This paper explores and assesses the presence/absence of institutional arrangements in educational settings for addressing the concerns of gender-variant children (GVC) through a sample survey of ...schools in the three-country context of India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. This research highlights the need for effective regulatory, normative and cognitive structures to address issues of childhood gender variance. With a contextual analysis of recent developments and comprehensive study of data reports in the three countries, the study analyses multiple dimensions of discrimination and bullying of GVC in educational settings. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, this paper highlights causes and issues associated with the problems of GVC as well as affirmative actions and institutional practices required to be implemented in schools in the three-country context. The results and findings provide evidence that academic institutions in India, Sri Lanka and, to some extent, Nepal lack institutional mechanisms to address issues of homophobia, abuse by peer group, mental health issues, emotional challenges, social discrimination, lack of opportunities, lack of monitoring and counselling, micro-level engagements and high dropouts of GVC. This study also charts out futuristic agenda, such as comprehensive mapping of GVC in schools, implementation of effective counselling mechanism, the need to create and adopt basic reference module for educators around gender diversity and variance.
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This collection of essays explores contemporary reflections on interactions between gender and culture. The 11 contributions focus on varied dimensions of popular culture that define, interpret, ...validate, interrogate and rupture gender conventions. There are discussions on how children react to gender expectations and how this reaction is reflected in their activities like drawing and games. There are also investigations of films, female bodybuilding in the USA, transgender identity in Greek and Indian mythology, and women breaking glass ceilings and pioneering social movements in developing countries like India. Specific chapters are devoted to British TV series and Hindi films that address issues related to masculinity. Essays on challenges that women face in the corporate world and the real world of social inequalities, especially in developing countries, give this volume rich thematic diversity. The collection will be of interest to literary critics, film critics, gender studies scholars, and poets.
This article examines Nadine Gordimer's post-apartheid short story collections, Loot and Other Stories and Beethoven Was One-sixteenth Black in the light of her artistic capability, expression and ...innovation. In her non-fiction writings including her Nobel Prize speech, Gordimer talks of the Chekhovian influence on her creative sensibility. This Chekhovian influence is notably visible in her post-apartheid short fiction, in which Gordimer, like Chekhov, disavows moral, structural and thematic finality in the narrative. The stories in these collections prompt debates around the role of a socially motivated writer in contemporary global networks.
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This article delves into the discourse of motherhood and the girl-child as deconstructed by Ismat Chughtai in A Life in Words (2012) and The Crooked Line (2003). These two works due to their ...intertextual connections and thematic similarities become appropriate tools for analyzing Ismat’s concern with femininity as a complex web of tangible relations. Ismat’s women, even though living cloistered lives exert their individuality and authority in discursive ways. The girl-child narrator in both these works is a spectator to the wiles that women employ to empower themselves in the male dominated society. In these two works, Ismat unscrupulously deconstructs the images of the sacrificing mother and the dutiful daughter that are ingrained within the patriarchal system. In the process she liberates the experience of motherhood from age-old categories and gives voice to hidden anger, angst and discontent in the mothering self. At the same time Ismat also destabilizes the stereotypical image of the girl-child who not only acquires a certain subject position but also challenges motherly domination and familial authority. Thus both Shaman and young Ismat devalue and delegitimize the figure of the ideal daughter as exhibited in the polished conduct of Bari Apa and Manjhu (Shaman’s elder sisters). In deconstructing these established discourses, Ismat is also creating new ones that recognize alternative subject positions for women.
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