Corona, Care, and Political Masculinity: Gender-Critical Perspectives on Governing the COVID-19 Pandemic in Austria
Titelübersetzung:Corona, Sorge und politische Männlichkeit: Eine geschlechterkritische Perspektive auf das Regieren der COVID-19 Pandemie in Österreich
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 46 (2021) 4, S 50-71
Inhalt: The article departs from the contradiction that the importance of care for society was publicly acknowledged during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the pandemic response of the Austrian government did not challenge the structurally devalued status of care. In order to sustain the hegemonic patriarchal-capitalist governance of care and social reproduction in the pandemic government actors had to reframe care. We investigate government discourses that normalised its careless crisis management and interrogate the role political masculinity and affects played therein. Based on our analysis of a set of selected press conferences held in March 2020, we find that a new mode of rational-affective political masculinity was constitutive of the political management of COVID-19 crisis. With help of this hybrid mode of masculinity, political actors reinterpreted care first and foremost as healthcare and caring for the economy, and as caring for the population in terms of biopolitics. At the same time, caring tasks in the 'private' sphere were left to the personal responsibility of individuals and families. In order to generate consent, political actors frequently invoked affects that pertained to risk and danger on the one hand and solidarity and responsibility on the other.
Schlagwörter:Österreich; Austria; Pflege; caregiving; Reproduktion; reproduction; Gesundheitspolitik; health policy; Krisenmanagement; crisis management (econ., pol.); politischer Akteur; political actor; Männlichkeit; masculinity; Biopolitik; biotechnology policy; Hegemonie; hegemony; Gender; gender; rational-affective masculinity; reframing care; care for the economy; solidarity; nationality; Corona; COVID-19; global pandemic; biopolitics
SSOAR Kategorie:politische Willensbildung, politische Soziologie, politische Kultur, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung
Quelle: Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 6 (2020) , S 1-17
Inhalt: Image recognition systems offer the promise to learn from images at scale without requiring expert knowledge. However, past research suggests that machine learning systems often produce biased output. In this article, we evaluate potential gender biases of commercial image recognition platforms using photographs of U.S. members of Congress and a large number of Twitter images posted by these politicians. Our crowdsourced validation shows that commercial image recognition systems can produce labels that are correct and biased at the same time as they selectively report a subset of many possible true labels. We find that images of women received three times more annotations related to physical appearance. Moreover, women in images are recognized at substantially lower rates in comparison with men. We discuss how encoded biases such as these affect the visibility of women, reinforce harmful gender stereotypes, and limit the validity of the insights that can be gathered from such data.
Beyond Sex/Work: Understanding Work and Identity of Female Sex Workers in South China
Autor/in:
Ding, Yu
Quelle: Social Inclusion, 8 (2020) 2, S 95-103
Inhalt: While scholars and activists often advocate using the term ‘sex worker’ in preference to prostitute, in my research I found that female prostitutes in the Pearl River Delta area, south China, do not like to be addressed as such, and prefer the title xiaojie in Chinese. ‘Sex worker’ generalises the heterogeneity of meanings these women identify and attribute to what they do; it does not capture the complex cultural meanings involved in the term xiaojie. It is stigmatising in that what is exchanged within the transaction is less defined by sexual acts and more by a diversified range of activities. The women employ what is useful to them and infuse new meanings in it to construct gender images and identities to resist the sex worker stigma and to express their desires as rural-to-urban migrants. Using xiaojie becomes a destigmatising and gender tactic. I also found that the women discard the idea of finding alternative jobs partly because of the practical difficulty, and partly because they do not want to work (gongzuo) any more in the future. This study highlights the importance of exploring desire and agency to understand the lived experiences of this particular group of women.
Schlagwörter:China; China; woman; Prostitution; prostitution; Stigmatisierung; stigmatization; Gender; gender; Ostasien; Far East; South China; desire; destigmatisation; sex worker