{"title":"Women and nationalism in Poland: Defending the dignity of Polish women","authors":"Aleksandra Sygnowska","doi":"10.21825/digest.84672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.84672","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to explain the role of women involved in right-wing political parties and explore how women themselves legitimise the politics of exclusion through their political involvement. Its main assumption is that, on the one hand, Polish women in politics eagerly benefit from the feminist legacy in their own political careers, and, on the other, as representatives of right-wing political parties with traditionally antifeminist agenda, they significantly contribute to the radicalisation of politics.To show the discursive intersections of gender and nationalism and their impact on the public discourse, I analyse narrative strategies applied by Polish right-wing female politicians in their public, media, and parliamentary appearances. I claim that, having access to and control over public discourse, Polish right-wing female politicians play a prominent role in social mobilisation and, thereby, make an important contribution to the nationalist surge that sweeps Poland.","PeriodicalId":200532,"journal":{"name":"DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121326887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The brotherhood of hate: Hyper-masculinity, same-sex desire and far-right identity in Brotherhood","authors":"Paris Cameron-Gardos, Paris Cameron-Gardos","doi":"10.21825/digest.81851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.81851","url":null,"abstract":"The narrative of Danish director Nicolo Donato’s 2009 film, Brotherhood, demonstrates how both the coming out and outing of a gay Neo-Nazi creates dramatic moments of transformation within the film’s storyline. As a result, the audience has to confront the representation of unstable and asymmetrical acts of sexual, social, and political identification. These moments of identification involve acts of violence and betrayal that lead to the creation of a fluid sexual identity on screen. This article examines the choices of the characters within the film and the homosocial world that those characters purposely construct. In order to carry out that examination, key aspects of contemporary Danish political culture are assessed with a view to better understand the ascendency of the far right, anti-migration rhetoric, and the centrality of that political culture within the stories that are told in Brotherhood. The collisions within the Neo-Nazi group over what defines hyper-masculinity, family, violence against migrants, and same-sex desire are best observed through an interdisciplinary analysis that combines film, queer, and sociological research. In the film, a violent, hyper-masculine Neo-Nazi authors a coming-out moment that is both unique and tragic. This assessment of the collisions between homosociality and homoeroticism in the lives of these men creates space for the important and productive analytical deconstruction of hyper-masculinity in a fictionalized Danish far-right political movement.","PeriodicalId":200532,"journal":{"name":"DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies","volume":"128 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126266517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Where are the equal rights?’ Far-right women challenging gender equality and human rights in Greece","authors":"Marianthi Anastasiadou","doi":"10.21825/digest.81849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.81849","url":null,"abstract":"Across Europe, far-right groups balance between contradictory positions on gender equality, invoking women’s rights to claim European cultural superiority over imagined patriarchal Muslim immigrants while rejecting gender rights as threatening the nation. Using discourse analysis of online party media and parliamentary speeches, we explore intersections of gender and race in Greek neo-Nazi women’s public positioning towards gender equality, showing how these seemingly contradictory positions align well with the party’s political vision. At a moment of pervasive racist uses of feminist discourse (Farris 2017; Hark & Villa 2017), Golden Dawn women supported an antifeminist position that re-signifies ‘women’s rights’ as a racial issue, in order to construct political enemies and dismantle equality projects. By representing gender violence – as in debates on the Istanbul Convention – as exclusively committed by the ‘non-white’‘Muslim’male, and by rejecting ‘artificially constructed’ equality rights in favor of ‘natural’ rights, they claimed Golden Dawn as the only political actor genuinely promoting women’s welfare.","PeriodicalId":200532,"journal":{"name":"DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120894554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Resistant vulnerability: Voices of feminist dissent from the Panjabi minority in Italy","authors":"Sara Bonfanti","doi":"10.21825/digest.84673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.84673","url":null,"abstract":"Set in Brescia, an Italian city with a sizeable Indo-Pakistani minority, this article considers the media panic that honor killings raised and echoed nationwide since 2006. Based on extensive ethnographic work, the article draws from participant observation and personal narratives shared with Panjabi locals to investigate such ‘cultural crimes’, pondering which status of victim is (self-)ascribed to ‘Brown immigrant’ women. While the remnants of a Mediterranean culture of ‘honor-and-shame’ is almost forgotten today in the country, the repressive control that South Asian women seem to endure within their domestic environments saw the simultaneous condemnation from different social actors. As racialized Islamophobia escalates, the protection of migrant/ethnic women from honour-related violence (HRV) becomes more complex: who is entitled to ‘defend’ them? When and where can these women raise their own voices? The intersectional resistance that Panjabi women in Italy oppose against the objectification inflicted on them by family, community and public discourses (liberal feminist, multicultural or chauvinist) can barely be heard. Concurring with critical literature on HRV, this article argues to critically interrogate the idea of culture as a motivation for violence against minority women but also recognizes the pervasiveness of such narrative in the strenuous efforts waged by the same subjects in voicing their distress.","PeriodicalId":200532,"journal":{"name":"DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116799177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
An Van Raemdonck, Katja Kahlina, Aleksandra Sygnowska
{"title":"Editorial - Paradoxes in the Far Right’s gender and sexuality politics: Nationalism, Islamophobia and multiple positionings on gender","authors":"An Van Raemdonck, Katja Kahlina, Aleksandra Sygnowska","doi":"10.21825/digest.85526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.85526","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last decades, issues related to gender and sexuality came to the center of public and political debates in Europe. Right-wing parties and actors across Europe are gaining popularity while increasingly drawing on gender and sexuality in their anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric (e.g. Mayer, Ajanovic and Sauer 2014, Meret and Siim 2013). This Special Issue results from an international workshop organised by the Network for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality (NAGS), part of the European Association of SocialAnthropologists (EASA), and held at VU University Amsterdam in December 2019. The workshop interrogated entanglements of anti-migration and gender discourses, including anti-gender movements across Europe. Its overall aim was to discuss different ‘uses and abuses of gender’ in relation to migration and Islamophobia as deployed by right-wing discourse (Scott 2013). ","PeriodicalId":200532,"journal":{"name":"DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130393579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Home and belonging: African women in 'crisis' Greece","authors":"Viki Zaphiriou-Zarifi","doi":"10.21825/digest.81854","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.81854","url":null,"abstract":"In a Greek context in which full integration depends upon looking and sounding ‘native’, African women are made hyper-visible in discourses of the Other. Although the right to mobility is much emphasized in debates about migration, it appears to be the rooting or ‘being at home-ness’ of migrants that is most controversial. In both public discourse and personal encounters, these women are reminded daily that they are perceived as not ‘at home’. The widespread perception of them as liminal – at best temporary guests, at worst intruders who do not belong – appears to infuse home-making activities with even greater significance. In this paper, I explore home as a fluid yet meaning-ful and meaning-making idea and practice from the women’s own perspectives; the stories and practices through which a location becomes (or fails to become) a home; and, the communal activities through which women performatively construct, and claim, a sense of belonging.","PeriodicalId":200532,"journal":{"name":"DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131559253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Katrien De Graeve, Anja Meulenbelt, Ryan Backer, Sara De Vuyst, Katrien Jacobs, A. Swinnen
{"title":"Ageivism Roundtable","authors":"Katrien De Graeve, Anja Meulenbelt, Ryan Backer, Sara De Vuyst, Katrien Jacobs, A. Swinnen","doi":"10.21825/digest.84823","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.84823","url":null,"abstract":"DiGeSt 9(1) General Issue - Ageivism Roundtable","PeriodicalId":200532,"journal":{"name":"DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127737898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women’s (non)participation in sports: Gendered attitudes, biopolitics, and perceptions of body and sports in Iran","authors":"Ladan Rahbari","doi":"10.21825/digest.81846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.81846","url":null,"abstract":"Women’s lower participation in male-dominated sports in Iran is perceived to be caused by religious and cultural forces. This article uses feminist scholarship to investigate whether belief in Islam plays a central role in forming women’s perceptions of sports participation and gender. Based on interviews with twenty-six women participants, the study reveals that most women used essentialist arguments that attributed muscularity, strength, and excessive size to men, and delicateness, beauty, and thinness to women. Drawing on feminist perspectives on body politics and discipline, women’s attitudes and explanations for (non)participation in sports are discussed. Discourses of appropriate sexuality, femininity, and moral gendered embodiment played roles in these explanations. Direct references by the participants to modesty and gender norms and Islamic teachings show that the influences of religious beliefs and prescriptions remained present but peripheral in explanations of gendered aspects of physical activity and sports participation.","PeriodicalId":200532,"journal":{"name":"DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114176892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sexuality and Desire on the dance floor: A Queer Post-structuralist approach on Reclaiming Erotic Dances","authors":"Nina Poels","doi":"10.21825/digest.81843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.81843","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I intend to examine the rising popularity of erotic dances as a leisure activity in Western societies and question what exactly it is these dancers are reclaiming when using a discourse about sexual liberation and empowerment. In order to address the complexity of gender, sexuality and performance this study uses a queer post-structuralist analysis and an ethnographic methodology when studying erotic dances. On the basis of observations and in-depth interviews with male and female students and instructors, this study argues that writing off erotic dance solely as a hype within the trend to commercialise sexuality, is ignoring the useful and subversive ways in which these erotic dancers are investigating the production of their sexed bodies to disrupt and deconstruct normative ideas about sexuality and gender.","PeriodicalId":200532,"journal":{"name":"DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130361510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Artful Care, Careful Art. Women’s Art in times of Capitalism’s Care Crisis. : Barbara Raes’s Zon dag kind and Els Dietvorst’s Field Guide.","authors":"Sarah De Mul","doi":"10.21825/digest.81848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.81848","url":null,"abstract":"Cultural approaches to burnout culture, as I will argue in this essay, have much to gain from these recent feminist critical theorisations and artistic imaginations of care. The suggestion is indeed to reframe the debate on the so-called ‘burn-out society’ as a debate on capitalism’s care crisis in order to bring into the discussion the valuable perspectives offered by feminist theorizations and artistic imaginations, which have thus far been largely sidelined, or not properly been considered. \u0000This essay, then, signals the start of a proposition that explores how concepts of care can be developed, troubled and enhanced through an engagement with women’s art works and, simultaneously, how certain art works can be re-thought and re-imagined through a dialogue with care ethics as an alternative mode to the governing neoliberal technologies of self. It builds on recent feminist theorizations of care so as to explore these from the perspective of contemporary women’s art. In my analysis of two contemporary women’s imaginations of art as a matter of care, Zon dag kind by Barbara Raes and Fieldguide by Els Dietvorst, I hope to show, that in their own idiosyncratic way, Raes and Dietvorst explore different ways in which art can act as a matter of care that can bind together individuals and communities where larger institutions or governments fail to intervene. In so doing, Raes and Dietvorst break down conventional artistic boundaries and the conventions of the performing and visual arts respectively in order to carry out experiments in sociability which help us imagine caring subjects and a sense of community, which can arguably be seen as an important part of the answer to the self-sufficient entrepreneurial individual in our postmodern society, in particular, to his or her total exhaustion and other related mental and affective states. ","PeriodicalId":200532,"journal":{"name":"DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128595266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}