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Until today, Western, European sociology contributes to the social reality of colonial modernity, and gender knowledge is a paradigmatic example of it. Multiple Gender Cultures, Sociology, and Plural Modernities critically engages with these 'Western eyes' and shifts the focus towards the global variety of gendered socialities and hierarchically entangled social histories.
This is conceptualised as multiple gender cultures within plural modernities. The authors examine the multifaceted realities of gendered life in varying contexts across the globe. Bringing together different perspectives, the volume provides a rereading of the social fabric of gender in contrast to androcentrist-modernist as well as orientalist representations of 'the' gendered Other.
The key questions explored by this volume are: which social mechanisms lead to conflicting or shifting gender dynamics against the backdrop of global entanglements and interdependencies, and to what extent are neocolonial gender regimes at work in this regard? How are varying gender cultures sociohistorically and culturally structured, and how are they connected within (global) power relations? How can established hierarchies and asymmetries become an object of criticism? How can historical, cultural, social, and political specificities be analysed without gendered and other reifications? That way, the volume aims to promote border thinking in sociological understanding of social reality towards multiple gender cultures and plural modernities.
List of contents
1. Multiple gender cultures, sociology, and plural modernities: introduction
PART I - Colonial modernity and gendered knowledge regimes: decolonising gender sociological thinking
2. Gendering modernities: tracing multiple alterities in the longue durée
3. Gendered self-determination: native feminists theorising settlement, sovereignty, and forms of Indigenous peoplehood
4. Citizenship, migration, and the gendering of modern/colonial inequalities
PART II - Multiple gender cultures: the negotiation of gender in varying local contexts
5. Modernising modernity: the women's movement in Japan
6. Women, faith, and facts in modern Iran
7. Navigating multiple sites of knowledge: the development of religion in a Cairene women's NGO
8. Karama (dignity), celibate women, and the 'Arab Spring': gendered identity construction in the Tunisian context
9. The work of entanglement: wranslating Women's rights in Malaysia
10. FEMEN's transnational fight for women's rights: multiple modernities, transnational spaces, and plural gender orders
Part III - Theoretical horizons: multiple gender cultures in plural modernities
11. How to talk about difference and equality? Human dignity, gender, and the cosmopolitics of the social
12. Multiple gender cultures: gender as an epistemic test case of plural modernities
About the author
Heidemarie Winkel is Professor of Sociology at Bielefeld University and Senior Research Associate at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. Her current research areas are transcultural gender sociology and global sociology of religion with a particular interest in knowledge production from a postcolonial perspective, notions of equality, and selected Arab societies. A recent publication is Global Historical Sociology and Connected Gender Sociologies: On the Re-Nationalization and Coloniality of Gender, InterDisciplines 2, 89–134 (2018).
Angelika Poferl is Professor of General Sociology at TU Dortmund University, Germany. Her research interests include theories of modernity, reflexive modernisation and globalisation, sociology of knowledge and culture, qualitative methods of social research, and analysis of contemporary societies. Among her publications is a book coedited with Ulrich Beck, Great Poverty, Great Wealth: On the Transnationalisation of Social Inequalities (2010).
Summary
Multiple Gender Cultures, Sociology, and Plural Modernities introduces the plural modernities approach for the first time from a gender theoretical perspective.
