Gender under Construction: Femininities and Masculinities in Context(94 At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries)

Gender performativity, its variances depending on their historical, social and cultural contexts, and the rituals, representations and institutions involved in gender performances are some of the issues the authors addressed in this collection. Gender under Construction takes a non-essentialist view of gender and provides illustrative examples of gender constructive processes by pursuing them in various contexts and by means of diverse methodologies. In so doing, the book demonstrates that it is unfeasible to consider gender as a fixed biological trait. Instead, the authors propose to look at gender performance as ongoing processes in which femininities and masculinities enter multiple and dynamic intersections with a myriad of categories, including those of nationality, ethnicity, class, sexuality and age.

Contributors are Iqbal Akthar, Renata Ćuk, Ewa Glapka, Deirdre Hynes, Borja Ibaseta, Martin King, Ana Cristina Moreira Lima, Mervi Patosalmi, Marcia Bastos de Sá, Andréa Costa da Silva, Vera Helena Ferraz de Siqueira, Christi van der Westhuizen and Isabelle V. Zinn.


Table of Contents:
Introduction  Ewa Glapka and Barbara Braid Part I Gender in Talk: Construction of Identity versus Hegemonic Discourses of Gender   Masculinity in Media Consumption: Readers’ Positioning to the Discourse of a Men’s Magazine   Ewa Glapka   Still Pink and Pale: White Afrikaans Hetero-Femininity in Postapartheid South Africa   Christi van der Westhuizen   Gendering the Workplace: Between Transgression and (De-)Naturalisation   Isabelle V. Zinn Part II Dynamic Masculinities and Their Representations   Inscribing the Male: Representations of Masculinity and Male Bodies in Contemporary Literature   Borja Ibaseta   ‘Imprisoned in a System of Work, Produce, Consume’: So How Did Jack Kerouac, Hugh Hefner, Albert Finney and John Lennon Challenge the Link between Masculinity and Responsibility?   Martin King   Desperately Becoming a Father: Representations of Fatherhood in Desperate Housewives   Iqbal Akthar and Deirdre Hynes Part III Gender, Sexuality and the Coercive Power of Institutions   Sexual Violence against Men in Armed Conflict: Why Is It still Invisible?   Renata Cuk   Marital Rape and Constructions of Sexual Agency   Mervi Patosalmi   Sexuality and Gender at a Brazilian School: Constructing Femininities   Vera Helena Ferraz de Siqueira, Marcia Bastos de Sá, Andrea Costa da Silva, and Ana Cristina Moreira Lima

About the Author :
Ewa Glapka has received her PhD degree from Adam Mickiewicz University and is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her research interests include discourse and gender, media discourse, media reception, discursive psychology and qualitative sociology. In 2014, she published a book titled: Reading Bridal Magazines from a Critical Discursive Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Barbara Braid has earned her PhD degree at Opole University, Poland, and currently holds a position of Assistant Lecturer in English at Szczecin University, Poland. She has published a number of book chapters and journal articles on neo-Victorian fiction, gender performativity, gothic studies and lesbian fiction. She has co-edited a two-volume collection of essays “Unity in Diversity” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013-14).