Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 26, Issue 3/4, 2023

In this article, we describe to what extent culture-bound gender norms are reproduced in interactions between childcare workers and parents in daycare. This is important because more and more families want to share responsibilities for paid work and child rearing equally, but in many families this does not work out that way. Prevailing gender norms may provide an explanation for this. We used an online questionnaire to measure which implicit (gender/career IAT) and explicit gender beliefs (ideal amount of time spent on work or care for both father and mother) are held by childcare workers (n=259) and to what extent these beliefs and their different behaviour towards fathers and mothers is related. Although childcare workers with more traditional gender beliefs on the division of paid work by parents are more likely to inform and reach out to mothers, the relationships between beliefs and behaviour are not as strong as expected. An important finding is that the presence of more fathers in daycare is associated with more egalitarian behaviour of childcare workers. We suggest that the current tendency to approach mothers more often can be challenged by inviting more fathers and acknowledging them as the important parents they are.

This article explores the relationship between marriage and conversion from a critical gender perspective, based on a comparative ethnographic study of women’s conversion to Judaism, Islam and Christianity in the Netherlands. In the study of religion and gender, a valuable conceptual framework developed that questions the limited representation of religious women (as somehow ‘oppressed’) and recognises agency within observance. However, up to now, theories and conceptualisations of female conversion have not been able to successfully deal with the tension between individual agency and relationality, more concretely: between individual choice and the impact of intimate relationships. This article suggests a framework more capable of grasping the complexities of conversion and marriage, by introducing the concept of mixedness. In this approach, relationships are understood as agential spaces of religious becoming. Conversion forms and reforms what is ‘mixed’ within a relationship, and intimate relationships indeed play an important role in religious becoming. The goal is to move beyond the binary options that women seem to have to vocalise their process: either they convert because of someone else (implying less agency) or their religious transformation is an expression of autonomous, individual choice (neglecting the impact of relationships). Mixedness highlights the dynamic and fluid aspects of intimate relationships, whilst simultaneously focusing on the interactions between the couples’ experiences of mixedness and social norms of majority and minority religio-racial groups.

In contemporary debates on multiculturalism and immigration, gender (equality) remains crucial in drawing lines between the Western European self and non-Western Others. A crucial figure in these debates is the veiled Muslim woman, who is marked to be both the victim of a perceived oppressive patriarchal religion and a cultural threat to Western modernity and its freedoms (with regards to gender and sexuality). Different studies scrutinise how this figure is employed to constitute cultural differences and imagine national selves. This paper explores the impact of such national discourse on the everyday experiences of anti-Muslim racism of fourteen Muslim women in the Netherlands. Drawing on a distinction between structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and everyday anti-Muslim racism, we demonstrate how veiling and unveiling practices of one’s Muslim identity are crucial in the racism that is experienced. Veiled Muslim women experience more structural (e.g. labour market and educational), hegemonic (stereotypes to (re)imagine national selves) and everyday (e.g. exclusion, discrimination, and violence) anti-Muslim racism. While unveiled Muslim women – in unveiling or veiling their religious identity – are more likely to navigate everyday anti-Muslim racism. Altogether, anti-Muslim racism fundamentally limits the ways in which Muslim women can move, dress, and express themselves in different spaces.

This article discusses the TikTok trends on deified forms of (post)femininities posted under the regularly co-occurring hashtags: #darkfemininity, #divinefemininity, and #feminineenergy. Through digital methods in tandem with feminist critical discourse analysis, this research clarifies, construes, and contextualizes these trends and developments in their historical as well as contemporary contexts. It addresses the current multimodal discourses and network around dark and divine femininities on TikTok as well as how these post-femininities dialectically relate to the (post)modernist episteme and its theological heritage of Christianity, questioning if this postfeminist affective public leads to subversion or subjugation of these subjective positions and systemic inequalities.

With the multiplication of queer identity categories and the lack of knowledge transfer in queer communities, ‘female masculinity as a culture’ seems to die out (Halberstam, 1998, p. 269). While comics by Alison Bechdel and Diane DiMassa highlight the word dyke¹, it has barely been investigated academically (Jones 2012). To fill this research dearth, we adopted an interdisciplinary mixed-method approach consisting of a qualitative literary analysis and a quantitative linguistic analysis. Text-specific findings from the literary analysis were then investigated linguistically by focusing on 692 occurrences of the word dyke in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (henceforth COCA, Davies, 2008–present). We focused on the following research questions: which characteristics of the word dyke emerge in a literary analysis of comics by queer authors? And: does the corpus-linguistic analysis confirm these characteristics? The literary analysis revealed that dykes often position themselves in-between, neither identifying as femme or butch, incorporating an ambiguous gender performance. The extended lens of the COCA showed that widespread, influential media outlets promote a derogatory use of the word dyke. Contrary to our hopes, we could not show an improvement concerning the response towards female masculinity and gender ambiguity.

This paper will look at the influence of digital media platforms and the aural storytelling medium on the inclusion of LGBTQ+ representation in independent audio fiction podcasts. It has been argued that independent fiction podcasting is a unique place for LGBTQ+ content in the current media landscape. This paper aims to investigate what affordances independent fiction podcasts have to aid this inclusion of LGBTQ+ representation. When it comes to production and dissemination, this paper will argue that the independence afforded by low production costs, ease of dissemination, and ample participatory culture are the main factors that facilitate the inclusion of LGBTQ+ representation in independent audio fiction podcasts. When it comes to the influence of the fiction podcast as an aural medium, the ‘invisibility’ of audio and the importance of voice are the main factors that influence the ease of including LGBTQ+ representation because this invisibility can aid in disrupting heteronormative and cisnormative ideas. This paper will aim to do this through a literature review and original analyses, aided by case studies of popular independent fiction podcasts such as Welcome to Night Vale, The Adventure Zone, The Penumbra Podcast and The Magnus Archives.