Annually, we award the Janet Blackman Prize in memory of the particular interests of one of our founding members. The 2019 prize has been awarded to Paloma Villegas for ‘I made myself small like a cat and ran away’: Workplace Sexual Harassment, Precarious Immigration Status and Legal Violence. The content of this article will shortly be made available as free-access for a limited period. We congratulate the author on this exceptional piece of work and wish her well with future projects.
This issue is themed around social influences over gender roles. Universal social hierarchies regulate gender roles, as well as sexual desire, through social learning and cultural practices or interactions. The resultant values (articulated or latent) are highly determinative in identity formation. The exposure of the challenges faced by those who encounter (either knowingly or unknowingly) these prescriptive roles is brought together here from a range of perspectives.
In Gender Factors in the Expression of Politeness in Farsi Makarova and Pourmohammadi focus on gender in the Iranian language, Farsi, known for the complexities of its politeness system (‘ta’aroff’). The authors explore the production and perception of ta’aroff across genders. The results show that men’s attitudes to ta’aroff are generally more positive than women’s and the authors point to some of the differences in its production.
In Gendered Perceptions in Punjab, Farooq examines different generations’ views of gender roles in rural Pakistan. Social, religious, economic and technological changes bring alterations to economic status as well as to thinking. Emergent data show that younger females face the greatest familial and community pressure in their life decisions. In particular, this affects their aspiration to economic independence which alters perceptions of them, as well as their status.
In Gender stereotypes in original digital video advertising Aramendia-Muneta, Olarte-Pascual and Hatzithomas use content analysis to assess digital video advertising. Although previous studies in advertising have depicted men in male-authored commanding roles, with muscular physiques, alongside objectified, hypersexualized, subordinate females, this research shows that women and men are equally portrayed in non-stereotypical activities and roles. However, in digital video advertising central figures are still more likely to be male than female, indicating a gender difference in terms of the assignment of key roles.
In The mediated erotic lover, Scarcelli and Stella study the discourse that young Italian heterosexual couples construct around pornography as illustrative of their negotiation of desire and gender roles. The interviewees widely express the idea of heterosexual male desire as implacable, natural and a fundamental expression of masculinity. The authors suggest that pornography might be seen as an erotic lover capable of embodying practices and desires that cannot be expressed or shared by a couple.
In Being bitchy and feminine: Unfolding the postfeminist account in Hong Kong’s CosmoGirl!, Kam examines this magazine’s intention to create an alternative approach to being for girls in a cosmopolitan city. The author looks at how the magazine frames the concept of ‘the girl’ through the lens of post-feminism and asserts that the freedom of choice emphasized in the magazine is not unlimited but one founded in ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. The unquestioning inclination towards opposite-sex relationships dichotomizes the ‘bitch’ and the ‘feminine’ and is reflective of the reality facing girls and women in a neoliberal economy such as Hong Kong.
In An ambiguous hierarchy of inequalities, Mostowska and Dębska present findings on women’s homelessness in Poland, demonstrating that contemporary studies on homelessness fail to acknowledge its intersectionality. This article adopts the concept of ‘political intersectionality’ to demonstrate policy failure in acknowledging overlapping categories of exclusion. The paper analyzes the narratives of older women and suggests that age in conjunction with experiences of violence are seldom considered. This indicates an ambiguous hierarchy of inequalities in which age determines the problems deemed important and – consequently – what kind of support can be granted, often at the expense of other concerns.
In Differences in Gay and Heterosexual Men’s Emotional Restriction through their Femininity, McMahon, Tiernan and Moane examine the role that emotional expression plays in men’s mental health. Emotionality is still perceived as a feminine response and its restriction is enmeshed in male identity. Gay men’s supposed relationship to femininity might suggest that they are less emotionally restrictive. Using subjects contacted through social media, this paper offers evidence that counters this.
In The myth that children can be anything they want, Fatima, Shahnaz and Qadir assess how gender is constructed in Pakistani children’s literature, using one of the oldest and most popular Urdu-language children’s magazines; `Taleem-o-Tarbiyat’. Content analysis was used to describe character and pictorial presentations of male and female characters. The findings indicate strong gender bias against females in both character and pictorial representation; a bias continuing over the years. Although, there was some improvement in the depiction of female characters at the end of the sample period, the representation of females in major and supporting roles is still limited.
In the Forum section of the journal Tom Ue interviews the London-based playwright, theatre director and producer, Tom Wright. In 2019, his plays My Dad’s Gap Year and Undetectable premiered in the UK, winning many awards between them. Ue and Wright discuss the inspiration behind these works. The interview attends to the social and literary context in which the plays emerged, how they evolved, and their individual thematic interests; advancing understanding of contemporary gay theatre, internal homophobia, transgender people and mixed-race relationships.