Browsing by Subject "Women"

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A qualitative analysis of gender differences in the experience of depressive symptoms
(Texas Tech University, 1996-08) Daughtry, Donald W.
It is well established that adult women as compared to men are over-represented regarding depressive symptoms and unipolar depression by a ratio of approximately 2 to 1. This phenomena is consistent even when factors such as ethnicity, levels of income, education, and occupation are controlled. This investigation is phenomenologically focused, and aimed at the identification and exploration of latent constructs salient to adult women's and men's organization and expression of depressive symptoms. It employs a two-study research design that blends qualitative and quantitative research strategies. In Study One, an alternative research methodology, concept mapping, was used to elicit and graphically represent participants' perceptions of depressive experience. Participants in Study One were coTTTTunity college students (n = 59). Qualitative data reduction was also employed to derive a depressive symptom inventory based on these perceptions. In Study Two, this questionnaire was administered to a larger sample (n = 393) of carmunity college students. Participants in both studies were also administered the CES-D and the PAQ. Stepwise discriminate function and regression analysis were employed to determine the variation of Study Two participant responses regarding gender, level of depressive symptoms, and gender role identification. Evidence from the first study suggests that adult women and men differ regarding their conceptual organization of depressive symptoms. It seems that adult women's depressive experiences were arrayed along dimensions of intrapersonal/interpersonal difficulties and emotional constrictionemotional expression. Men's experiences of depressive symptcms seemed arrayed along the dimensions of social stress-social isolation and internal chaos-lack of confidence. Evidence from the second study suggests that at least some of the concept mapping clusters may generalize to a separate sample. Experiences of vegetative-negative physical appraisal contributed most significantly to the correct classification of adult women by gender. Experiences of burdened-paranoid contributed most significantly to the correct classification of men by gender. Results from the second study also suggest that experiences of despair were most related to adult women's level of depressive symptoms, while experiences of unhappmess were most related to men's symptom level. Results from the second study showed little support for the influence of gender role identification on participants expression of depressive symptomatology.
A time for reform: the woman suffrage campaign in rural Texas, 1914-1919
(2009-06-02) Motl, Kevin Conrad
This dissertation offers a new narrative for the local woman suffrage movement in nine rural counties in Texas. I argue that, unlike cities, where women used dense organizational networks to create a coherent suffrage movement, conservatism inherent in rural Texas denied suffrage advocates the means to achieve similar objectives. Rural women nevertheless used the suffrage campaign to articulate feminist sensibilities, thereby reflecting a process of modernization ongoing among American women. Rural suffrage advocates faced unique obstacles, including the political influence of James E. Ferguson, who served as Governor for almost two administrations. Through Ferguson's singular personality, a propaganda campaign that specifically targeted rural voters, and Ferguson's own tabloid Ferguson Forum, rural voters found themselves constantly bombarded by messages about how they should view questions of reform in their state. The organizational culture that sustained suffrage organizations in urban Texas failed to do so in rural Texas. Concerned for their status, rural women scorned activism and those who pursued it. Absent an organized campaign, the success of suffrage initiatives in rural Texas depended on locally unique circumstances. Key factors included demographic trends, economics, local politics, and the influence of frontier cultural dynamics. The tactics and rhetoric employed by rural suffragists in Texas generally reflected those used by suffragists nationwide. While rural suffragists mustered arguments grounded in natural and constitutional rights, rural voters responded more to the claim that votes projected woman's feminine virtue into public life, which accommodated prevailing attitudes about woman's place. The First World War supplied rural suffragists with patriotic rhetoric that resonated powerfully with Texans. Rural Texas women successfully reframed public dialogue about women's roles, articulating feminist ideas through their work. Unlike rural clubwomen, suffragists pursued the ballot as a means to improve the status of all women. Feminist ideas increasingly obtained with women in visible leadership, and eventually reached all rural women, as countless hundreds registered to vote, and still more educated themselves on political issues. In doing so, rural women in Texas joined women across America in challenging the limits of domesticity and envisioning a fuller role for women in public life.
A typology of south Korean female apparel consumers
(Texas Tech University, 1995-05) Hlavaty, Valerie T.
As markets become saturated and retail concepts change, American apparel firms are looking beyond domestic borders for new markets. Considering South Korea is a fast growing world economy and South Koreans have adopted westem fashion, South Korea should be a viable market for American apparel. The purposes of this study were to segment South Korean female apparel consumers; profile the consumers; assess relationships between the sample's sociodemographics and degree of fashion opinion leadership and emphasis on life style characteristics; and examine the relationships between the respondents' degree of fashion opmion leadership and emphasis placed on life style characteristics. Data were obtained in a previous study from a convenience sample consisting of 271 South Korean women residing in four cUies: Seoul, Pusan, Kwangju, and Taejeon. The questionnaUe used in the prior study included five scales: Fashion Opinion Leadership, Life Style Characteristics, Fiber Preferences, Store Selection Attributes, and Clothing Purchase Influences. Other questions addressed sociodemographics and selected apparel shopping attitudes. Statistical procedures employed to analyze data were cluster analysis, multivariate analysis of variance, oneway analysis of variance, two-way analysis of variance, and chi-square test of independence.
"A Victorious Struggle:" Confederate Women Writers Commemorate the Civil War, 1860-1945
Ballard, Crystal N.
Academe Maid Possible: The Lived Experiences of Six Women Employed as Custodial Workers at a Research Extensive University Located in the Southwest
(2013-03-14) Petitt, Becky
This qualitative study sought to understand the ways classism, as it intersects with racism and sexism, affects how low wage-earning women negotiate their work world in the academy and the way the academy functions to create, maintain, and reproduce the context within which oppression is able to emerge. Field research took place at State University, a pseudonym for a Land Grant, Research Extensive institution located in the Southwest. Through the lenses of critical theory and critical feminist theory the stories of six women employed as custodial workers, nine administrators employed at State University, and two State University employees involved in the community's Living Wage initiative, were analyzed. The lives of women employed as custodial workers are largely unremarked and undocumented, and the ways in which their work serves to make the academy possible have been unacknowledged. This study found that the job of cleaning in the traditional higher education environment is laced with challenges. The nature of the academy, the ethos and operation of State University, and the interlocking systems of classism, racism and sexism fuse together arrangements of power that simultaneously obliterate and render these women agonizingly visible through systems of oppression. In an environment where honor is conferred upon "the educated," the custodial participants, whose opportunities were limited due to their social locations, exist on the border of the academy. Their marginality is reinforced daily, as they are in constant contact with higher-status individuals who perform raced, classed, and gendered behaviors that are woven into the fabric of our society. The study also found that the custodial participants and the university administrators are locked in a relationship of mutual distrust. State University administrators do not trust the custodians and the custodians do not trust State University administrators. Furthermore, existing at both the literal and metaphorical "bottom" of the organization, custodians are among the first to feel the impact of major institutional shifts, such as increases in student and faculty bodies, and large-scale economic recovery initiatives. Additionally, I reconceptualize the notion of "borrowed power" to name the impermanence of the authority which Black custodial supervisors, and people of color in general, hold in our racialized society. Finally, the data decidedly point to White male students as primary actors and architects of the overtly hostile work environment within which the women work. The custodial participants negotiate these challenges with facility. They find creative ways to resist and to negotiate the obstacles they face. Unfortunately, they also occasionally internalize negative messages and are complicit in their marginality. Administrators who participated in the study were aware of these conditions, but remained silent on the issue of resolution. Through various intentional (if unconscious) State University policies, practices, rules, norms, behaviors, and structures that sometimes act in insidious, hidden ways, the dominant groups? interests continue to be pursued while the interests, needs, and even the very presence of marginal members is ignored. Thus, systems of domination and subordination are produced, reproduced, validated, and institutionalized in the academy. This process is presented in a Conceptual Map of How Systems of Oppression Flourish and are Re/produced in the Academy. The findings of this study contribute to existing bodies of knowledge that discuss racial, gender, and economic inequality. Yet it opens new lines of inquiry into the overlapping conditions of gender, racial, and economic marginality as they impact the lives of women custodial workers in the academy. The findings issue a clarion call for institutions of higher education, one of our nation?s longstanding and respected foci of social change, to tap into its available expertise to end oppression, beginning in its own "backyard."
Advertising to female runners : a comparative evaluation of Nike and Brooks Running, Inc. in Runner's world magazine
(2012-08) Martin, Elizabeth Jane; Eastin, Matthew S.; Stout, Patricia A.
This research report aims to examine and evaluate the ways in which two leading running product companies, Nike and Brooks Running, Inc., target female runners in the context of Runner’s World magazine (the world’s leading running-related magazine). It presents relevant past research, theories and methodologies and applies them to the analysis. From the analysis and comparisons, a collection of best practice recommendations are determined in order to inform and advise any company’s future advertising efforts directed at female runners.
Affecting violence : narratives of Los feminicidios and their ethical and political reception
(2012-12) Huerta Moreno, Lydia Cristina; Robbins, Jill, 1962-; Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Héctor, 1962-; Arroyo, Jossianna; Chapelle-Wojciehowski, Hannah; Ravelo-Blancas, Patricia; Pia Lara, Maria
In Mexico there is an increasing lack of engagement of the Mexican government and its citizens towards resolving violence. In the 20th century alone events such as the Revolution of 1910, La Guerra Cristera, La Guerra Sucia, and most recently Los Feminicidios and Calderon’s War on Drugs are representative of an ethos of violence withstood and inflicted by Mexicans towards women, men, youth, and marginalized groups. This dissertation examines Los Feminicidios in Ciudad Juarez and the cultural production surrounding them: chronicles, novels, documentaries and films. In it I draw on Aristotle’s influential Nicomachean Ethics, Victoria Camps’ El gobierno de las emociones (2011), María Pía Lara’s Narrating Evil (2007), Vittorio Gallese’s and other scientists’ research on neuroscience empathy and neurohumanism, and socio-political essays in order to theorize how a pathos-infused understanding of ethos might engage a reading and viewing public in what has become a discourse about violence determined by a sense of fatalism. Specifically, I argue that narrative and its interpretations play a significant role in people’s emotional engagement and subsequent cognitive processes. I stress the importance of creating an approach that considers both pathos and logos as a way of understanding this ethos of violence. I argue that by combining pathos and logos in the analysis of a cultural text, we can break through the theoretical impasse, which thus far has resulted in exceptionalisms and has been limited to categorizing as evil the social and political mechanisms that may cause this violence.
American deaf women historiography : the most silent minority
(2011-12) Nathanson, Deborah Anne 1974-; Jones, Jacqueline, 1948-
The development and current state of the historical perspective of American Deaf women is outlined in the report. Initially this paper reviews the historical study of people with disabilities and for the American Deaf. This paper concludes with a review of the small but significant selections of historical scholarship related directly to American Deaf women along with recommendations to preserve the rich and colorful Deaf-oriented heritage; especially of the women.
An exploration of role-related identity in India-born Indian women living in the United States and Anglo-American women
(Texas Tech University, 2002-08) Ramaswamy, Mangala G
The current study examined the differences in role-related identity between India-born Indian women living in the U.S. and the Anglo-American women. Identity patterns between the two groups of women were observed in the family (wife, mother), work, and homemaking roles. Erikson's psychosocial theory and the individualistic/collectivistic ideologies seen in the two groups of women form the framework for the present study. The present research seeks to explore the extent to which these cultural differences might be reflected in the role-related identities of the two groups of women. The sample consisted of 30 India-born Indian women living in the U.S. and 30 Anglo-American women. All respondents were married. The respondents completed a questionnaire consisting of demographic information after which a lengthy interview based on women's lives and how they carried out the important roles in their lives were conducted. Interviews were transcribed at a later time and rated by two trained raters. Interviews were rated for salience and flexibility dimensions. Within the salience dimension, interview responses regarding each role were rated for motivation, affect, effect on self-evaluation, and time commitment. Past and present/future flexibility responses within each role were rated for reflectiveness and behavioral change. For the current research only motivation (degree of importance and reasons for involvement in the role) and affect (degree of affect and type of affect) within the salience dimension was analyzed for the wife, mother, worker and homemaker roles. The results indicate similarities and differences between the two groups of women. Differences between the two groups of women were observed in the degree of affect associated with the wife role and reasons for involvement and type of affect associated with the mother role. Differences between the two groups of women were also observed in their degree of importance to the work role, reasons for involvement in the worker role, and the degree of importance to the homemaking role. Similarities were observed in the degree of importance associated to the wife and mother roles, degree of affect associated with the mother, worker, and homemaker roles, reasons for involvement associated with the wife role, types of affect associated with the wife, worker, and homemaker roles, and reasons for involvement in the homemaker role.
An exploratory investigation of the beliefs, behaviors, and performance of women in college algebra in a rural community college
Hill, Bobbie Jo Zowarka
Aspirations and Experiences of West Texas Superintendent Certified Women
(2010-12) Duwe, Karan; Mendez-Morse, Sylvia; Klinker, JoAnn F.; Valle, Fernando
Aspirations and Experiences of West Texas Superintendent Certified Women Abstract The purpose of this phenomenological inquiry is to discover the common experiences of women school administrators that influence and hinder their aspirations of becoming school district superintendents. This qualitative study examines the aspirations and experiences of superintendent certified women in West Texas. It is framed in Shakeshaft’s Stages of Research on Women in Administration. Research questions guiding this study were: 1. What specific experiences and motivations influenced aspiring female administrators to attain certification for superintendency? 2. What is happening to qualified women school administrators that cause them not to pursue a superintendent position? The research design is qualitative using in-depth interviews and an online discussion forum so the participants could respond to each other. Eight women were selected to participate in the study with half having applied for a superintendent position. Results show that women attain their superintendent certification (1) out of convenience, adding the courses to the end of their principal certification program, (2) to prepare themselves for any opportunities they may encounter in the future and (3) for professional development. Factors that cause the women to lose their aspirations are (1) lack of mobility, (2) lack of access to information, (3) gender discrimination, (4) lack of mentoring, (5) school boards that won’t consider women and (6) the ‘Good Ole Boy Network’. This study adds to the knowledge concerning the lack of female superintendents and the factors that cause women who have attained superintendent certification not to pursue that position. It contributes to the data in Shakeshaft’s stage 4 in which women are studied on their own terms and stage 5 in which women challenge theory. This study also contributes to the preparation of women to become superintendents by revealing experiences and perceptions of other women and adding to new theoretical perspectives of educational leadership that includes both men’s and women’s experiences.
The baby will come, the ring can wait : differences between married and unmarried first-time mothers in Chile
(2010-12) Salinas, Viviana; Potter, Joseph E.; Osborne, Cynthia; Hopkins, Kristine L.; Regnerus, Mark D.; Roberts, Bryan R.
The proportion of children born outside of marriage in Chile increased from 15.9 percent in 1960 to 64.6 percent in 2008. Similar increases have been taken elsewhere as indicative of a Second Demographic Transition (SDT). In this dissertation, I study differences between married and unmarried mothers in Chile and the reasons why such a large proportion of children are born outside of marriage, with the goal of understanding whether the demographic changes we are observing in the country are part of a global movement towards the SDT. The data comes from a postpartum survey implemented in Santiago, the capital city. I analyze differences between women according to the family arrangement they live in, including married women in nuclear households, married women in extended households, cohabiters in nuclear households, cohabiters in extended households, visiting mothers, and single mothers. I consider women’s socioeconomic wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, social support, attitudes and values, and reproductive health. The results show large demographic and socioeconomic differences, marking the socioeconomic advantage of married women in nuclear households, who are the oldest, and the disadvantage of cohabiters in extended households, visiting and single mothers, who are the youngest women in the sample. Married women in extended households and cohabiters in nuclear households are between these two poles. Differences in emotional wellbeing exist, benefiting married women in nuclear households, but they are not so large. Differences in social support continue delineating married women in nuclear households as a privileged group, but visiting mothers appear as a highly supported group too. There are not large differences in attitudes and values, as most women continue holding conservative attitudes on family issues, and most unmarried mothers plan to marry. Differences in reproductive health are large, showing that unplanned births and contraceptive failure are high in the underprivileged and youngest groups. Unmarried women seem to accept their pregnancies with no pressure to marry, and to give priority to other goals, such as their careers and homeownership, before the wedding, which they do not discard for the future. Under these circumstances, it is hard to interpret recent demographic changes in Chile as a SDT.
The balance of souls : self-making and mental wellness in the lives of ageing black women in Brazil
(2010-05) Henery, Celeste Sian; Vargas, João Helion Costa; Gordon, Edmund T.; Ali, Kamran; Visweswaran, Kamala; Cvetkovich, Ann
The dissertation explores new understandings about the uses of emotional work in the social struggles of racialized people. This project is a case study that analyzes how a singing group of ageing black women organized to improve the mental wellness of women in a low-income, peripheral neighborhood of the city of Belo Horizonte. This grassroots effort was a response to the women’s use of anti-anxiety medication, specifically Valium, and an attempt to attend to the women’s ongoing issues not addressed through the use of pharmaceuticals. The dissertation examines these women’s self-making as a critical window into how the embodied experiences of the interlocking forces of race, class, gender, age and place of residence are lived in the demanding material and psychological conditions of these women’s lives and the nature of the group’s healing work in their life narratives. Through considering these women’s self-making in discourses of madness, geographic landscapes of memory, musicality and performance, the dissertation investigates how the psycho-emotional transformations of these women illuminate the types of therapeutic work beneficial to anti-racist, sexist and age diversified modes of being and collective mobilization in the current social context of Brazil’s re-democratization. It also considers the group’s re-conceptualization of blackness and mental wellness as exemplary of and contributing to the personal and social work of black women’s struggle and praxis. The research methodology includes participant observation, interviews (structured and un-structured), oral histories, documentary photography and archival research conducted during an extended period (sixteen months) of fieldwork in Brazil.
Betty and Jane : two OSS women who waged psychological warfare in a forgotten theater
(2014-05) Baum, Ann Todd, Ph. D.; Abzug, Robert H.; Brands, H W; Minault, Gail; Carleton, Don E; Beaumont, Roger A
This dissertation is a personal narrative reconstruction of the lives and careers of Elizabeth MacDonald and Jane Foster, who served with the Office of Strategic Services in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II. It touches on aspects of OSS history which have been underserved by personal accounts and scholarly research, especially those having to do with psychological warfare and black propaganda.
Between boulevard and boudoir : working women as urban spectacle in nineteenth-century French and British literature
(2011-08) Erbeznik, Elizabeth Anne; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; MacKay, Carol; Wilkinson, Lynn; Coffin, Judith; Bergman-Carton, Janis
Between Boulevard and Boudoir examines the nineteenth-century obsession with documenting the modern metropolis and analyses visual and verbal portraits of working women to investigate how urban literature invented the seamstress as a type. Approaching the nineteenth-century city as a site of passive voyeurism where social relationships were increasingly mediated by print culture, I argue that sketches of French grisettes and British sempstresses replaced the endless variety among working-class women with a repetitive sameness through the fictionalization of these urban figures. Transforming producers of commodities into objects of consumption, popular fiction showcased the visibility of the city’s working women while ignoring their actual labor. These women were thus portrayed as exploited bodies, rather than exploited workers, destined to adorn, and then disappear into, the crowded city. This dissertation looks first at what Walter Benjamin dubbed “panoramic literature” — texts that sought to describe the metropolis and its inhabitants through a categorization of people and places based on appearances — and asserts that these fragmentary depictions created a widely recognizable urban typology that gained cultural currency and, ultimately, influenced other authors. Analyzing French and British urban text, I maintain, however, that even the most stereotyped representations destabilized the structures of classification that defined the working woman as a type. While novelists Eugène Sue, G.W.M. Reynolds, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning all seem to valorize self-supporting women, I demonstrate that, by turning their workers into wives and expelling them from the city, they discredit the premise of an urban destiny that confined these women to a type. This examination of the unique position of working women in Paris and London not only challenges established notions about nineteenth-century constructions of gender but also provides insight into the anxieties – vis-à-vis the rapidly changing city – that plagued the writers who codified these women as types. Investigating the fictionalization of working women, this study opens up urban literature to considerations of how gender and class determine inclusion within the city as it was produced by print culture.
Beyond balance : examining work-family interface, role negotiation, and coping strategies for female caregivers in STEM
(2016-08) Reilly, Erin Dawna; Awad, Germine H.; Rochlen, Aaron B.; Cokley, Kevin O; McCarthy, Christopher J; Walkow, Janet C
Though the retention of female caregivers in STEM fields has become increasingly discussed, there is a lack of research investigating the major factors impacting their successful negotiation of work and family responsibilities and roles. This body of research examined the impact of societal roles, external support structures, and coping resources on work-family satisfaction and psychological well-being. In particular, this study investigated the following: (1) the relationships among work support, family support, coping, and satisfaction; (2) the relationship between family- and occupational-support, work-family conflict, and satisfaction; (3) coping resources as a mediator of the relationship between work-family conflict and work and family satisfaction, and; (4) the impact of internalizations of competing societal myths (i.e., the ideal worker myth and motherhood myth) as moderating the impact of work-family conflict on interpersonal guilt. Participants included 204 women in STEM fields who also reported caregiving responsibilities. The majority of the recruited sample identified as mothers, and reported approximately equal amounts of time spent on occupational responsibilities and caretaking work. Results indicate that women who reported higher levels of family support and occupational support tended to have higher levels work and family satisfaction, as well as greater perceived internal coping resources. In addition, women with greater perceived abilities to identify, predict, and plan for demands and possible stressors tended to have greater levels of family and work satisfaction. In terms of modeling work-family interface, women who reported higher levels of familial and career-climate support tended to also report greater perceived coping resources and abilities. However, the hypothesis that work-to-family and family-to-work conflict would significantly predict lower work satisfaction and family satisfaction was not supported when modeled alongside other variables (external support and coping). On the other hand, the hypothesis that the relationship between family-to-work conflict and work satisfaction was mediated by perceived coping resources was supported. Finally, results suggest that greater internalization of the motherhood myth, the ideal worker myth, and the presence of work-to-family conflict are associated with higher levels of guilt for female caregivers in STEM fields. Limitations, future research areas, and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Beyond Tahrir : women in Egypt battle sexual harassment and assault
(2013-12) Jukam, Kelsey Rebecca; Lawrence, Regina G., 1961-
Since the 2011 revolution, the media has given much attention to the problem of sexual harassment and assault in Egypt. Attacks against female journalists and protestors have thrust the issue into the international spotlight, but it is a problem that has plagued Egypt for years. The majority of women in Egypt face some kind of sexual harassment everyday. This report is about the men and women who are working to stop sexual harassment and assault in Egypt.
Brazilian immigrant women : the relationship of marianismo and acculturative stress to acculturation types
(2012-05) Bessa, Luana Barbossa; Borich, Gary D.; Cokley, Kevin
The proposed study will investigate how individuals of different acculturation types vary in their levels of acculturative stress and marianismo. First-generation Brazilian immigrant females will complete a demographic questionnaire, as well as measures of acculturation, marianismo, and acculturative stress. Two 1-way ANOVA analyses and one 1-way ANCOVA analysis will be conducted in order to explore the relationship between these variables. It is proposed that Brazilian immigrant women’s levels of acculturative stress and marianismo will vary by acculturation type. It is further proposed that measuring adherance to traditional gender roles as varying by acculturation type rather than level will yield a more nuanced understanding of this relationship by not confounding integrated and marginalized individuals. Implications and limitations of the study’s potential findings will be discussed. Lastly, a program evaluation perspective will be presented to further explicate the implications of the current study for mental health outcomes and the provision of mental health services to Brazilian immigrant women.
'But you haven't told me about yourself' : women's digests in Pakistan as an affective space of belonging
(2013-12) Ahmed, Kiran Nazir; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-
This report demonstrates how encounters between readers, writers and editors of a low-brow genre of Urdu fiction, create an affective space of belonging. This genre is published in commercial monthly magazines (commonly known as women’s digests) that contain narratives of feminine domesticity, primarily written by and for women, in Pakistan. Drawing on ethnographic work (archival and interviews) with authors, readers and editors of two monthlies, this study traces the contours of digest community as an affective space of belonging that provides a ‘complex of confirmation and consolation’ on how to be a woman in Pakistan’s changing social milieu. It further argues that recent proliferation of cell phones has led to a new sensibility in this community that has its own rhythm of sound. Previously readers would communicate through published letters mediated by editors. However, now there is direct contact between these two groups, through cell phones. Digest narratives are now also being drawn from experiences readers share with authors over cell phone conversations. This sharing is not factual as such, but rather an affective exchange of feelings about facts. Thus, these conversations can be seen as a shared emotional experience where the lack of visual cues regarding social class, age and ethnicity (since readers and writers rarely meet each other) leads to voices becoming just that – voices that share life stories and experiences. There is thus a transient coming together of women who are mostly unrelated by kinship or ethnicity; and a sociality is formed between strangers with its own sensory feel of rhythm and sound, through the medium of the cell phone. This work contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on how media and technology is a negotiation between material properties of technologies being introduced and the particular effects in forming new affects and sensibilities; and how dominant representations of Muslim women as a singular and stable category of analysis, can be spoken back to, by highlighting their myriad voices and understanding them beyond the usual tropes of victimhood and emancipation.
Child care teachers' perceptions of their work as women's work
(2010-08) Kim, Mi Ai, 1968-; Reifel, Robert Stuart; Brown, Christopher; Field, Sherry; Svinicki, Marilla; Briley, Sandra
This qualitative study explores six child care teachers’ perceptions of their work as gendered work. The purpose of the study is to understand how the experiences of women child care teachers are connected to the larger issue of gendered teaching embedded in culturally pervasive beliefs about child care teaching. This study answers the following questions: 1) What do child care teachers perceive about their work? 2) How do they conceptualize child care teaching as women’s work? 3) How do they describe the practice of their perceived work as women’s work? Data were collected through in-depth interviews and, following Corbin and Strauss’s (2008) grounded theory methodology, analyzed to find emergent themes. Six themes emerged from the analysis of interview data: 1) child care teaching is not gendered work, 2) child care work is an identification of self, 3) child care teaching is a way of relating to one another, 4) vulnerabilities of child care work, 5) child care is hard work, and 6) contradictions and paradoxes. These themes answer the three research questions. First, these teachers perceive their work to be gender-neutral work, self-identification, mutuality, vulnerabilities, and labor profession. Second, the teachers conceptualize child care work both as gender-neutral and gendered, as creating women’s culture, and as women’s culture being stigmatized. Third, the teachers show paradoxical and inconsistent attitudes about the practice of their perceived child care work as gendered work. The categories about the participants’ conceptions of their work are interrelated and interwoven. They reflect a complexity in the participants’ understandings. The inconsistencies of the teachers’ perceptions reflect the complexity of child care teachers’ reality and their negotiations between dominant beliefs about what child care work means and the elements of their individual and collective experiences that they bring to their profession (Biklen, 1995; Dillabough, 1999, 2005; Murray, 2006; Ryan & Grieshaber, 2005). The findings of this study provide implications for teacher educators. The implications involve the need to utilize contemporary theories and feminist perspectives to better understand the nature of child care teachers’ work and to help teachers develop a critical and more realistic understanding of the nature of their work.