This article examines the development of campaigns against “gender ideology” in Europe, leading to the emergence of a specific family of mobilizations that we call anti-gender campaigns. These ...campaigns, started in the mid-1990s as a Catholic project in reaction to the results of the UN conferences of Cairo and Bejing, but developed significantly in several European countries after crucial encounters with right-wing populism. While recognizing the importance of these crossovers, we contend the interpretation that mobilizations against “gender ideology” and right-wing populism are the two faces of the same coin, and we plead for a more complex understanding of the ways in which distinct—and sometimes competing—projects can converge in specific settings. We argue that research on the “Global Right Wing” should therefore disentangle the various components of this phenomenon, and locate them in concrete settings. We show that this research strategy allows us to better grasp the specificities of each project and the ways in which they interact. Opening our eyes on crucial developments in contemporary Europe, this strategy also prevents researchers from falling into the trap of a global and unqualified backlash against everything achieved in terms of gender and sexuality in the last decades.
The article deals with the process of the “secularization” of the Roman Catholic Church and its attempts to secure exclusionary patriarchal and traditional values and interpretations in the context ...of issues pertaining to sexual citizenship. Taking two case studies as examples – the recent Family Code debate in Slovenia and the Health Education in Croatia – it shows how the Church and its satellite civil society organizations increasingly refrain from using “biblical discourse”, substituting it with what appears as a rational, scientific discourse molded into reassuring and populist common-sense statements. In such a way, the Church is secularizing its discourse in order to “clericalize” society. Furthermore, it is successfully reinventing the issues of family and marriage as an ideological battleground of contemporary cultural wars in post-socialist societies, constituting gays and lesbians as the outsiders of the nation.
•In sexual citizenship debates RCC secularizes its discourse to clericalize society.•Church establishes satellite civil society organizations to spread its message.•Family and marriage remain ideological battleground of contemporary cultural wars.
Filozofska fakulteta Univerze v Ljubljani in Komisija za slovenski jezik v javnosti pri Slovenski akademiji znanosti in umetnosti sta v torek, 23. oktobra 2018, organizirali okroglo mizo »Jezik in ...spol«, ki je potekala na Filozofski fakulteti v Ljubljani. Izhodišče razprave je bil sklep Senata Filozofske fakultete o izmenični rabi moške in ženske slovnične oblike za vse spole v pravilnikih Filozofske fakultete, s sogovornicami in sogovorniki pa sta organizatorja želela razpravo razširiti na vprašanja, kakšne možnosti ponuja slovenski jezik za uporabo spolno občutljivega jezika in kako v slovenskem jeziku zagotavljati vključujoč jezik v različnih družbenih situacijah. Objavljamo zapis je po posnetku dogodka, ki je na voljo na YouTubu.
The article presents selected results from the two studies on the everyday life of lesbians and gays in Slovenia carried out in 2004 and 2014. It focuses on the experiences of homophobia and violence ...and coming out in different social settings. The findings are presented in a comparative perspective with an attempt to identify the main changes in the ten-year period. Although it was expected that the comparative analysis would show an improvement in the situation in the everyday life of gays and lesbians in Slovenia, the results show about the same level of violence against lesbians and gays in the public sphere and an increase of violence in school settings. However, there are more positive narratives from the private sphere, especially within the family, where there are fewer negative reactions and greater acceptance after coming out. Nevertheless, even here lesbians and gays often experience the "transparent closet," a social situation where after coming out they face silence and indifference from other family members. The situation is discussed considering broader social, political and cultural changes that have happened in Slovenia in the last two decades, including continuous attempts by conservative actors to re-traditionalize Slovenian society.
This article presents selected results from the first exploratory study on male sex workers in Slovenia. Drawing on nine semi-structured interviews with self-identified male sex workers, who sell sex ...predominantly to (gay) men, and starting from Altman’s (
1999
) suggestion to understand sex work as a continuum ranging from sex work as a profession to casual or accidental encounters, it discusses three themes recurring in the interviews: (1) entrance into sex work; (2) relationships with clients and occupational strategies; and (3) use of technology for sex work. The male sex workers’ narratives are clustered along the distinctions between the “devoid-of-choice-oriented” and “business-oriented” male sex work, pointing to the somewhat blurred professional/private relations of the business in the context of post-socialist Slovenia. Entry into sex work is narrated at the crossroads of poor socioeconomic circumstances as a trigger, as exemplified in past studies, and a career decision-making, as noted by the recent studies. The distinction also runs along the lines of types of relationship male sex workers establish with their clients; while the first group describe relationships as turning into friends-like and moving beyond sexual encounters, the second group keep their contacts with clients as strictly business relations. This distinction can also be read in the context of the use of online technologies: although all our participants have used the internet to obtain clients, the business-oriented ones have thoughtfully worked on creating and updating their online profiles to make them as appealing to potential clients as possible, while the “devoid-of-choice-oriented” have reverted to only using a mobile phone, counting on “word of mouth” promotion of their work.
Women as a linguistic footnote Kuhar, Roman; Gaber, Milica Antić
Gender and language,
01/2022, Letnik:
16, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The debate on nonsexist or gender-sensitive language in Slovenia has been taking place since the mid-1990s. It intensified again in 2018 when the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, decided to ...use the feminine grammatical gender in its internal regulations as generic and inclusive for all genders. The decision provoked heated public reactions and media reports. Through critical frame analysis of 60 media texts published between May and December 2018, this article identifies four basic frames: the decision as impermissible linguistic engineering, as a sign of excessive political correctness, as a false solution to the actual existence of sexism in language, or finally, as a positive change. Whereas many of the arguments used in the Slovenian debate were found in similar debates elsewhere, a new discursive frame emerged that cannot be placed on the classical dichotomy of feminist and antifeminist, but is instead based on equality fatigue and the understanding that gender equality has allegedly already been achieved.
Based on qualitative empirical data from two studies on Internet dating in Slovenia, this paper discusses the social contexts of the Internet dating of heterosexual men and women and homosexual men. ...Special attention is given to different aspects of the commodification and rationalisation of dating in the process of forming potential (romantic) partnerships. First, we discuss our respondents’ reasons for using the Internet to get in touch with potential (romantic) partners. Second, we focus on the demands and strategies of targeted market- ing in personal profile writing and, finally, on the process of selecting potential partners. Our study shows that the primary understanding of Internet dating among people who engage in it is its economic nature. Together with targeted marketing and the predeter- mined criteria for choosing interesting others, Internet dating can thus be understood as a market that encourages rationalisation and commodification in the process of forming intimate relationships.
PDF
