Legal Change and Stigma in Surrogacy and Abortion

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-195
Author(s):  
John A. Robertson

The role of stigma in limiting reproductive rights has long hovered in the air. Paula Abrams has sorted through the concept and shown how it operates in two major areas of procreative liberty — having a child through surrogacy and avoiding childbirth by abortion. Her paper is especially useful for showing how legal change initially dilutes stigma but may reinstall it with post-legalization regulation.Abrams argues that both abortion and surrogacy are stigmatized because they deviate from traditional gender roles and social expectations about pregnancy and maternity. Past restrictions have rested on a common legal and cultural paradigm of the good mother: a woman who conceives, carries her child to term, and then rears the child. Indeed, as she later argues, evidence of stigma surrounding a practice is “relevant to determining whether laws regulating abortion or surrogacy are based on impermissible stereotyping.”

Author(s):  
Anne Pollok

This chapter examines the various strategies of intellectual self-formation by female intellectuals. While Henriette Herz created the public persona of the nurturing muse in her salon and established the idea of mutual exchange between the sexes, Rahel Varnhagen took the idea of self-reflection in the eyes of others one step further and, together with her husband, created a monument of remembrance with her collection of letters, fashioning the modern persona as fundamentally constituted through her exchange with others. Bettina von Arnim, finally, had no qualms using the most prominent poet, Goethe, as a prop in her writings, exercising the subversive power of remembrance to establish herself. Even though all these strategies build on the (male) other, they showcase the potential to subvert traditional gender roles.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 3058 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Gil Arroyo ◽  
Carla Barbieri ◽  
Sandra Sotomayor ◽  
Whitney Knollenberg

Tourism has the potential to empower women, particularly in rural areas. However, little is known about whether it can have the same effect in Andean communities, mainly because the traditional social and cultural structures of those communities have limited women’s ability to empower themselves through traditional economic activities. Through interviews with residents participating in agritourism development in seven communities across the Cusco and Puno regions (Peru, South America), this study examined the role of agritourism development in the empowerment of women in those communities as well as the ways in which it has changed traditional gender roles. Study findings revealed that agritourism contributes to four areas of empowerment for women: psychological, social, political, and economic. However, the culture of the Andean communities still has considerable influence on gender dynamics and may prevent women from garnering all the benefits of tourism development. Agritourism development in those communities should incorporate gender-related cultural considerations to navigate and overcome barriers, thereby allowing the maximization of empowerment benefits for women.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-38
Author(s):  
Golman Gurung

This article argues that the notion of gender is not a fixed category and doesn’t have any given essence to it. The male and female characters in William Wycherley’s play The Plain Dealer perform roles that tend to challenge our traditional conception of gender roles. Gender identities are complex things and it is not possible to reduce them to simple and unproblematic essences. The Character Manly falls into the trap of a woman’s machinations and succumbs to her power. His lack of manliness and the Widow’s knowledge and alacrity prove that traditional gender roles are open to challenge and can be reversed by different characters in different situations. This article analyses the role of the characters in the light of Foucauldian discourse and Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Manley

Chapter 3 looks at women’s resistance activities on the island and in exile during the Trujillato, as well as the rhetoric that surrounded mothers and wives within the movement and argues that it was precisely the increasingly intimate violations of women and traditional gender roles that ultimately doomed the regime. The chapter advocates for not only a physical inclusion of women in the narrative of anti-dictatorial politics, but also a consideration of the role of traditional familial and feminine “protections” in the upending of a thirty-year regime. Women pointed out—to both domestic and international audiences—the failure of the regime to protect femininity and national morality and, as a result, led the way to the regime’s demise.


Author(s):  
Raquel Serrano González ◽  
Laura Martínez-García

Despite the shifting ideologies of gender of the seventeenth century, the arrival of the first actresses caused deep social anxiety: theatre gave women a voice to air grievances and to contest, through their own bodies, traditional gender roles. This paper studies two of the best-known actresses, Nell Gwyn and Anne Bracegirdle, and the different public personae they created to negotiate their presence in this all—male world. In spite of their differing strategies, both women gained fame and profit in the male—dominated theatrical marketplace, confirming them as the ultimate “gender benders,” who appropriated the male role of family’s supporter and bread-winner.


Hawwa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 193-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayman Shabana

Abstract This paper examines the role of biomedical technology in reconstructing traditional gender roles in the Muslim world. It questions the neutrality of this technology and explores the extent to which various applications of genetic and reproductive technologies can be used either to enhance or diminish gender equality. It concentrates on Islamic normative discussions surrounding pre-marital genetic testing and sex selection and emphasizes the role of these discussions for the proper accommodation of these technologies within the Muslim context.


2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Abrams

Surrogacy and abortion represent two facets of procreative liberty, the right to reproduce and the right to avoid reproducing. Research on stigma associated with abortion and surrogacy illuminates how these very different experiences carry similar stigmatic harm. Why do certain decisions about reproduction engender social support, other decisions social disapproval? Restrictions on surrogacy and abortion derive from a common legal paradigm — state regulation on the pregnant body — that is rooted in traditional gender roles. Not all laws restricting abortion and surrogacy evince gender stereotyping. Abortion and surrogacy pose complex moral and social dilemmas. But research of stigma associated with abortion and surrogacy suggests that gender stereotypes play a role in the creation of stigma.


2021 ◽  
pp. 168-171
Author(s):  
Samuel Cohn

This chapter identifies two primary mechanisms that could lead to antifeminist backlash. The first is declining male economic status. Globally, men are losing earning power due to deindustrialization in the Global North and rising unemployment in the Global South. Unemployed and underemployed men lose power within their families, particularly if the wife becomes the primary breadwinner. Men react to this loss of status by turning conservative and striving to reconstruct traditional gender roles. This leads to fights against reproductive rights and in favor of traditional religion. Male resentment from lost earning power also leads to domestic abuse and sexism on its own. It increases societal violence, which leads to sexual violence and male control of women. The chapter then looks at antifeminism in Poland, Yemen, Kenya, Central America, and Argentina.


2018 ◽  
pp. 183-200
Author(s):  
Catriona MacLeod

Guyane's carnival constitutes one of the most popular and publicised elements of the territory’s cultural identity. The carnival is home to several established ‘characters’ who represent different symbolic roles or incarnate various aspects of the territory’s history. This chapter will focus on two figures whose costumes and behaviours appear intended to challenge the traditional gender roles which still dominate everyday life in Guyane: the cross-dressing male (the travesti) who takes part regularly in street parades, and the female-incarnated Touloulou of the carnival’s masked balls. This chapter first considers the travesti, an apparently-paradoxical figure common to parades in other Caribbean and Latin American carnivals. It considers this practice in the specific context of the Guyane festivities, examining competing symbolic interpretations both of the travesti’s comic appearance and actions. The second half of the chapter considers the Touloulou, a carnival figure apparently native to Guyane itself and celebrated as the ‘queen’ of the festivities. It will consider the role of the Touloulou in the carnival of Guyane, interrogating particularly the popular interpretation that this figure constitutes an exceptionally independent and powerful role for Guianese women, representative of changing gender roles in the territory since the 1950s.


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