Negotiating Empathic Communication

The popularity of personal blogs has instigated a debate on how to define the type of communication taking place between the authors and readers of these blogs. Can it be considered as a dialogic form of communication, or should it rather be characterized as a form of communication with more self-centered aims and potentially commodifying implications? This article analyzes the case of top-ranked personal blogs written by young Swedish women in the year 2009. The popularity and commercial aspects of these blogs make them an interesting case through which to explore a presumed shift from what will be termed “empathic” to “phatic” communication in personal blogs. The article analyzes comments to postings in the blogs and ways in which the bloggers handle these comments and, using the theory of emotion work (Hochschild 1979, 2003), shows how young female top-bloggers negotiate between different communicative forms and purposes in their interaction with readers. In conclusion, the article argues that this communication should be seen as a form of dialogue confirming, but also re-constructing shared values and relations between young female bloggers and their readers.     

Monstrous schoolteachers: women educators in popular cultural texts

From the drooling Mrs Green in the children’s picture book, The Teacher from the Black Lagoon to the best scarer of all time, Dean Hardscrabble from Monsters University, monstrous female teachers leap out from around the corners and under the desks of popular imaginings of school. In this paper, I focus on the figure of the female monster teacher in popular cultural texts and media produced for and/or consumed by North American youth, including picture books, television, film, and other cultural texts. Although these monster teacher narratives are produced for children and youth, they also work as a form of popular pedagogy for adults. The stakes of these representations are many, including the misogynistic representation of women in power as monstrous, the devaluing of teaching as “women’s work” or “child care,” and, the figuring of boys as “in crisis” in relationship to a predominately female workforce. I argue that, the female monster educator in popular cultural texts offers a corporeal curriculum that seeks to discipline the body of the teacher and to obfuscate the radical potential of teachers as professional women.     

Moving,Making and Atmosphere: Routines of Home as Sites for Mundane Improvisation

In this article, we examine how everyday atmospheres of home are made, maintained and improvised through habitual routines of movement, and the implications of this for co-design for energy demand reduction. Drawing on our ethnography of how people experienced and constituted a sensory aesthetic of home, we analyse the example of lighting use in night-time routines. We propose seeing these routines as sites of the possible, where everyday making might be engaged for co-design. Thus suggesting refocusing ethnographic design research beyond what people do in their homes, towards how they move through and make the atmospheres of their homes.     

Entertaining mobility: the racialized and gendered nation in House Hunters International

House Hunters International invites viewers in the United States to temporarily and vicariously escape their daily lives through the stories of those fellow citizens and the occasional foreign nationals fortunate enough to buy homes abroad, including vacation homes in the tropics. Of course, other people, including viewers with access to the show, actually live their daily lives in those vacation paradises. The actors are presented as seeking an “authentic” experience away from the local population that is often tokenized and seen as static or invisible. In many instances, women and people of color who are a part of the visual landscape represent these places. This paper considers the ways the show frames mobility as entertainment, which ignores the politics of gender, race, and class that enables such mobility in the first place. This article concludes by considering María Lugones’ conceptualization of “traveling worlds” in order to propose a different way to articulate international house hunting.     

The mommy wars: on the home front and waged abroad

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” published in 2012, generated huge response, well beyond what already has become typical in the intensifying mommy wars in the United States. It also drew considerable attention globally. Within one week of publication, Slaughter’s “lament” attracted a million readers. Slaughter’s explanation of why she quit her high powered job, and then Yahoo’s choice of the then-pregnant Marissa Mayer as its new chief executive, provoked another round of mommy wars. The research reported here on how journalists dealt with the controversy compares the US, with its tradition of heated controversy over working mothers and neoliberal opposition to structural supports for families, and Israel, where attention to Slaughter was somewhat surprising, given the presumption in Israel that mothers will work outside the home. Journalistic discourse in both countries tended to frame the work–home conflict as a women’s issue, to be addressed by women journalists, and not men. Moreover, writers tended to address the issue anecdotally, in terms of personal experience but ignoring structural issues and structural solutions and ignoring how solutions for middle-class professional women or women at the “center” may not work for other kinds of women.     

Broadening the scope of ageing femininities on TV: the evolution of the older woman in two contemporary Catalan soap operas

The older woman has been an unacknowledged character in fiction up until recently, when it has become the focus of some studies in the interconnected fields of literary and cultural gerontology. Given their popularity, TV shows are especially powerful in the propagation of images of any form of identity; accordingly, they can be regarded as an interesting and highly effective artistic and socio cultural vehicle through which representations of old people and of old women in particular can be analysed and discussed. Despite the success of The Golden Girls in the 80s and the exponential ageing of the baby-boom generation, TV series have also continued to depict older female characters as either motherly figures, always looking after their families at any cost, or as devilish older women characterised by inappropriate sexualised appearance and sexual behaviour. In contrast to this predominant tendency, Six Feet Under (2001–2005) stands out as a significant exception. In this article, we argue that Six Feet Under is innovative in presenting the older woman through the central character of Ruth Fisher (Francis Connor) and through the interaction of Ruth Fisher with other women within her same generation which face ageing from different perspectives.     

At home with strangers: social exclusion and intimate labor in Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo (2013)

In Singapore, many middle-class families employ foreign domestic workers (FDWs) to take on care and domestic work. In this setup, female FDWs need to be “a part of the family” and “feel at home” to better perform and render intimate labor, but they are structurally displaced and prevented from being fully integrated in both their employer’s homes and in the host country. Ilo Ilo (2013), a debut film by a Singaporean director Anthony Chen, has poignantly portrayed this paradoxical relationship by showing a young boy’s growing affection to his Filipina maid, and how this brief yet enduring bond demonstrates migration’s effects on both the foreign helpers and the middle-class families employing them. This Singaporean family melodrama depicts the affective nature of migration by demonstrating how FDWs are positioned as an intimate yet excluded figure inside the employer’s homes. The contradiction between intimacy and social exclusion seen in the film also simultaneously describes and prescribes the FDW’s place in the host country. The film illustrates the paradox of intimacy and exclusion in the host–guest worker relationship of employers and their maids within the private domains of household and the public discourse on FDWs’ claims in Singapore.     

“But we still try”: affective labor in the corporate mommy blog

This article studies three “mommy blogs,” online platforms catering to (in these cases) American mothers of various sub-demographics, through an affective labor framework. Using digital labor and Althusserian subject formation to inform my reading of the common rhetorical gestures made in these blogs, I ask how they conceive of their readership and contributors. I argue that mommy blogs should be understood as sites of digital labor because of the ways in which their publishing conditions and rhetorics establish labored expectations of the “mommy” subject. Contestations of the nature of affective labor in motherhood are reflected by anxieties around digital labor, which play out via ideological conflicts that manifest rhetorically in the blogs under discussion. This analysis is informed by affect theory, Althusser and Butler’s work on subject formation, and the existing feminist literature on digital labor and the mommy blog.     

Consumption-led mobilized urbanism: socio-spatial separation in the second-home city of Sanya

Abstract

Tourism and recreational second-home development has increased rapidly in peripheral and lower tier cities of China in recent years. While tourism-led real estate development has been widely accepted as an effective investment opportunity, it can increase urban segregation and stratification. This pattern is seen in the resort city of Sanya on Hainan Island, China. Sanya’s recreational second homes vary in form and can be categorized into (1) elite-vacation second homes (short stay, private homes), (2) lifestyle-migration second homes (short stay, commercial homes), and (3) retirement-migration second homes (longer term, seasonal homes). Unlike the segregated cities formed by displaced labor migrants in many of China’s cities, seasonal recreational migrants are both economically better-off and are emerging as a dominant political force. The segregated residential spaces created by Sanya’s second-home development landscape further limits interaction and social network building between indigenous local residents and part-time recreational migrants. The perceived home space and feelings of place attachment towards Sanya is under drastic change, with locals feeling increasingly displaced. The new mosaic of consumption-led amenity cities in developing economies is one where traditional models of migration-based segregation are reversed. Wealthier second-home migrants have the capacity for more political power than local residents, as well as relying more on non-localized social networks and multi-nodal home spaces. Consumption-led mobility is an important determinant in building explanations of socio-spatial segregation and stratification in global cities that are undergoing dramatic development change.     

“Whatsapping” the continuity of postpartum care in Switzerland: A socio-anthropological study

BackgroundDigital media such as Apps, Internet and social networks have become integral parts of the maternity experience for more than a decade. These media can support or undermine women’s experiences as has been shown in digital sociology research. Using Immediate Messaging Applications to provide information and support to women during the perinatal period is an emerging practice.AimThis article analyses how health and social care professionals – with a focus on community midwives – and women communicate between postpartum home visits through Immediate Message Applications in Switzerland.MethodsA socio-anthropological study that relied on qualitative methods including semi-directed interviews with midwives and health and social care professionals (n = 30) and immigrant women (n = 20).FindingsSince the introduction of Immediate Messaging Applications, women and their carer converse more regularly between post-partum home visits. Women send questions, pictures and videos to them, often allowing swift responses to their concerns. Midwives encounter difficulties answering women’s questions when they cannot be solved through quick communication (e.g. infant crying). To them, texting frequency forms a clinical clue to women’s mental health. Not all women contact their carer through digital messages; immigrant women are less likely to know and use this service.Discussion and conclusionImmediate Messaging Applications form a promising communication tool, complementary to home visits, and contribute to woman-centered care and continuity of care. As an emergent practice, it has not been framed by a guideline yet. Policy makers and practitioners should ensure that its use does not contribute to unequal access to care.     

“We Can Have It All”

Focusing primarily on films made in 2008 and 2009, this article examines the phenomenon of the girlfriend flick. Films such as Sex and the City, Baby Mama, The Women, and Bride Wars depict female friendship's priority in intimate culture, celebrating supportive and loving relationships over heterosexual romance. Exploring these films through the intersection between feminism and postfeminism, this article asks whether the girlfriend flick transcends limited understandings of sisterhood to include difference and to constructively explore conflict between women. This article argues that these films advocate a retreat into a segregated female sphere; not as radicalisation, but as a space where women monitor each other's drive for physical perfection and/or marriage and motherhood. Ultimately, they depict female friendship as maintaining “representable” femininities and producing sameness.     

Comic revisions? Motherhood and women’s comedy in contemporary Germany

Maternal stereotypes and the realities of mothering are prominent themes in Anke Engelke’s Ladykracher and Martina Hill’s Knallerfrauen, two of the most popular sketch shows in twenty-first-century Germany. This article relates their success to social anxieties about motherhood, which Engelke and Hill illuminate through the theme of their sketches as well as through their very use of comedy to do so. I begin by using close-readings of Ladykracher and Knallerfrauen to illuminate the political potential of the sketch form to challenge maternal myths and articulate taboo feelings such as maternal ambivalence. I then consider the innovation of these maternal sketches in view of traditional theories of comedy, which paradoxically draw their imagery from the realm of the maternal even though they discount real women and mothers as comic agents. I argue that the maternal sketches of Engelke and Hill are thus doubly subversive, challenging maternal taboos as well as the discursive and generic norms they sustain.     

Sharing a Home: The Experiences of American Women and Their Parents over the Twentieth Century

Trends and determinants of daughter-parent coresidence over the twentieth century are examined by using the 1987-1988 National Survey of Families and Households. Young women from more recent birth cohorts leave their parents’ homes for the first time at earlier ages, but are more likely to make return trips home than those born earlier. Thus cohorts show remarkable consistency in the proportion of life lived in the parental home. For the 1900-1929 birth cohorts, daughters’ lifetime probability that a parent will move in with them is approximately 15%; younger cohorts show similar age-specific probabilities to date. Explanations for these trends are considered.     

Iron lady to old lady: the neutering of James Bond’s M

Abstract

This paper contradicts interpretations of James Bond’s M, played by Judi Dench, as a feminist triumph. Through a focus on aging, it argues that the initially powerful M is ultimately reinscribed into patriarchy. In Dench’s eight films, M undergoes two processes of age-based reconfiguration: “post-sexualization” and “domestication.” Drawing on Mulvey’s and Butler’s psychoanalytic theories, this paper shows that, early on, M is post-sexualized as she is distanced from youthful femininity and aligned with phallic masculinity. Following this, and contrary to consensus that M’s domestication began in the Daniel Craig era, this paper contends that by the middle of the Pierce Brosnan era, M’s power is already exposed as a façade and she consequently enters the maternal realm. Expanding on Tasker’s writing on women in action films, this paper details how M’s authority not only shifts entirely into the maternal sphere but is also systematically stripped until she becomes a peculiar mother-child. Finally, this paper identifies an emerging pattern within popular media of turning Ma’ams to Moms to martyrs. Evidence is taken from Dench’s final Bond films and other contemporary action film series (Star Wars, The Hunger Games, and Divergent). This paper concludes that age has become a post-feminist strategy to neuter powerful women and return them to patriarchal and heteronormative frameworks.     

(Un-)becoming Chinese creatives: transnational mobility of creative labour in a ‘global’ Beijing

ABSTRACT

Drawing on qualitative research conducted on transnational creative workers in Beijing, this article shows how the vibrant interaction between global cultural industries and the local Chinese economy propels transnational labour mobility and affects the subjectification of transnational creative workers. Having come to China to enhance their careers, these professionals have been incorporated into the Chinese creative workforce, contributing to the Party State’s aspiration to use creativity as a growth engine for the economy and as a form of soft power. In terms of these workers’ everyday experience, however, China’s aspiration to ‘foreign creativity’ does not necessarily guarantee a privileged life. The State’s restrictions on migration and the insecure working circumstances within the Chinese creative workplace discourage these transnationals from fully integrating in Chinese society and the Chinese labour market. At the same time, this research shows that the precarious lives led by transnational creative workers in Beijing are also productive and generate the conditions for a situated cosmopolitan subjectivity. Such a cosmopolitan subjectivity fosters respect for cultural difference and relations of mutual understanding and care among both international and local subjects.     

Media Capital or Media Deficit?

This paper will focus primarily on how women in leadership roles are represented in the media using a feminist critical discourse approach (FCDA). There is a tendency amongst some feminist media analysts to homogenise all media as sexist, but contradictory tendencies are evident, especially with the rise of new media platforms. On the one hand, the news value of “unexpectedness” affords women in prominent leadership roles relatively high media capital. On the other hand, even ostensibly positive coverage can help to reinforce the limited and limiting perceptions of women that circulate in the mediatised public sphere. For instance, the hybridised gendered interactional and rhetorical styles favoured by many women in public sphere roles have led to them being evaluated as inauthentic by mainstream media institutions. This paper will investigate these contradictory tendencies through a focus on case study evidence of dominant media constructions of British, Irish, and US female political leaders. The paper will conclude by considering briefly the use of Twitter, blogs, and other new media platforms by high profile women in politics in order to bypass the persistent interpretative control exercised by some mainstream media institutions.     

‘It Was the Right Time To Do It’: Moving House,the Life‐Course and Kairos

While much has been written on the two issues of home and of residential mobility, little has been written on the experience of moving house. This paper aims to fill this gap. While work on residential mobility has tended to conceptualise it in terms of transitions in the life‐course as triggering moves, this paper explores how these moves are experienced and narrated by those moving house. In doing so, it develops the concept of kairos, an ancient Greek notion of time meaning the ‘right time’ to act. I argue that people who move house narrate their moving experiences in such terms: they saw an opportunity to move home, an opportunity that arose at just the right time and their timely actions meant that they seized the moment. It is through such narratives of kairos that homes are created and (re‐)constituted.     

Common Factors That Enhance the Quality of Life for Women Living in Their Own Homes or in Aged Care Facilities

A qualitative study of older women living in their own homes and older women living in aged care facilities found that the concerns of the women living in their own homes were the realities of life for the residents in the aged care facilities. Twenty-five female residents across two facilities and 11 older women living in their own homes were interviewed. The positive outcomes of aging at home are relevant and desirable for residents of aged care facilities. A smooth transition from community living to residential aged care involves retaining some of these positive aspects of their lives.     

Divorce,living arrangements,and material well-being during the transition to adulthood in rural Malawi

In this paper, we use longitudinal data to investigate how parental death and divorce influence young women’s own experience of divorce in Malawi, a setting where women marry relatively early and unions are fragile. We find that maternal death and parental divorce are positively associated with divorce for young women but, after controlling for socio-demographic and marital characteristics, only the association with maternal death remains statistically significant. Maternal and paternal death are both strongly associated with women’s post-divorce living arrangements, which in turn affects their material well-being. This finding suggests that divorcing at a young age shapes the subsequent life chances of women; although some women return to their parental home and may have the opportunity to reset the transition to adulthood, other women begin their 20s as head of their own household and with considerable material disadvantage.     

Experience,perceptions and attitudes of parents who planned home birth in Spain: A qualitative study

BackgroundA woman’s home birth and postpartum experience can have a major impact on her baby’s, partner’s and family’s well being. It is a life-altering event that can help improve or worsen women’s self-esteem and self-confidence.AimThe aim of this study was to describe and understand the experiences, perceptions and attitudes of parents who planned a home birth in Spain.MethodsA qualitative study was conducted based on Gadamer’s hermeneutic phenomenology. Two main methods were used for data collection; narratives and individual in-depth interviews with 14 mothers and 8 fathers who had planned a home birth in the last year. Inductive analysis was used to find themes based on the data obtained.FindingsSix main themes emerged from the data analysis: (1) in search of a natural and personalised birth, (2) breaking with social pressures, (3) experience of home birth for the mother, (4) role of the father in home birth, (5) how does the father experience home birth?, (6) home birth is not available to all mothers and fathers.ConclusionFor the mothers and fathers in this study the home birth experience fulfilled their previous expectations of an intimate and natural moment, making it a highly satisfying experience for both. However, parents expressed experiencing negative feelings such as fear and worry about complications and labor pain. According to our research society in general and public health professionals in particular issue numerous criticisms and value judgments towards mothers and fathers who opt for a home birth in our country. In addition, the study shows the economic and cultural inequalities in access to home birth in Spain.