We are delighted to begin our first issue of 2023 with the announcement of two prizes that celebrate the life and work of two of the journal’s early editors; Janet Blackman and Sheila Cunnison. The Janet Blackman Prize celebrates scholarship on international feminist movements, trade unions and women in work and the Sheila Cunnison Prize celebrates scholarship on gender and the Global South. Our Janet Blackman prize for 2023 is awarded to Charlotte Morris, Tamsin Hinton-Smith, Rosa Marvell and Kimberley Brayson for their article ‘Gender back on the agenda in higher education: perspectives of academic staff in a contemporary UK case study’ and our Sheila Cunnison prize is awarded to Jonalou S. Labor and Augustus Ceasar Latosa for their article ‘Locked down queer love: intimate queer online relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic’.
This issue also features an interview with Rachele Girardi, the winner of our first Blu Tirohl prize, established in 2022 to celebrate the work of the journal’s previous Editor-in-Chief.
Our articles in this issue include discussions of benevolent sexism, Twitter talk about sexual violence, perceptions of sexual harassment and suspect credibility, attitudes to image based sexual abuse, reading responses to depictions of mothers and fathers, and the role of gender in learning a second language.
In the first of these Angélica Quiroga-Garzah, Eva Moreno-Bella, Juan A. Matamoros-Lima, and Guillermo B. Willis consider sexist beliefs in the context of festivals that focus on women, such as International Women’s Day. In Mexico, this festival, ‘Women’s Day’ also tends towards a celebration of traditional gender roles and relationships, emphasizing ‘how women should behave in order to be appreciated and rewarded’. The article suggests that, framed in this way, Women’s Day may actually promote benevolent sexist attitudes that praise women who conform to traditional values, with participants tending to agree more strongly with phrases containing benevolent sexist content on this day.
Juan Antonio Guevarah, Julia Atienza-Barthelemy, Daniel Gómez González and José Manuel Robles focus on two Spanish case studies involving Twitter – a discussion of an incident named ‘La Manada’ (‘the Wolf Pack’) - where a woman was sexually abused by five men during the San Fermin festival in 2016, and #Cuéntalo – an initiative by journalist Cristina Fallarás which encouraged women to share their experiences of aggression. The authors’ comparison of the cases suggests that spontaneous digital debates like La Manada promote negative and misogynistic discussions that are dominated by a set of ‘leaders’ while more organized and structured ones like #Cuéntalo encourage less polarized and more productive discussion which includes women.
Priel Harush, Sarit Elikishvili and Oshrit Kaspi-Baruch discuss an experiment in Israel investigating perceptions of sexual harassment. This used an account which claimed an experience of sexual harassment alongside related WhatsApp correspondence, with some participants shown the account with a man presented as the harasser and others with a woman presented as the harasser. Female respondents in the study tended to interpret the situation as harassment more often than men and the male character was interpreted more often as sexually harassing. Male respondents tended to judge the male harasser more severely whereas female respondents judged male and female harassers more equally. The authors discuss a range of possible interpretations of their findings and the implications for understanding how gender and sexual harassment are related.
Nir Rozmann and Inna Levy’s study also examined the relation of gender and perception, in this instance asking law students in Israel to assess a suspect’s credibility in a drug trafficking investigation. Participants read a transcript provided by a male or a female suspect and rated them as truthful/untruthful. Rozmann and Levy found that men tended to see male suspects as more credible, but there was no significant gender difference between the participants in relation to female suspects. Their study raises questions about how gender is related to the way judgements are made and how different kinds of perceived similarity between observer and suspect may figure in this.
Sarah Tan explores attitudes to sexual voyeurism and violence in Singapore, focusing particularly on image-based sexual abuse in digital environments and drawing on Facebook comments made in response to the media reporting of a sexual voyeurism case in 2019. Tan shows how commentary often tended to absolve male offenders, seeing violence as deriving from ‘natural’ male sexual desire, while blaming women for failing to avoid victimization, especially when they didn’t conform to standards of respectability. It also tended to present verbal abuse as trivial in contrast to physical abuse, but as the article shows, forms of image-based sexual abuse complicate these understandings, with commentators locating it differently in relation to verbal and physical abuse. A significant number of commentators resisted gender norms and victim-blaming in their responses.
Our final two articles consider issues of language. Mylène Ross-Plourde, Mylène Lachance-Grzela, Andréanne Charbonneau, Mylène Dumont and Annie Roy-Charland discuss their Canadian study of parental stereotypes, examining how passages that feature a mother or father in a traditional or non-traditional role were read by participants. Where fathers were featured, reading time was the same, regardless of how they were depicted. Yet when mothers were depicted in non-traditional roles, for example, paying for family expenses rather than feeding or comforting a child, participants’ reading slowed down. The study suggests that, while presentations of a ‘highly involved and nurturing father’ are still not frequent, perceptions of fatherhood have evolved more quickly while views of mothers remain more rigid.
Chit Cheung Matthew Sung’s article explores the relationship between gender and second language learning, following a woman’s experience of learning English at a university in Hong Kong. The article shows how her experience was constrained by gendered expectations in particular ways; for example, her concerns about not wanting to stand out or be seen as showing off in class led to her decision to contribute only when other students remained silent. In contrast, speaking in English to female students about Western culture allowed her to express what she felt was an appropriate form of femininity, displaying her belonging to an imagined community of English teachers exemplified by patient and caring women. The study shows the complex interplay between ideology, identity and capital in shaping aspirations and investments in language learning.