Browsing by Subject "gender"

This thesis is a part of Development through Sports discussion, particularly from gender perspective and its effort to improve women’s position and status in developing countries by using sport as a tool. The study aims to depict the position and effects produced by gender in the field of sport and education by the means of ethnography. The perspective of the study is holistic in its attempt to acknowledge the impact of Tanzanian society, economy and politics for girls’ and women’s position within sport and education. The study was carried out with 7-week long fieldwork in a Tanzanian teacher training college. The college was a boarding school and the study focused mainly on students of physical education. The data of the study was collected with participant observation, informal discussions, semistructured thematic interviews and structured survey questionnaire. Also study material used in the college was collected, such as course outlines and directions given to the students. The interviews were analysed with thematic analyse. The space of girls and women in the masculine field of sport in Tanzania is narrow and challenging. For sociocultural reasons, it is difficult for women to obtain the motorical and psychosocial skills needed in teaching physical education in childhood and youth. It is more difficult for girls and women to have access and to move in masculine spaces that in addition to sport and sporting fields, is salaried work done outside home. Salaried work is necessary for financing the studies, but acquiring the money has moral effects. The morally acceptable financiers of women’s education are families – fathers and husbands mainly. Moral conflicts are caused if a woman acquires the funding through transactional sex and/or uneducated, physical labour. By moving in these masculine, independent spaces of sport and money, the morality and value of a woman can be questioned and thus inhibit the development of women’s position in society and women’s financial independence.

This thesis answers to a question “Why adolescent girls drop out of school in Northern Uganda?” In Uganda, approximately 70% of the children drop out of public school before 7th grade, the final year of primary school. In northern Uganda, girls drop out of school in more significant numbers than boys, and it happens around the age when girls reach puberty. Northern Uganda is also a particular location because it is recovering from long conflict, affecting strongly the whole population living in the area. The thesis is based on two-month ethnographic fieldwork in northern Uganda during the spring of 2015. To answer the main research question this study seeks to analyse it through taking a look how the school, the community and the girls themselves experience and talk about dropping out, education and growing up in the current post-conflict state of the social life. The thesis argues that the dropout rate is linked to the adolescence as life-stage of becoming an adult that is making the girls to make decisions about the future. The analysis is done through three different perspectives – the educational, societal and personal narratives of the youth. The first perspective is the education and schooling in northern Uganda. It explores the concept of ’educated person’ by Levinson and Holland through sexual education and gender in education. The study shows that Ugandan public primary and secondary education is deriving its ideas and understanding of educated person from the national curriculum, which often conflict with the local concepts of the educated person in the Acholi community, influencing the blamed and real reasons for dropping out. The second perspective looks into the community and the societal pressures the girls are facing when growing up. It will describe family, kinship, marriage and gender in post-conflict context and show how in these areas of life, the past conflict, “loss of culture”, generational conflicts and subsequent disobedience are presented as reasons behind the challenges to stay in school. The third perspective tells the stories of the girls met and talked to during the ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Uganda. It answers the question “What is happening in the life of a girl when she drops out of school?”. It is argued that the girls take actions of a gendered agency to further their lives and become adults. Thus, dropping out of school cannot just be explained as a simple event just suddenly happening without their own will. It will further answer the question “What makes some girls stay in school?” to show how those girls still in school manage the crosscurrents of growing up in Acholiland. The thesis argues that the girls in northern Uganda are active appropriators and social agents who through their own actions contest, struggle and penetrate the structures in their society while also at the same time reproduce them. In Northern Uganda, both the community and the state together with different international agencies will have plans and expectations for the girls’ future. The study shows how the girls navigate the school, community and peer expectations and sociocultural and economic structures to stay or finally drop out of school. These structures are state organised and aid-infused formal schooling and society in amidst of post-conflict recovery which creates a framework where the girls are acting. The school presents the modern and globally orientated educated person, and in contrast to it, the community is looking for to restore ‘traditional’ way of life. It is argued that these two sides are often in conflict and in the middle of this conflict the girls act and solve their way out of it, looking for adulthood and gaining respectable status in the society. The schools, the community and even sometimes the development actors see the girls as passively following the things they will encounter. The thesis will show that they are not. The girls either stay in school or drop out of it, but more often as a consequence of their own decisions and actions than passively because the school or the community could not support them. It is demonstrated that dropping out of school looks more of line a tactic for the future as a respectable grown-up than mere problem to be solved.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted Finland to re-evaluate its national security and led to increased support for NATO membership. This study examines how Finnish news media portrays national security at the time of heightened sense of insecurity. The objective of the study is to explore and expose the nexus of security and gender within the NATO discussion context. Drawing on feminist security studies, this study views security as a gendered concept. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, integrating security studies, gender studies, and media studies. The thesis investigates the gendered nature of security by using traditional masculine and feminine values as tools in discourse analysis. Additionally, the thesis analyses whose voices are heard in the media. This case study focuses on the NATO discussion in Helsingin Sanomat, Iltalehti, and Yle from January to March 2022. The thesis comprises two parts from the perspective of methodology and data. The quantitative content analysis of 671 online news articles examines gender representation in the media, while the qualitative analysis of 70 opinionated online news media articles employs thematisation and Wodak’s approach to critical discourse analysis. The findings of this study imply that the dominant notion of security in the media is narrow and masculine. The hegemonic notion of Finnish national security aligns with traditional masculinity, emphasising militaristic, physical, and rational characteristics. The analysis shows that growing insecurity appears to correspond with decreasing feminine notions of security. The study argues that the prevailing security discourse in the media is exclusive to the performances of militarised masculinity. Additionally, security is predominantly discussed by male voices in the media. Finally, this thesis argues that the dominant narrow, masculine, and militaristic notion of security is not contested in the media, thereby lacking a comprehensive understanding of securities and insecurities as well as inequalities. The study addresses a need for further critical research to examine the interrelation of national security, militarism, and gender in Finland.

In the Monsoon season of 2015, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, revealed his ambitious programme ‘Digital India’ which aims to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. However, the gender dimension of digitalisation is absent in the conversations about Digital India. In the said background, the thesis strives to address the lacunae in the debates and investigate what digitalisations means for expanding women’s capabilities in India. The premise of the thesis was grounded in two conceptual notions. Firstly, Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s capability approach served as the normative framework and as a tool for evaluating digitalisation in India. Secondly, information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) formed another fundamental building block for the thesis. The principal objective of the study was to investigate women’s wellbeing in the digitalisation process in India. Nine organisations, working in the field of women’s rights and/or digitalisation, were interviewed to gather the principal data. In the research, knowledge acquired was rearranged with the support of the theoretical framework. The qualitative content analysis method was employed through which three distinct categories were discovered: independence, sexuality and control. In the analysis, these three categories were utilised to dissect the impact of digitalisation on women’s capabilities in India. The findings of the thesis demonstrate that digitalisation efforts expand women’s internal capabilities. Women have acquired independence through gaining economic capabilities through e-commerce, where women are able to sell their products to a larger audience. Furthermore, technologies allow the incorporation of women’s voices in the flow of information, addressing issues that matter to them and rendering their view on events. Many interviewees stressed the importance of access to information that women gain with ICTs. However, Modi’s government treats digitalisation as a panacea for India’s challenges and views ICTs as ends rather than means. The Government fails to address the socio-cultural norms that impede on women’s capabilities to utilise ICTs even if they acquire digital literacy. As seen through the study, women have shown poorer conversion rates in transforming ICT-commodities into capabilities and functionings. Thus, the current implementation of digitalisation in India is at a risk of generating more inequalities as opposed to reducing them.

In this thesis I examine the Finnish Border Guard’s (FBG) institutional understandings about migrant sex work and it’s policing. Through stating that the entry of a non-EU/EFTA citizen may be denied at the borders if there is a reason to suspect them of selling sexual services, the Finnish Aliens Act 148 § gives the FBG a role in policing migrant sex work at the national borders. As the law attributes the border enforcing officials with considerable discretionary power while no public information is available about the implementation of the law, the FBG’s institutional conceptions about the law and its implementation become objects of research. With an interview data consisting of four interviews with FBG officials working in superior positions, I present an analysis of the institutional understandings that guide the interpretation of the law. I use a combination of content analysis and frame analysis to examine the two closely intertwined aspects of the institutional conceptions that the interviewees draw from: the descriptions of the practices done at the borders and the institutional framework that gives meaning to these practices. Using content analysis I map out the officials’ descriptions of the ‘correct’ interpretation and implementation of the law on a practical level. Here, I look at how the discretional space between the letter of law and the concrete practices is bridged in the interviewees’ accounts. With the help of frame analysis I examine the underlying conceptions that the interviewees draw from when describing the institutional stance to migrant sex work. Here I analyse the framing of migrant sex work as a phenomenon and the FBG’s role in policing it. In the institutional framework of the FBG, migrant sex work is framed as a ‘public order problem’ that should be hindered through crime prevention and immigration control. In this framework, migrant sex work is criminalised and framed as a threat to the national stability, while the FBG is positioned as an institution ensuring the safety and stability of the Finnish society.

The dissertation elaborates a theoretical approximation to the subject of gender parity and democracy. The study contends that parity serves as an institutional mechanism that helps create a political space for the contestation of gender power relations (génos relations). After examining in detail the definitional borders of democracy and explicating the formation of democratic identity, grounded on Foucault’s notions of power, I analyze génos relations, as social constructions that mold the desires and beliefs of men and women. Accordingly, I explain how democracy needs to provide spaces of deliberation so as to guarantee the possibility for the political discussion of the predominant practices that distinguish male/female interaction. In the conclusion, I make a plea for the essentiality of difference when undertaking the task of analyzing the topics of democracy and gender, supporting the theoretical and practical approaches that propose to create a more democratic world by learning from heterogeneity.

Abstract The aim of this study is to critically analyse and unfold common discourse on emigration in Georgian talk radio show “Migration Routes”. It is largely focused on non-elite talk on emigration from Georgia with the purpose to find different metaphors that were involved in the talk. The study aims to answer the following questions: 1. how is emigration and emigrants linguistically constructed in talk radio show? 2. Is there evidence that can be found in the speakers’ use of language that promotes dramatization of female emigrants from Georgia? 3. What functions do such discourses have in the society? I have chosen Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological approach to better analyse naturally occurring spoken material. For the analyses of material, the following scheme has been implemented: 1) identification of thematic content areas of the material; 2) analysis of the dominant rhetorical devices in the talk (e.g. the use of metaphor, referential vagueness, extreme case formulations, etc.); 3) argumentative strategies that lie behind emigration discourse, which at the first glance seems to be very positive. In total, eleven talk radio shows have been listened and analysed. Three discursive strategies have been used by the actors of talk radio show to convey ideologies, attitudes and common sense knowledge: victimization of migrants, avoidance of concrete discussion on the empowerment of migrants and use of positive rhetoric with contradictory implications. It has been revealed that speakers of this radio programme enjoyed drama talk on emigrants which in turn reinforced myths, idealized discussions and perpetuated portrayal of emigrants as “victims”, “lost generation”. Discourse around representation of female emigrants from Georgia was contrasting in essence. Most commonly, it was linked to negatively connoted metaphors such as “virtual parent”, “guest”, “other”, “sacrifice”, “battle”, “and “fear”. However, the other side of female emigration was understood as positive in terms of their success stories and professional as well as personal achievements. Behind the good intention to cover emigration topic and bring their voices into the public, the way it has been achieved resulted in symbolic understanding of emigration which was on the surface.

Naisten ja seksuaali- sekä sukupuolivähemmistöjen oikeuksia vastustava antigender-liikehdintä on lisääntynyt sekä Euroopassa että muualla maailmassa. Antigender-liikehdintä vastustaa uhkaksi määrittelemäänsä ”gender-ideologiaa”, eli sosiaalisen sukupuolen käsitteen valtavirtaistumista, naisten lisääntymisoikeuksien laajenemista sekä seksuaali- ja sukupuolivähemmistöjen oikeuksien laajenemista. Antigender-liikehdintä on uhka ihmisoikeuksien toteutumiselle. Vaikka liikehdintä on toistaiseksi Suomessa pienimuotoista, monissa Euroopan maissa antigender-toimijat ovat jo saaneet aikaan konkreettisia lainsäädännöllisiä muutoksia esimerkiksi naisten aborttioikeuteen sekä seksuaalivähemmistöjen oikeuksiin. Tämä tutkielma käsittelee antigender-liikehdintää suomalaisessa kontekstissa. Aito avioliitto ry on suomen keskeisimpiä antigender-toimijoita. Tutkielman teoreettisena viitekehyksenä toimii ontologisen turvallisuuden näkökulma, jossa antigender-liikehdintää tarkastellaan pyrkimyksenä ontologisen turvallisuudentunteen saavuttamiseen yhteiskunnassa, jossa erilaiset sukupuoleen ja seksuaalisuuteen liittyvät kulttuuriset ja lainsäädännölliset muutokset ovat aiheuttaneet joillekin ryhmille ontologisen turvallisuudentunteen horjumista. Tutkielman aineisto koostuu Aito avioliitto ry:n verkkosivuillaan julkaisemista artikkeleista, uutisista ja muusta materiaalista. Aineiston analyysin menetelmänä toimii kehysanalyysi. Tunnistan analyysin perusteella Aito avioliitto ry:n julkaisuista kolme keskeistä kehystä. Transideologia uhkana lasten kasvurauhalle -kehyksessä määritellään sukupuolen moninaisuus -ajattelu ja sosiaalisen sukupuolen käsite uhkana lasten kehitykselle. Heteroavioliitto yhteiskunnan tukipilarina -kehys painottaa heteroavioliiton merkitystä yhteiskunnallisen tasapainon kannalta ja erityisesti lasten hyvinvoinnin näkökulmasta. Sananvapauden kaventuminen -kehys määrittelee suvaitsevaisuuden ja moninaisuuden käsitteiden olevan todellisuudessa hyökkäys konservatiivisia ja perinteisiä arvoja vastaan, joiden tarkoituksena on hiljentää konservatiivisia ääniä yhteiskunnassa. Kehyksissä määritellään gender-ideologia yhteiskuntajärjestykselle vaaralliseksi aatteelliseksi voimaksi, joka uhkaa erityisesti lasten turvallisuutta. Heteroavioliitto määritellään yhteiskuntaa ja moraalista järjestystä ylläpitävänä instituutiona. Aito avioliitto ry perustelee ja legitimoi argumenttejaan tieteeseen, luonnollisiin tosiasioihin sekä moraalisiin käsityksiin vedoten. Kehystämällä seksuaali- ja sukupuolivähemmistöjen oikeuksien vahvistuminen luonnollista järjestystä uhkaavaksi, Aito avioliitto ry pyrkii herättämään yleisössään ontologisen turvattomuuden tunteen. Aito avioliitto ry:n toiminta voidaan nähdä pyrkimyksenä ontologisen turvallisuudentunteen vahvistamiseen yhteiskunnassa, jossa sukupuoleen ja seksuaaliseen liittyvät murrokset aiheuttavat joissain ihmisissä ontologisen turvallisuudentunteen heikkenemistä.

This thesis studies the discourses of power and anti-violence activism related to feminicides in Mexico. Feminicides are defined as killings of women because of their gender. Although feminicides have existed throughout the history of Mexico, the issue became a focus of attention among the masses nearly 30 years ago because of the wave of violence in Ciudad Juárez. Today, according to the official data of the State, three women are victims of feminicides in Mexico daily. However, the number is most likely substantially higher given the underreporting of feminicides and that some states still do not distinguish them as separate crimes from homicides. It is estimated that approximately ten women are killed as victims of feminicides in Mexico every day. The theoretical framework for this study is rooted in the Foucauldian scholarship of power. More precisely, Michel Foucault’s theory of power as relational or productive and the idea of power being everywhere but nowhere, in particular, imposes the principal understanding of how violence is implicated in multiple structures of power relations. The study was conducted in the form of semi-structured interviews, with data being gathered by interviewing six feminist activists who are working against feminicides in Mexico. After this, the interviews were analysed with methods of discourse analysis. The study finds the total of five main discourses with their sub-discourses: 1. Structures (Patriarchal culture and Deficient understanding), 2. The State (Politics and Impunity), 3. Truth (Bending truth and Clash of genders) 4. Pervasive violence, and 5. Women’s networks. The results of the analysis suggest that the power related to violence against women comes indeed from everywhere: power comes from structures of the society, from education, from the State and the law (and impunity), from the truth (or what we accept as truth), from non-State agents such as criminal organisations and women themselves. They are all connected so that even criminal organisations and politicians are interweaved in the same network of power, and in the case of Mexico, not even very far from each other. Women themselves exercise power through relations, networks and cooperation and this is the dimension of power that women consider their most important asset. To keep themselves secure in a potentially hostile environment, activist women maintain a set of safety rules and regulations that they follow in their everyday lives. In conclusion, power influencing violence against women is located deep in the patriarchal structures and practices in Mexico. This is why it is challenging to tackle the problem of continuing gendered violence in Mexico: it does not have any centre. This means that also globalised networks of organised crime, as well as the overall patriarchal culture, influence on discourses that power and gender-based violence are given. Also, it is noteworthy that power should not be considered only oppressive or dominating as that interpretation would give women only the role of passive victims. Women also possess power that they exercise through social relations and collective activist networks. In sum, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of feminicides and violence against women in Mexico. Furthermore, through the unique interview data, the results collect valuable information on all the main challenges that are hampering the activists’ work against violence.