Gender Perspectives of Male Immigrant Healthcare Assistants in Norwegian Elderly Care

Exploring gender and feminization in healthcare professions within welfare institutions is an important issue. This article explores the experiences of male immigrant healthcare assistants with racialized features in Norwegian elderly care. A key narrative theme was how notions such as gender and categories of class reinforce structural power relationships, positioning male immigrants in elderly care as “lacking” and/or vulnerable with respect to self-esteem. In the analysis, participants’ experiences were perceived, contested, and negotiated within the themes of: (a) Gender Identities: Negotiations among male immigrant healthcare assistants, and (b) The interwoven process of gender and class. Participatory parity (Fraser, 2008) and perspectives of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) were applied to explore how notions of gender and categories of class limit and reinforce power relationships. The analysis sheds light on how such notions and categories reinforce structural power relationships. Furthermore, the article argues that understanding the impact of gender on the Norwegian care sector must address how specific categories of individuals are affected, in addition to the attendant labour market challenges.

Rewriting Immigrant Masculinities in Selected Works of Bharati Mukherjee

The precedence of women over men in Bharati Mukherjee’s works reflects an attempt on her part to construct a feminine narrative as a means of countering the marginalized position that women usually occupy in mainstream traditional literature. This paper probes how with such displacement of female perspectives into an authoritative position, routinely prescribed for men, Mukherjee revises the suspiciously stable place occupied by male immigrant subjects in fictional writings. Employing the critical voices of several masculinity theorists, this paper explores how immigrant men’s conceptions of masculinity are reformulated and challenged by their migration processes. Seen in the light of gender oppression, the male characters, seem to occupy an ineffective and feminine narrative space even in powerful male stories of immigrant economic success written by Mukherjee. Finally, the paper probes how Mukherjee’s act of rewriting masculinity from inventive perspectives in her fictions introduces new, more egalitarian, and alternate models of manhood.