The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Communication

Marnel Niles Goins, Joan Faber McAlister, Bryant Keith Alexander, Marnel Niles Goins, Joan Faber McAlister, Bryant Keith Alexander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138329188
• eBook ISBN: 9780429827327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

This volume provides an extensive overview of current research on the complex relationships between gender and communication. Featuring a broad variety of chapters written by leading and upcoming scholars, this edited collection uses diverse theoretical frameworks to provide insight into recent concerns regarding changing gender roles, representations, and resources in communication studies. Established research and new perspectives address vital themes in this comprehensive text, including the shifting politics of gender, ethical and technological trends in gendered media, and gender in daily life. Comprising 39 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six thematic sections:

• Gendered lives and identities

• Visualizing gender

• The politics of gender

• Gendered contexts and strategies

• Gendered violence and communication

• Gender advocacy in action

These sections examine central issues, debates, and problems, including the ethics and politics of gender as identity, impacts of media and technology, legal and legislative battlegrounds for gender inequality and LGBTQ+ human rights, changing institutional contexts, and recent research on gender violence and communication. The final section links academic research on gender and communication to activism and advocacy beyond the academy.

The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Communication will be an invaluable reference work for students and researchers working at the intersections of gender studies and communication studies. Its international perspectives and the range of themes it covers make it an essential and pragmatic pedagogical resource.

PART I

Gendered lives and identities

Introduction to Part I

The idea of “gendered lives and identities” speaks to the interconnectivity of gender to how we define ourselves, and how we are thus socially constructed in the circulation of our daily lives as gendered beings. Maybe it begins with the now popular gender reveal parties, in which the colors pink or blue are still used as signifiers of sex, serving as the beginning of a gendering process. Within these rituals that vary across cultures, there is always an unspoken or maybe overly subscribed socialized desire in the determination, to which the ceremonial reveal and the evidenced response is always performatively enacted: either overly reacted or timidly tempered in the moment of public sharing. Each response speaks to the value of the presumed masculine in relation to the determined feminine. And so begins a socializing process of expectations and orientations of enforced binary fixities: male/masculine, female/feminine, and all that comes with those categorical containments, including heteronormativity. This process often establishes inequities of opportunity as well as restrictive options in the ever-emerging possibilities and potentialities of gendered being and becoming. Gendered beings, in their own time and manner, may then come to resist the social fixities and containments of their assigned and socially gendered determinations. And some actively begin to embody, and in some cases trans-body, their owned and emerging gender identities in a performatively enacted resistance of claiming their innate human rights and dignity.

Hence, the social investment in gendered identities also signals that issues of hierarchy and inequity inform and intervene in the connections between communication, gender, and culture. In her groundbreaking work on Gendered Lives, Julia T. Wood writes:

If we don't want to be limited by the experiences, perspectives, and circumstances of people in other social positions … realizing that inequality is socially constructed empowers us to be agents of change. We have a choice about whether to accept our culture's designation of who is valuable and who is not, who is normal and who is abnormal … Instead, we can challenge social views that accord arbitrary and unequal value to people and that limit humans' opportunities and lives.¹

In such a process of challenge, those of us who have been restricted by and captive to the social expectations of gender (which is most, if not all, of us outside the regimes of sustained power and privilege) must stand up and speak out for the next generation of those who are revealed into a social system that has already predetermined their possibility.

This section continues and updates discussion of such issues by furthering vital debates relating to the ethics and politics of gender as identity and the social constructions and sharing of identity through communication. The chapters as a whole address the confrontation of gender expectation and embodied gender performativity in disparate and desperate situations, with shifting effects and affects on both the performance of gender and the material fact of bodies in social negotiations and interpretations. Contributors in this section consider crucial sites of gendered practices and performances as well as issues of identification and disidentification, while also reflecting recent debates regarding inclusion in feminist scholarship and challenging key assumptions of gender studies in diverse geographic, ethnic, and cultural contexts. The chapters tease at the intersections of communication, gender, and sexuality in the social domains of the self in society. In order, the chapters build new arguments on the notion of gendered lives in locational contexts.

In the first chapter, “Performing gender complaint as airport activism, or: don't get over it when it's not over,” Stacy Holman Jones and Anne Harris offer a bracing auto/ethnographic documentation of experience—in which they situate their gendered and relational bodies in the public space of the airport. The auto/ethnographic, in this case, is literal to the articulated personal politics of lived experience by gendered beings, bodies in a cultural context, to which no one is left uncensored (with differing consequences). They explore how airport scanners have become a site of trans* and genderqueer anxiety and performativity much in the same way public toilets served those roles for generations of gender and sexuality warriors and resisters. They explore a new generation of LGBTQI assimilation that has not tempered the politics of visibility in such spaces for trans-masculine and femme-presenting women. If trans* has become hyper visible in an age of social media, femme queer sexuality and gender expression have become even more invisible. They argue that the now everyday experience of body scanning as a process of entry for airports and other “secure” areas both overtly and inadvertently categorizes and marginalizes gender outlaws. The chapter draws on critical autoethnographic narratives, in addition to feminist, trans*, and queer scholarship, as lenses through which to question the everyday politics of invisibility and security and to break down binaries in human and more-than-human intersubjectivity. It is the aim and hope of the authors that this work offers readers new and resistive ways of performing the rainbow of queer selves possible in contemporary communication scholarship.

Bryant Keith Alexander takes up the charge of Jones and Harris, as he in essence articulates his own resistive ways of being fully present in the breadth and depth of his personal and professional life as a Black queer man, amongst other things. In his chapter, “Dense particularities: race, spirituality, and queer/quare intersectionalities,” Alexander uses the notion of dense particularities as a means of talking about our lived and imagined difference. Using theories of critical race theory and disidentification linked with queer/quare studies, queer color critique, and spirituality, the author provides strategies of knowing the gendered self in society through race and resistance; and maybe race as resistance. This knowing is with respect to prevailing notions of intersectionality, palimpsest, and theories of the flesh as co-informing tropes that are not conflated as the same, and yet, not not the same in the dailiness of living. Like Jones and Harris, Alexander then moves to recontextualize theory back into the body through a performatively autoethnographic piece that speaks to the intersections of his Black/male/queer-quare/Catholic gendered identity—working as an academic Dean in a Catholic Jesuit university—a positionality in which he refuses to compromise any aspect of the personal for the professionally political.

In the third chapter, “Gaysian fabulosity: quare(ing) the normal and ordinary,” Shinsuke Eguchi queerly and powerful appropriates and claims the terms “gaysian” and “fabulosity.” They theorize the terms in the empowerment of gay Asians, with fabulosity becoming not just a performatively aesthetic reference but a criticality of engagement and boldly owning the particularity of oneself in the world. The study uses performance and quare studies to interrogate how gaysian [gay + Asian] subjects self-represent their narratives via YouTube. The author argues specifically that gay anti-Asian racism reproduces the construct of gaysians as feminine and submissive Others. Simultaneously, gaysian identities, performances, and politics implicate a need to navigate the material fragmentations of places and spaces such as White gay sexual cultures and “Asian” cultures. Yet, gaysian narratives primarily draw from the hegemony of Asian-White interracial couplings as the relational norm. Eguchi explores three themes, “Gay Anti-Asian Racism,” “Strategic Essentialism,” and “Gaysian Critically, Needed” that represent the analysis of this engagement. They formalize the notion of fabulosity as both a performative presentation of self and a critical locational politic used as performative resistance to repressive regimes of the normal. Eguchi also uses fabulosity to normalize the construct of “gaysian” as a complex identity location that operates at the intersections of both gay and Asian culture to establish an emancipatory politic of possibility.

In an ever-increasing globalized world in which borders bleed in ways that are both figurative and literal, Astrid Villamil and Suzy D'Enbeau's chapter, “Communication, gender, and career in MENA countries: navigating the push and pull of empowerment and exclusion,” explores how transnational discourses around gender take on multiple, shifting, and contested meanings. The fluidity of these terms appears especially complicated in geographies where local and cultural complexities do not mirror Western notions and ideals of gender, career, and family. The Middle East and North African (MENA) region presents a unique context to explore gender/ed dimensions at the intersections of family, career, and work. This extended literature review strives to unpack the ways of thinking about MENA countries reflected in academic research that informs underlying assumptions regarding choice, agency, and constrained obligation. The authors introduce transnational feminism to synthesize a snapshot of extant research in the contexts of education and career in MENA countries. They also summarize several strategies employed by women in the MENA region to navigate a push and pull between empowerment and exclusion as they pursue their education and career. The chapter concludes by suggesting several potential areas of future research.

In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Gendered lives and identities
• PART II Visualizing gender
• PART III The politics of gender
• PART IV Gendered contexts and strategies
• PART V Gendered violence and communication
• PART VI Gender advocacy in action
• Index