidatkinja tokom predizborne kampanje za Opšte izbore 2018.

Author(s): Maida Zagorac / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 46/2019

Ravnopravna zastupljenost žena i muškaraca u zakonodavnim tijelima vlasti jedan je od osnovnih pokazatelja ostvarenog stepena ravnopravnosti spolova u svakom društvu. Zakon o ravnopravnosti spolova u Bosni i Hercegovini (ZoRS BiH) u članu 20. propisuje obaveznu kvotu učešća od minimum 40% manje zastupljenog spola u svim tijelima vlasti. Izborni zakon Bosne i Hercegovine usklađen je sa ZoRS-om BiH 2013. godine, te u članu 4.19 propisuje minimalnu kvotu od 40% manje zastupljenog spola na svim izbornim listama, uz obavezno pozicioniranje kandidata_kinja manje zastupljenog spola na tačno određenim mjestima na listi. Analiza svih izbornih listi za Opšte izbore 2018. ukazuje na to da je na ovjerene 804 redovne kandidatske liste bilo tek 16% nositeljica listi. Ukupan broj kandidata_kinja na Opštim izborima 2018. iznosio je 7497, od čega je 3119 žena, odnosno 41,60% i 4378 muškaraca, odnosno 58,39%. Samo na 81 listi kandidatkinje su bile zastupljenije od kandidata, u omjeru od 50 do 60%. Prema službenim i potvrđenim rezultatima Opštih izbora 2018, u Predstavnički dom Parlamentarne skupštine BiH (PD PSBiH) od 42 zastupnika_ca izabrano je sedam žena (16,66%). Jedna zastupnica u trenutnom mandatu je izabrana direktno, a šest sa kompenzacijskih listi. Postavlja se pitanje koji su uzroci toga da svaki izbori u BiH rezultiraju podzastupljenošću žena i formiranjem nelegalnih tijela zakonodavne vlasti.8 Naime, član 20. Zakona o ravnopravnosti spolova je jasan i obvezujući, a od usvajanja Zakona 2003. godine nijednom nije bio primijenjen. Promocija i vidljivost kandidata_kinja tokom predizborne kampanje je bitna i može uticati na odluku glasačkog tijela o tome kome će dati povjerenje da ih zastupa u tijelima zakonodavne vlasti. [...]

"ZOVITE IH PO OČEVIMA NJIHOVIM": MUŠKA STERILNOST I NOVE REPRODUKTIVNE TEHNOLOGIJE U SVETLU ISLAMA

Author(s): Marko Pišev / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 2/2012

Generally speaking, many patrilineal and patrilocal communities highly appreciate male fertility. In islamic societies Qur'an dogma givs strict preference to patrilinearity over matrilinearity, and ascribes primary importance to the biological fatherhood. The reader of Qur'an will, in the Surat Al-Ahzab, come across the verse "Name your adopted sons after their fathers, that is more just with Allah", while one of the experts on Arabic literature emphasizes the fact that male characters in many stories stand out through their fatherhood, especially the one expressed in relation to their sons. In such social context – shaped mainly by the absolute authority of faith – reproductive "incompetence" of an individual is reflected through specific biological "defect" which primarily stigmatizes male population. Thus, women are those who most often take over "the guilt" of infertility. Discussing some elements of islamic bioethics this paper shall focus on the issues whether and how new reproductive technologies are being used for treatment of male sterility in these societies, as well as whether it is – by their practical use – possible to decrease tensions that emanate from the conflict of male reproductive "unfulfillment" and traditional notions of the purity of the descent (nasab).

MESLEK EDİNDİRMEYE YÖNELİK BİR AB PROJESİ KAPSAMINDA KONYA’DA YAŞAYAN ROMAN KADINLARIN ALMIŞ OLDUKLARI EĞİTİMLER HAKKINDAKİ GÖRÜŞLERİ

Author(s): Yasemin Koparan / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 43/2019

Romans, One of the disadvantaged groups living in our country have a difficult life due to their exclusion, low levels of education and inadequate financial means. For this purpose, an EU project has been implemented within the framework of Konya. Therefore, the main purpose of this study to evaluate the outcome of the education given to Roma women who do not have any profession and want to contribute to the family budget.The study population consisted of Roma women living in the city center of Konya.The sample was composed of Roma women who do not have a profession living in Doganlar Neighbourhood, in the central Karatay district of Konya. Research is one of the quantitative research patterns of "pretest-posttest control group ”.The interview form prepared by the researcher was used as the data collection tool.Interview form; The readiness and the post-training gains of Roma women were measured by asking the Roman women to contribute to the family budget and whether they would like to have a profession. At the end of the research, frequency and percentage analysis were used to analyze the data. Roman women have received such training for the first time and are satisfied with this and they stated that they wanted to contribute to the family budget.

Bodily Violence and Resistance in Wojtek Smarzowski’s Rose (Róża, 2011)

Author(s): Elżbieta Ostrowska / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2018

The article argues that Wojtek Smarzowski’s film Rose (Róża, Poland, 2011) undermines the dominant bigendered logic of screen death and suffering in the Polish films depicting the experience of World War II. In these films, there is a significant absence of images of female suffering and death, which is striking when compared to the abundant images of wounded and dying male bodies, usually represented as a lavish visual spectacle. This unrepresented female death serves as a ‘structuring absence’ that governs the systematic signifying practices of Polish cinema. Most importantly, it expels the female experience of World War II from the realm of history to the realm of the mythical. This representational regime has been established in the Polish national cinema during the 1950s, especially in Andrzej Wajda’s films, and is still proving its longevity. As the author argues, Smarzowski’s Rose is perhaps the most significant attempt to undermine this gendered cinematic discourse. Specifically, the essay explores the ways in which Smarzowski’s Rose departs from previous dominant modes of representation of the World War II experience in Polish cinema, especially its gendered aspect. Firstly, it examines how Rose abandons the generic conventions of both war film and historical drama and instead, utilises selected conventions of melodrama to open up the textual space in which to represent the female experience of historical events. Then the author looks more closely at this experience and discusses the film’s representation of the suffering female body to argue that it subverts the national narrative of the war experience that privileges male suffering. A close analysis of the relationship between sound and image in the scenes of bodily violence reveals how the film reclaims the female body from the abstract domain of national allegory and returns it to the realm of individual embodied experience. The article concludes that Rose presents the female body as resisting the singular ideological inscription, and instead, portrays it as simultaneously submitting to and resisting the gendered violence of war.

War and Women in Jānis Streičs’ Films

Author(s): Inga Pērkone / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2018

This article is devoted to the theme of women and war in the films of Jānis Streičs, possibly the most influential Latvian film director. In the course of his career, which spanned nearly 50 years, Streičs made films that were popular in Latvia, as well as throughout the Soviet Union. He is one of the few Latvian film directors who managed to continue a comparatively stable career in the newly reindependent Republic of Latvia. Streičs skilfully used the canonised means of expression of classical cinema and superficially fulfilled the demands of socialist realism to provide appealing and life-asserting narratives for the audiences. Being a full-time film director at Riga Film Studio, and gradually becoming a master of the studio system, Jānis Streičs managed to subordinate the system to his own needs, outgrowing it and becoming an auteur with an idiosyncratic style and consistently developed topics. The most expressive elements of his visual style can be found in his war films, which are presented as women’s reflections on war. In this article, Streičs’ oeuvre in its entirety provides the background for an analysis of two of his innovative war films. Meetings on the Milky Way (Tikšanās uz Piena ceļa, Latvia, 1985) rejects the classical narrative structure, instead offering fragmentary war episodes that were united by two elements – the road and women. In Carmen Horrendum (Latvia, 1989) Streičs uses an even more complicated structure that combines reality, visions and dreams. After watching this film, the only conclusion we can come to with certainty is that war does not have a woman’s face and, in general, war has no traces of humanity. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how World War II, a theme stringently controlled by Soviet ideology, provided the impetus for a search for an innovative film language.

Sex of place: Mediated intimacy and tourism imaginaries

Author(s): Elsa Soro / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

The capillary diffusion of digital and mobile technologies has deeply changed both the way of travelling and loving. Against this changing context, the aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between tourism discourse and online-dating discourse. Through analysis of a sample of Tinder profiles, the relationship between the self-presentation and the touristic space experience will be scrutinized. The main hypothesis that drives this work is that different ways of being attractive and seductive on dating apps correspond to specific, current narratives and typologies of tourism. The article maintains that discourse of mediated intimacy platforms borrow its themes from tourism imaginaries. Consequently, tourism discourse shapes the different modes of self-presentation in online intimacy.

РОЛЬ ЖЕНЩИНЫ В РЕЛИГИОЗНОМ ИНАКОМЫСЛИИ В XIX — НАЧАЛЕ ХХ в.

Author(s): Andrey Anatolyevich Mashkovtsev,Victoria Vyacheslavovna Mashkovtseva / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2019

The article examines the role of women in the Old Believer, sectarian, Baptists organizations in the territory of Vyatka province in the XIX — beginning of the XX c. The study is based on the documents extracted from the funds of the central and regional archives (the Russian State Historical Archive, the National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan and the State Archives of the Kirov Region), as well as published sources presented by statistical data and regulations. Drawing on previously unpublished material, the authors showed the importance of women in preserving the confessional identity of religious associations, which were the object of severe persecution by the regional authorities and the official church.

The Future of Men – Men, Masculinities and Gender Equality

Author(s): / Language(s): English Issue: 12 (26)/2019

The Man Box: The Making of Masculinity

Author(s): Giese Rachel / Language(s): English Issue: 12 (26)/2019

This article looks at the concept of the “man box”: the behaviors and expectations associated with a conventional, rigid form of manliness, an exaggerated, archetypal machismo that academics describe as “hegemonic masculinity.” I explore how manliness and masculinity are tied to male identity and how throughout the centuries anxiety over boys has manifested itself with the changing perceptions of masculinity.

Men’s Attitudes to Gender Stereotypes in Ukraine

Author(s): Gerasymenko Ganna,Maidanik Iryna,Svitlana Polyakova,Bachek Tetyana,Libanova Ella / Language(s): English Issue: 12 (26)/2019

This study of masculinity as a concept of men’s culture was undertaken with the purpose of generating data needed to understand the processes of formation of men’s identity and evolution of men’s cultural practices in order to find efficient communication channels for advocacy efforts to effect changes in the social stereotypes. To fill the gaps in the data throwing light on men’s behavioral practices and attitudes to gender equality and violence, UNFPA launched a special sociological survey. The study methodology was based on the approaches of the International Men and Gender Equity Survey (IMАGES) adjusted to the local socio-cultural context. The survey topics covered men’s experience in childhood and their marital relationships, division of powers in households and attitudes to parenthood, perceptions of the gender norms, awareness on gendersensitive legislation and attitudes to gender-based violence