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This chapter argues that sexual politics is present in all aspects of our lives, including gendered violence, the state, and citizenship. It adds that sexual politics opens up new possibilities for understanding the persistent effects of domestic violence by shifting attention to the politics of gender relations. This shift away from the binary category of gender as men/women to the active and relational dynamics of sexual politics undercuts assumptions that gendered violence is natural or inevitable, or that violence is only caused by individuals. Sexual politics has material and discursive effects and offers an understanding of how the gendered dynamics of domestic violence and its long-term consequences have remained largely hidden from view. This chapter argues that the persistence of violence against women is implicated in the sexual politics of citizenship and the state. Hence, the challenge of violence against women is recognised as an issue for the state, citizenship, and society.

This chapter discusses the gendered nature of both state-sponsored reforms and monastic revitalization in Labrang, considering the argument that Dengist economic reformers relied on Maoist state infrastructure in order to negotiate the natural contradictions to the dynamics of statist capitalism. It analyzes the local dynamics of gender and monastic revitalization in Labrang, and further studies the micropolitics of contextualization that is embedded in daily interactions.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of American Muslim organizations working against domestic violence in Muslim communities. The central goal of these organizations is simple: the eradication of domestic violence, a scourge that affects too many individuals, families, and communities in the United States and all over the world. Their work, however, is complicated, ongoing, and challenging. This book is about the people who carry out anti-domestic violence work in Muslim communities in the United States. It chronicles their efforts, their motivations, and their engagement with gender dynamics, textual interpretation, and religious authority. The chapter then lays out the framework for the following chapters, including the sources and methods employed in the study and the complex landscape of secondary literature on domestic violence.

This chapter reviews the things the author has learned about the Tibetans. It presents a record of her interview with one of her friends, Kazang, and takes a look at the Tibetans' Buddhist revival efforts in post-Mao China, re-examining the gender dynamics among Tibetans and the gendered nature of the post-Mao Buddhist revival. The chapter also considers the configuration of sex and gender categories among Labrang Tibetans, and the socioeconomic encounters since the founding of the Labrang monastery.

This chapter examines prison rape, specifically the myth that black men subject white men to rape in prisons more frequently. It asks: How do prisoners, guards, administrators, academics, and other observers come to believe that prison rape is black-on-white when it usually isn't? What is the effect of the black-on-white rape myth on prison law and policy? Why does this stereotype continue to influence prison law and policy when recent studies tend to contradict it? And what does it say about our understanding of race and gender in the outside world? The chapter is organized as follows. The first part reviews empirical data that illuminates the racial dynamics of prison rape. These data do not support the notion that prison rape typically, or disproportionately, involves black prisoners attacking whites. Contrary to stereotype, it is multiracial prisoners, not whites, who report significantly elevated risks of sexual abuse by other inmates that are unexplained by other factors. The second part considers the narrative practices by which prisoners, correctional officials, policymakers, academics, and others come to understand prison rape as typically black-on-white. The third part looks at the consequences and implications of the black-on-white rape myth. It suggests that black-on-white rape myth influences correctional responses to inmates' individual rape allegations, and gives rise to misguided policy recommendations. These stereotype-based policy recommendations also tend to deflect policy attention from the institutional and gender dynamics that have been shown to foster sexual violence.

This chapter investigates fictional descent narratives where the female character descends into the underworld. It first looks at the gender dynamics involved in descent narratives, where the descent heroes are usually men, while women play the role of the medium through which the quest is realised. The chapter then studies the feminist descent, and discusses in detail three descent narratives where the route to female subjectivity is down through a patriarchal Hell.

This chapter explores how self-propelling agency and social support shape immigrant trajectories and social mobility, including the negotiation of social support, the fluid nature of networks, and the roles of social support from a significant other, ties that offer leverage, and transnational ties. It also explores the challenges that self-propelling agents (SPAs) face in their quest for social mobility, including the struggle to maintain their children's “immigrant identity,” the shifting gender dynamics, and the negotiation of a changing culture and generational differences. To illustrate these points, the chapter mainly draws from the story of Josefa, a first-generation Afro-Honduran immigrant mother who lives in public housing in South Boston with her husband, Alberto, and their three children—Katrina, Yolanda, and Albertito.

This chapter examines the increasing circumscription of minoritized and feminized Burmese subjectivities in the late colonial and early postcolonial period through an analysis of Ma Ma Lay's 1955 anticolonial novel Not Out of Hate. Not Out of Hate offers an alter/native view of the end of British colonialism. Rather than focusing on the naturalistic savagery of Burma, Ma Ma Lay uses architecture and space to explore gender dynamics in British Burma. This chapter reads Not Out of Hate's tragic relationship between a young Burmese wife and her older Anglophilic husband as an allegory of gendered displacement, dramatizing a crisis of cultural contact initiated by British colonization of Burma. It also considers Ma Ma Lay's emphasis on autochthonous epistemologies and the liberatory potential of Buddhist renunciation, arguing that she offers a counterweight to the possessive orientations of Anglo-influenced imperialist masculinity and secularized heteropatriarchy. It shows that Not Out of Hate highlights the failure of substantive “emancipation” after Burmese independence.

Chapter 5 deals with the intangible aspects of cultural heritage and the notion of ‘intangible cultural heritage’ is introduced and defined and its significance for cultural communities and wider society considered, alongside the important related areas of traditional cultural expressions, traditional knowledge, and indigenous heritage. The history of UNESCO’s normative and operational activities in relation to intangible cultural heritage and the development of UNESCO’s 2003 Intangible Heritage Convention are presented, followed by an introduction to the treaty text and to the operation of the two international lists established by it. The potential for change and evolution in implementing approaches and measures that the flexible structure of this treaty, based on relatively broad provisions whose implementation is set out in detail by Operational Directives, is explored through two specific cases: the gender dynamics of safeguarding intangible heritage; and community participation in implementing the Convention.

Smith’s chapter explores the ways that ongoing social changes have affected the context of intimate partner violence and marital rape in southeastern Nigeria. At the core of these changes are transformations and contestations around gender dynamics. Many aspects of the contemporary situation, such as increasing levels of education and employment for women and widely circulating global norms about gender equality, appear to push against gender-based violence. However, Smith finds that these changes do not necessarily empower women in the face of abuse. He argues that exploring masculinity and the perceived challenges to patriarchy must be at the core of understanding and addressing sexual violence. But, rather than simply condemning male behavior, he contends that it must be put in context. This approach should not be interpreted as excusing men’s violence, but, rather, is absolutely necessary to curb it.

This chapter discusses people’s accounts of the challenges they face when men return to the home from prison. These accounts highlight particular tensions related to shifting from a masculinity constructed in accordance with the punitive constraints and dictates of the penitentiary to one that must operate within the harsh social conditions of life for impoverished people in the ‘outside’ world. Paradoxically, although riddled with emotional distress and responding to a brutalizing environment, the masculinity enacted during the incarceration period brings elements of fulfillment to men as well as their partners, who themselves enact an incarceration-specific femininity. By contrast, once men are home, men’s and women’s understandings of what it means to ‘be a man’ shift to encompass behaviors and achievements that are difficult for men with conviction histories to attain. Thus, the profound dissatisfaction both parties feel about the failure to enact this manhood translates into conflict in the relationship.

This chapter explores the reasons for women’s dislocation in and from the UK, and the gendered decision making processes involved in migrating to Spain: in other words, through the examination of women’s narratives, the chapter focuses on ‘the whys’ and ‘the how’ of retirement migration. This chapter explains how women experience disengagement from the UK as a place, or space, and also as temporal disjuncture, since they also reject the UK in the present. Age and ethnic positionalities too shape feelings of disruption. This is both in terms of feeling peripheral and on the margins of society through being retired, and also due to the presence of ‘others’, immigrants to the UK. This chapter unravels the multiple motivations for women’s migration, taking account of structural forces, their unique biographies and agency and positionalities through structurally analysing their narratives, illuminating their lives in context.

This chapter explores the reverberating impact of the Vietnamese female rape victim in Casualties of War (1989). The film concerns a patrol of GIs who, during a reconnaissance mission, kidnap, rape, and murder an innocent Vietnamese girl, a story that is embedded in another story about how one of them, Private Eriksson (Michael J. Fox), who tried unsuccessfully to prevent these events, eventually brings the others to justice. The film invites audiences, irrespective of gender, into more diffusely feeling territory. It moves beyond melodrama's universalizing symbol of female victimhood. Haptic amplification of the close-up on the woman's face and insistence on her individuality through restoration of her name while diminishing the hero's attempt to bring justice, readjusts the conventional gender dynamics of the war film, converting melodramatic pathos—reassuring us of our own humanity—to discomfiture and shame.