Crossing Borders In Gender And Culture

While gender issues are almost always multidimensional and complex, this book discusses them from a cultural angle and with a focus on crossing borders, to represent their concepts meaningfully and to illuminate their realities as sharply as possible. Its five parts detail specific aspects and issues within that focus, namely communication, literary representation, equality and violence, work and politics, and cross-cultural connections. This combination of a wide topical range with specific discussions of gender issues makes the volume’s insights worthwhile for a wide range of readers, from individuals and groups engaging with current gender challenges, to institutional and political decision-makers entrusted with improving gender relations on national or international levels, up to social, economic or educational institutions empowered to implement such solutions in everyday reality. Its “unity in diversity” contributes to gender and cultural studies by offering considerations and conclusions that are specific and generalizable, theoretically robust and empirically tested, professionally rational and poetically ravishing.

This volume brings together scholars, students and writers as well as artists from around the world. By choosing a thematic focus on "transition" in women’s lives, we present research on women who have crossed biological, geopolitical and political borders as well as emotional, sexual, cultural and linguistic boundaries. The international approach brings together different cultures and genres in order to emphasize the links and connections that bind women together, rather than those which separate them. The chapters consider the ways in which the changes and transitions women undergo influence the world we live in. We are particularly interested in the idea of crossing borders and how this influences identity and belonging, and the theme of crossing boundaries in the context of motherhood as well as sexual orientation. The topic is timely given the waves of migration all around the world in recent times. The contributors deal with issues central to contemporary life, such as gender equality and women’s empowerment, as well as understanding women’s identities and being sensitive to fluid concepts of gender and sexuality.

This book explores the processes of self-understanding that take place in a group of Chinese women studying in universities in the United States. In the past few decades, there has been an increasing number of Chinese women attending U.S. universities, yet their psychological experiences within American culture have not been a focus of study by researchers in higher education. Those who crossed geographic, cultural, and psychological borders to study in the U.S. described their change as a basic psychological process called 'reweaving a fragmented self.' This book contributes to the educator's understanding of the diversity of international women's student experiences, expectations, and desires.

The study of borders has recently undergone significant transitions, reflecting changes in the functions of boundaries themselves, as the world political map has experienced transformations. Gender (defined as the knowledge about perceived distinctions between the sexes) is an important signifier of borders as constructed and contested lines of differences. In the interplay with other categories of difference like class, race, ethnicity, and religion, it plays a major role in giving meaning to different forms of borders. It is not surprising, then, that an increasing number of studies in the last years have aimed for a gendering of border studies. This book explores this new interdisciplinary field and develops it further. The main questions it asks are: How do we define 'borders', 'frontiers' and 'boundaries' in different disciplinary approaches of gendered border studies? What were and are the main fields of gendered border studies in different fields? What might be important questions for future research? And how useful is an inter- or transdisciplinary approach for gendered border studies? Sixteen established scholars from various disciplines contribute chapters in which they set out how the issue of gender and borders has been approached in their discipline and describe what they expect from future research.

This anthology indicates the many and multi-layered ways in which women's movements have developed in the past and the challenges that face women's movements today. Covering a broad range of issues, the book strives for re-narration and re-location of one of the major social movements of the 20th century and for fresh analysis of the latest trends. The framework for the texts has been set by recent structural, ideological and cultural changes towards globalization (including the end of the Cold War bipolarization), immigration, and multiculturalism. The changes have produced new fields of cooperation and conflicts within the women's movements and generated new questions that are dealt with in four main sections. - Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2005

This volume introduces a gender dimension and provides new insights in the issues like nationalism and racism, identity building, transnational networking, citizenship and democracy.

This innovative book represents a timely intervention in both critical discourses on video and new media art, as well as examination of gender in post-Socialist contexts. The chapters explore how encounters between art and technology have been implicated in the representation and analysis of gender, critically reflecting current debates and politics across the region and Europe. The book offers a diversity of analytical contexts, addressing interwoven histories across post-Socialist Europe, and engages the paradigms of art practice and the visual cultures such histories uphold. Contributors have given a broad interpretation to the questions of video, media and performance, as well as to mediation in relation to art and gender, reflecting on a wide range of subjects, from the curatorial role to artistic practice, cross-cultural collaboration, co-production, democracy and representation, and impasses in securing streamlined identities. The volume brings together rigorously theoretical and visually comprehensive examinations of examples of works, featuring artists such as: Bernd and Hilla Becher; Anna Daučiková; Izabella Gustowska; Judit Kele; Komar and Melamid; Andrzej Karmasz; Marko Marković; Oleg Mavromatti; Tanja Ostojić; Nebojša Šerić Šoba; Mare Tralla; Ulay and Abramović and others. Contributors: Inga Fonar Cocos, Mark Gisbourne, Marina Gržinić, Beata Hock, Katarzyna Kosmala, Paweł Leszkowicz, Iliyana Nedkova, Agata Rogoś, Boryana Rossa, Aneta Stojnić, Josip Zanki. Preface by Katy Deepwell.

Comprises 13 papers which explore the concept of boundaries in relation to the family, gender and culture. Questions the value or legitimacy of boundaries and shows how, by transgressing these borders, the conventional codes that govern social relations are challenged. Comprises four sections covering: the role of the state in shaping family forms; conceptions of women's space and time in household organization; the role of colonialism in defining household and kin relations; and the impact of work and changing economies on the shaping of households.