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Social work as an institutionalized profession aims to promote and defend human rights and social justice regardless of gender, sexual orientation and other grounds. Rooted in Christianity, it is partly performed by religious organizations and religious people. Consequently, conservative values may orient the profession, thus conflicting with the rights of lesbians and gays. The aim of the article is to present the risks of social worker’s oppressive action toward same‑sex parents, and to suggest possibilities how to avoid such ethical misconduct. First, we present a dilemma of social work arising from the tension between ethical principles of equality and non‑discrimination on the one hand and conservative norms on the other hand. Then, we introduce individual oppressive tendencies which are manifested in the discourse “on homosexuality” in Czech social work and how these may transform into social worker’s oppressive action. Finally, we propose practical suggestions that can support anti‑oppressive social work in the Czech Republic.
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This article presents a case study of the Slovak feminist organisation ASPEKT, the oldest and one of the most significant advocates of gender equality in the region. While challenging the theoretical presumption that new media and digital technologies are detaching us from our historical and socio-political context and thereby leading to greater homogenisation, it focuses on the way in which the organisation approaches and makes sense of these new platforms and tools in relation to their specific history and political beliefs. It elaborate on topics such as the tension between the effort to remain creative and independent in times of increasing bureaucratisation of funding opportunities, or making full use of the potential of new online platforms yet staying true to one’s original standards and values. It aims to highlight the following: That even though digital technologies are a global phenomenon which – organisationally and symbolically speaking – transcend time and space, the way we approach digital technologies and new media, the meaning and potential we ascribe to them, is culturally and historically specific.
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Housework has always been one of the main issues of feminist debates. The aim of the article is to show how the housewife became the subject of political debate. The article focuses on the feminist and political discourse surrounding household chores in post-war Czechoslovakia (1945–1947). Drawing on an analysis of the journal Our Household (Naše domácnost) and discussions in parliament, we argue that after WWII the women’s movement and the National Socialists called for the recognition of domestic work as equal to occupations outside the home. This article contributes to the debates about the recognition of housework by showing how the issue of housework was addressed in a particular period of Czech history and what strategies were employed to improve the representation of household chores and the position of housewives in society. recognition of housework, housewife
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This study deals with the involvement of female students in economic, historical and ‚‘racial‘‘ scholarly tasks at the Sudeten German Institute for Research on Provincial Characteristics and Folkways (Sudetendeutsche Anstalt für Landes- und Volksforschung, SALV) in Liberec (Reichenberg, which at that time was in the Reichsgau Sudetenland/Sudetengau) under Dr. Margarete Klante between 1942 and 1944. The students performed their wartime duties (Kriegspfl icht) for the Reich during their holiday deployment (Ferieneinsatz).
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The paper focuses on the social situation and social practices of female care migrants (at the age of 50 and above) from the South Moravia (the region of Mikulov, Břeclav) who migrate for work to Austria as domestic workers-caregivers for seniors at regular intervals (circular migration). The main aim of the text is to argue that translocal female migrants paradoxically perceive their labour migration as a specific form of emancipation, despite the fact that they work in the so-called live-in-service jobs (where they live and work in private households) and often experience indignity. While in Austria they work in gendered and very demanding jobs with low wages, circular care migration provides them with the possibility to extend their gender power in the transforming Czech society. There is thus a paradox in that while they are marginalized in Austria, they are empowered on the Czech side of the border. This is achieved through paid reproductive work and better access to income, which leads to personal consumption based on their own interests and overall personal benefit. Special attention is paid to new forms of translocal care chains and new forms of these women’s partner cohabitation (living apart together).
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The study examines the experiences of contemporary older Czech men specifically in their role as grandfathers. Despite the great body of research devoted to the issues of grandparenthood, most attention, both locally and internationally, has been given to women and grandmotherhood. To overcome this shortcoming, we present findings based on eleven qualitative interviews conducted with men with diverse grandparenting experiences and performing various forms of caring practices. Grandparenting is a negotiated, relational, and highly gendered social role, which we explored in our research through our respondents’ narratives focused on everydayness and memories of their own experience as a grandchild. Based on their self-reflective narratives we were able to describe the performative potential of grandparenting and define four types of activities through which grandfather roles take shape. On this basis we were also able to describe the spatio-temporal aspects of these practices, which proved to be crucial for understanding of gender issues of grandfatherhood. Although the narratives of the participants in our research reflect an active approach to fulfilling the grandparenting role, their caring practices are still predominantly structured in a gender-stereotyped way. In terms of theory, our research results build on and seek to contribute to one of the most influential theoretical models of grandfathers’ involvement proposed by Bates and Taylor.
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The author in her study named Levandulo prevúnná... (Notes to the Image of Woman in the Texts of Old Slovak Literature) deals with the literary adaptation of the image of woman in Old Slovak literature in such form as it was preserved in Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque writings. It focuses on relevant works of medieval chronicles and legends, Renaissance Humanist poetry in Latin, Slovak Renaissance love and historical poetry and Renaissance drama, Baroque poetry, prose and drama. The study shows that the image of woman in Old Slovak literature shifts in Renaissance from its original simple and modest form of a saint and a noblewoman to a more colorful range, which peaks in Baroque literature, where we can find a noblewoman, a religious woman, but also a simple woman or a woman of loose morals.
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This text explores the affective politics of race and disability that underpin the post-socialist developments in the Czech Republic. Firstly, I interrogate “mental retardation”, as a discursive and material practice of differentiating human life according to presumed value. To make the argument, the text follows practices of “mental retardation” through several discursive and material locations: cultural imaginations of “ferality”, controversy spiked by the use of “protective”/“cage” beds in institutional care and the concept of lege artis, i.e. the principle of necessary and (medically) possible care. Travelling through these locations, I argue, secondly, that racialised and ableist notions of worthy human life have been central to the post-socialist affective politics of abandonment. In other words, the text shows how the politics of re-negotiated belonging and attachment to liberal democracy in the post-socialist Czech Republic were predicated upon structures of abandonment and the de/valuation of disabled and racialised lives. And lastly, the text lays out the legacies of colonial domination even in the contemporary intersectional comminglings of race and disability as it is echoed in the current practices of “mental retardation”.
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Vietnamese immigrant parents in the Czech Republic often hire Czech nannies for their children. The nannies are usually recently retired women who welcome the opportunity for daily (paid) activity. Close daily contact between a nanny and a child leads to the formation of kinship ties: the nanny becomes the child’s grandmother, and the cared-for child becomes the nanny’s grandchild. Drawing on in-depth interviews the author examines these intergenerational relationships and focuses on how the nannies and the children understand these relationships in the context of their biographies. To this end the author poses two questions: How does the kinning process between nanny and child occur? What is the meaning of the established kinship ties for the Czech grandmothers and their Vietnamese grandchildren? The main argumentation is based on the assumption that children need grandmothers and women need to be grandmothers. The author argues that both of these needs are fulfilled in the daily practice of caregiving and thereby in the formation of strong emotional ties that in many respects override the biogenetic ties. In this particular case study, paid caregiving is found to give rise to new kinds of kinship relations and to enable women and children to be active parts of an intergenerational relationship. The unique case of ties between migrant families and Czech/native-born women also serves as a potential way of reconceptualising grandparenthood, grandchildhood, and intergenerational relationships.
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During the last couple of decades, paid childcare has become one of the central issues of feminist research. Agencies mediating childcare are a relatively new actor in childcare arrangements in the Czech Republic. This article argues that these agencies do not fill a gap in the market by offering childcare. Far from providing simple supply that reacts to a market demand, the agencies create the demand for specific care. Drawing upon qualitative research conducted with owners of these agencies, the text looks into the ways in which childcare is constructed. The issues of qualified, specialized, and professionalized care are discussed. The article aims to show that childcare in the agencies is deconstructed as a natural female activity and is reconstructed as a gendered activity requiring particular skills that are subjected to professional screening.
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The present article conveys a psychoanalytic Freudian and Lacanian examination of the feminine and masculine mourning in Eugene O’Neill’s 1940 modern tragedy Long Day’s Journey into Night. I will show that the work of mourning in this playis both feminine and masculine, but with a particular emphasis on the feminine mourning and, secondly, on the autobiographical aspect of the Tyrone/ O’Neill family. Whereas for the feminine character Mary Tyrone the darkness of her psyche appears within the sickness of the body and her mourning is repeated in a history of histerisation, Edmund Tyrone, the playwright’s alter ego and a seagull figure in the modern theatre, longs for death and he mourns nothing else but his own self.
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The mobility of scientists that is the subject of this article is part of the broad scale of flows of people, objects, and knowledge in the contemporary world. These flows occur in multiple ways: from relocation and settlement in another country, to everyday pendulating mobility back and forth across boarders. In this article, the author is concerned with academic mobility and particularly mobility tied to long term post doctoral fellowships. She sets out to explore the gender dimension of long term academic mobility and observe how scientists organise their professional and personal lives around movement between academic institutions. She argues that mobility at this stage of the academic trajectory involves the production of new (re)configurations of partnerships, while at the same time the fact of being in a partnership is constitutive for establishing an academic career.
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In this paper we explore the impact of the economic recession of 2008 on gender inequality in the labour force in Central and Eastern European countries. We argue that job and occupational segregation protected women’s employment more than men’s in the CEE region as well, but unlike in more developed capitalist economies, women’s level of labour force participation declined and their rates of poverty increased during the crisis years. We also explore gender differences in opinions on the impact of the recession on people’s job satisfaction. For our analysis we use published data from EUROSTAT and our own calculations from EU SILC and ESS 2010.
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This article analyses anti-obesity discourse in post-war Czechoslovakia, particularly in the country’s late socialist period. The article conceives of the discourse on obesity as a tool of biopolitical, rather than totalitarian, power, examining the ways expert knowledge, power, and morality worked together to produce a socialist subject. On the first level, it analyses the expert anti-obesity discourse as an example of the expertisation of public discourse in socialist Czechoslovakia. Second, it shows the construction of obesity in contrast to bodily ability, and the stigmatisation of the ‘fat’ body. On the last level, the article focuses on the gendered aspects of the discourse and demonstrates the ways in which the anti-obesity campaign supported the heteronormative framework of late socialism. By examining expert and media discourses, the article argues that the campaign against obesity served as a means to construct a proper socialist body and induce a moral panic about the state of socialism.
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Western moral and political theorists have recently devoted considerable attention to the perceived victimisation of women by non -western cultures. In this paper, the author argues that conceiving injustice to poor women in poor countries primarily as a matter of their oppression by illiberal cultures presents an understanding of their situation that is crucially incomplete. This incomplete understanding distorts Western theorists’ comprehension of our moral relationship to women elsewhere in the world and so of our theoretical task. It also impoverishes our assumptions about the intercultural dialogue necessary to promote global justice for women.
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The choice for the title of our research suggests thematic and interpretative directions for the novel Lepa Petra. We have decided on a phenomenological analysis of space in the novel and an appreciation of its potential cultural meanings, different psychological connections, as well as the archetypes associated with them. From the geography and the chronotope of the road, we direct the reading of these parts of the text to those which reveal gender marking, thus the novel can be read, through the character of the protagonist Petra, as an example of the permeation of different ways of presenting a woman.
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In the article the authors investigate the transformation of typical images of women leaders in Soviet cinema. Until the end of the Stalin era, politicized images of women leaders were created, which were mainly intended to justify state power and the course of leaders, who are not inferior to men in their strong-willed and business qualities, appeared during the years of the ―thaw‖ when the ideological pressure of state power on art became less strong. Women are depicted as independent and capable of achieving everything on their own. In the films of this period the party — as a social force — is absent. And finally, the 70s manifested the very patriarchal attitudes that Soviet cinema fought throughout its entire existence: the female leader began to be portrayed as an inferior person. The directors of this period promote the idea that the true essence of a woman is not career-oriented. For a woman, first of all, marriage and family should be the most important ideas and values. Moreover, ideally any woman should share the values and attitudes of the man she is going to marry. Such a metamorphosis was a sign of the decomposition of the Soviet system and the development of bourgeois relations, giving rise to the return of patriarchal views to Soviet society.
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On the base of contemporary scientific works the image evolution of Muslim woman and her social and low status are analyzed.
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We studied the evolution of reproductive behavior of rural women cohorts in Krasnoyarsk Territory in the period of final birth rate modernization (1960—1980) in the context of the transformation of rural population to the decrease of birth rate
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