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Cislaghi B, Abeyasekera AL, Bhatia A, Backman-Levy JK. Editorial: The next generation of gender equality work: Reflective action for health and justice. Front Sociol 2023; 7:1080349. [PMID: 36726598 PMCID: PMC9886309 DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2022.1080349] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/26/2022] [Accepted: 12/28/2022] [Indexed: 06/18/2023]
Affiliation(s)
| | | | - Amiya Bhatia
- London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom
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Abeyasekera AL. The hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart. Feminism & Psychology 2020. [DOI: 10.1177/0959353519900198] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/15/2022]
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Affiliation(s)
- Asha L. Abeyasekera
- Programmes in Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Colombo, Colombo, Sri Lanka
| | - Jeanne Marecek
- Departments of Psychology and Gender and Sexuality Studies, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, USA
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Abstract
In South Asia, shame is valued as a virtue and a means of social control, particularly for women. For Sri Lankan women, shame ( læjja-baya) denotes modesty, purity, innocence, and self-effacement. For unmarried girls, sexual improprieties—rumoured or real—threaten loss of respectability and jeopardise a girl’s marriageability and her family’s honour. We investigated the dynamics of shame and norms of propriety in adolescent girls’ lives by re-analysing a subset of interviews of daughters and mothers (N = 24 pairs) collected in a prior study of nonfatal suicidal acts. Many such acts took place after girls were accused of violating norms of propriety. Other such acts served to ‘blame and shame’ wrongdoers. Girls and their mothers reported further that public knowledge of a suicide-like act sullied a girl’s reputation because onlookers ascribed sexualised meanings to it. We point out the incommensurability between parents’ goals and aspirations for their daughters’ educational and occupation attainments and the rigid demands for respectable comportment to which they must conform.
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Abstract
Marriage is a cultural imperative in Sri Lanka and is constructed as the principal source of personal fulfilment for women. This paper critically examines through two case studies – a never-married woman and a woman in a “failed” marriage – how women from older generations narrate their life histories using culturally coherent repertoires. By deconstructing the subject positions of the “long-suffering wife”, the “devoted mother”, and the “selfless woman”, I reveal the spaces for manoeuvre these women create to experience well-being and exercise agency outside of the culture’s “hegemonic narrative” of successful marriage and maternity. Using the life history narratives I challenge the tendency to imagine older women’s lives as more constrained and illustrate the ways in which equivocal narratives about independence and self-sacrifice, about freedom and suffering simultaneously conceal agency while allowing non-normative ways of being.
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