Gender and Authority across Disciplines, Space and Time

This edited collection investigates the relationship between gender and authority across geographical contexts, periods and fields.

Who is recognized as a legitimate voice in debate and decision-making, and how is that legitimization produced? Through a variety of methodological approaches, the chapters address some of the most pressing and controversial themes under scrutiny in current feminist scholarship and activism, such as pornography, political representation, LGBTI struggles, female genital mutilation, the #MeToo movement, abortion, divorce and consent. Organized into three sections, Politics, Law and Religion, and Imaginaries, the contributors highlight formal and informal aspects of authority, its gendered and racialized configurations, and practices of solidarity, resistance and subversion by traditionally disempowered subjects. In dialogue with feminist scholarship on power and agency, the notion of authority as elaborated here offers a distinctive lens tocritique political and epistemic foundations of inequality and oppression, and will be of use to scholars and students across gender studies, sociology, politics, linguistics, theology, history, law, film, and literature.

Uses a variety of methodological approaches to address the most pressing and controversial themes related to gender and authority Covers a wide range of topics including pornography, the bio-medicalization of intersex people, the #metoo movement, female genital mutilation, LGBT representation, abortion, divorce and consent Multidisciplinary in nature and covers a wide range of periods

Auteur

Adele Bardazzi is Laming Research Fellow at Queen's College, University of Oxford, UK.

Alberica Bazzoni is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK.

Contenu

1. Introduction: Gender and Authority; Adele Bardazzi and Alberica Bazzoni.- Part 1. Politics.- 2. Language and the Problem of Women's Authority; Deborah Cameron.- 3. Negotiating Authority through Feminism: Girls' Political Experience in Italian Social Movements; Arianna Mainardi and Carlotta Cossutta.- 4. Kenyan Political Autobiographies: Reviving Generational Power and Masculine Authority; Anaïs Angelo.- 5. #MeToo, but First...: The Question of Analytic Priority in Identity Politics; Antonette Talaue-Arogo.- 6. "Exemplary" Lesbians: The Struggle for Adequate Representation; Charlotte Ross.- Part 2. Law and Religion.- 7. The Bio-medicalization of Intersex Variations between Medical and Parental Authority; Michela Balocchi and Ino Kehrer.- 8. The Law Believes the Words of Women More Than the Words of Men: Gendered Experiences of Divorce in Ben Ali's Tunisia; Sarah Grosso.- 9. What Does the Shastra Have to Say? The Age of Consent Bill Controversy and the Reimagination of Hinduismin Modern Western India; Alok Oak.- 10. Female Religious Authority in Muslim Majority Contexts: Past Examples and Modern State-Initiatives; Roja Fazaeli.- 11. Lived Religion and Female Informal Authority in a Neighborhood in Stuttgart, Germany; Petra Kuppinger.- Part 3. Imaginaries.- 12. The Politics of Reproduction: Abortion and Authority in Soviet Cinema; Serian Carlyle and Rachel Morley.- 13. Female Genital Mutilation: Authority, Fact and Fiction; Tobe Levin von Gleichen.- 14. The Authority of Pornography; F. Vera-Grey.- 15. Reconfiguring the Template: Representations of Powerful Women in Historical Fiction - The Case of Anna Komnene; Ioulia Kolovou.- 16. Staging Female Creatives in French Caribbean Women's Theatre; Vanessa Lee.