The Metamorphosis of a Female Subject into a Gendered subject: A Study of Easterine Iralu’s A Terrible Matriarchy

It is a universally practised phenomenon across society to conveniently create a dichotomy that is based on the physiological difference between a male and a female. This difference is further defined by the dichotomy of gendered roles and labour that are imposed on them. The hegemony of the gendered ideology makes it all so natural to assign gendered role to a baby the moment it is born. Its body serves as a continuing signifier for the gendered structure of a patriarchal society. Since these gendered ideologies are disseminated through established institutions such as education, religion and law; their manifestations can be found in culture, religion, clothes, discourse, movies, and even in gestures that this polarity between a man and a woman is accepted as natural. There still is no general consent among the cultural anthropologists that an unambiguous matriarchal society existed. Classical scholars like Johann Jakob Bachofen tried to argue that matriarchal society existed on the basis of unreliable historical sources such as Iliad and Odyssey (Bamberger, p.263). Easterine Iralu’s A Terrible Matriarchy intrigues the reader with this highly deceptive title that ironically bares the patriarchy of contemporary Naga society. However, if these reasons are taken into account that Feminism is all about equality and that matriarchy is the flip side of patriarchy with all its horrors; then she is not far from the truth in prefixing “terrible” to “matriarchy”. This article is an attempt to familiarize the milieu of a quintessential Naga girl and her resistance to the anxious process of self-denial imposed upon her by her grandmother who embodies the concept of ‘terrible matriarchy’. The article also concentrates on the typical mechanism of gender construction and how such mechanisms are responsible for metamorphosing a female subject into a gendered subject.

How Nissin Represented Naomi Osaka: Race, Gender, and Sport in Japanese Advertising

In January 2019, instant noodle giant Nissin Foods released two animated advertisements online featuring Naomi Osaka, which elicited backlash over “whitewashing” the multiracial professional tennis player who represents Japan. Although Nissin has since pulled the advertisements and officially apologized for portraying Osaka as lighter-skinned, underlying these issues are also those of gender, especially its intersections with race/ethnicity, nation, and sport in Japanese media. Employing discourse analysis of these two advertisements, this article examines how Nissin represented Osaka and what ideologies these representations reflect in Japanese society. Drawing on intersectional and transnational feminist cultural studies approaches, we argue that the advertisements’ representation of Osaka and the ensuing controversy reflect racialized and gendered ideologies in an allegedly homogeneous Japanese society, informed by local media and popular cultures that regularly portray “racially neutral” characters, celebrate lighter-skinned hāfu (half; multiracial) women, and diminish sportswomen’s athletic abilities. This article contributes to communication and sport studies by situating Osaka within broader contexts of how hāfu and sporting women are depicted in Japanese media and how elite sportswomen and multiracial athletes are portrayed in international media. Our article concludes by offering two suggestions on how to research multiracial sportswomen in the media.

Is vulnerability to climate change gendered? And how? Insights from Egypt

Most climate change literature tends to downplay the gendered nature of vulnerability. At best, gender is discussed in terms of the male-female binary, seen as opposing forces rather than in varying relations of interdependency. Such construction can result in the adoption of maladaptive culturally unfit gender-blind policy and interventions. In Egypt, which is highly vulnerable to climate change, gender analysis of vulnerability is almost non-existent. This paper addresses this important research gap by asking and drawing on a rural Egyptian context ‘How do the gendered relational aspects of men’s and women’s livelihoods in the household and community influence vulnerability to climate change?’. To answer this question, I draw on gender analysis of social relations, framed within an understanding of sustainable livelihoods. During 16 months of fieldwork, I used multiple ethnographic methods to collect data from two culturally and ethnically diverse low-income villages in Egypt. My main argument is that experiences of climate change are closely intertwined with gender and wider social relations in the household and community. These are shaped by local gendered ideologies and cultures that are embedded in conjugal relations, kinship and relationship to the environment, as compared across the two villages. In this paper, I strongly argue that vulnerability to climate change is highly gendered and therefore gender analysis should be at the heart of climate change discourses, policy and interventions.

Black Women’s Counter-Stories of Resilience and Within-Group Tensions in the White, Patriarchal Space of Mathematics Education

This article proposes and employs a framework that characterizes mathematics education as a white, patriarchal space to analyze undergraduate Black women’s narratives of experience in navigating P–16 mathematics education. The framework guided a counter-storytelling analysis that captured variation in Black women’s experiences of within-group tensions—a function of internalized racial-gendered ideologies and normalized structural inequities in mathematics education. Findings revealed variation in Black women’s resilience through coping strategies for managing such within-group tensions. This analysis advances equity-oriented efforts beyond increasing Black women’s representation and retention by challenging the racialized-gendered culture of mathematics. Implications for educational practice and research include ways to disrupt P–16 mathematics education as a white, patriarchal space and broaden within-group solidarity, including Sisterhood among Black women.

A gendered academy – women’s experiences from higher education in Cameroon

Women make up less than 20% of the faculty in Cameroon and continue to work in male-dominated workplaces against a context of patriarchal gendered ideologies. This paper explores women’s experiences in the academy in Cameroon, highlighting the way they navigate these challenges to position themselves in higher education. Through autoethnography and critical discourse analysis, it examines literature within the area of gendered discourse and texts on higher education, and the author’s personal experiences as a female academic in Cameroon. It is argued in this paper that the challenges of women are higher and include rendering content of teaching and research gendered, appropriating gendered identities as women, and asserting themselves in research, publication, and administration. Language is considered as the vehicle for disempowering women in the academy. Thus, women are called upon to demystify stereotypes about femininity and women’s place in the academy through language use. That deconstruction of roles must start with gender-sensitive language use.

Ethnic nationalism and gendered morality in the semiotic construction of the Moro language of Sudan

This paper brings together discussions on language and nationalism, with gender and nationalism. Drawing from ‘language ideology’ and ‘indexical gender’ from a linguistic anthropological approach, it traces the emergence of the “Moro language”, in the context of a Moro ethnic national movement, originating in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, and how it became indexically linked with masculine authority. Moro identify as Nuba and Christian, as opposed to Arab and Muslim, the dominant identities. Christian literacy, spearheaded by patriarchal leadership became the frame through which Moro organized ethnic identity and unity. The constructed language, as the object of metapragmatic evaluation, is also tightly woven into norms of morality and gender within the community. Two registers are identified: textuality is normatively masculine and orality is normatively feminine. The Moro community draws on gendered ideologies to produce a new writing and speaking style, the “Moro Bible Language” (MBL). MBL results from the interweaving of the two registers in language standardization practices. Negotiating the ideologies that bring MBL to life occurs in metalinguistic discourse, teaching, learning and speaking styles. Since the politics of standardization are foregrounded, even seeming apolitical projects are laden with moral worth in the turbulent context of rapid cultural change.

Ecocultural Contact and the Panarchy of Place

Margaret Fuller travelled to the Great Lakes region in 1843 on the trail of the Anglo-Ojibway poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. She had seen enough to recognize Schoolcraft’s immense promise—a “mine of poesy” that might serve as the raw material of a new American identity based on very different coordinates of gender, race, and culture than the ones settling into place in the antebellum United States. Fuller was too late to meet Schoolcraft, who had died the year before, but with her help, she learned to see the natural world, and the society taking shape in this colonial frontier, in an entirely new way. This essay uses a new materialist focus on the environment to examine how these writers allowed the natural world to complicate and counter the gendered ideologies of settler colonialism spreading over the land. The interplay of these elements in these writers works—American culture, Ojibwe culture, and the environment—is an example of ecocultural contact, one alive to the panarchic energies that often flourish beneath a dominant ideology. Fuller and Johnston, in particular, feature the voices of trees in their radically unsettling work. Reading these two women writers together offers a new approach to ecofeminism.

Epilogue

The biographies of amateur musicians unveil how gendered ideologies functioned in lived experiences: didactic prescriptions pertaining to consumerism and luxury, and to patriarchy and marriage, are complicated when we attend to individuals’ pleasures and hopes. The next generations of amateur musicians operated within the patterns established by the post-Revolutionary generation. The epilogue casts forward into the antebellum period to consider the similarities and differences with what came before. Most notably, a shift in attitudes toward female music teachers represents a marked change in the nineteenth century. However, separate gender roles remained entrenched. A summary of how manuscript music books’ materiality intersected with gendered experiences of music in amateurs’ daily lives in the early republic reminds us how this came to be the case.