scholarly journals Gender and Trajectories of Marital Breakdown: Accounts of Chinese Immigrant Women in Canada

Affilia ◽  
2022 ◽  
pp. 088610992110709
Author(s):  
Yanqiu Rachel Zhou ◽  
Christina Sinding ◽  
Lisa Watt (1972–2018) ◽  
Jacqueline Gahagan ◽  
Evelyne Micollier
Keyword(s):  
Personal Growth ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Life Trajectories ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Life Circumstance ◽  
Gender And Migration ◽  
Marital Breakdown ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Chinese Immigrant Women ◽  
The Relationship

The relatively sparse literature has documented various challenges international migration poses to martial stability, yet we know little about immigrant women's experiences with marital breakdown. Drawing data from a qualitative study of Chinese economic immigrants to Canada, this article explores women's experiences of navigating the processes of this life circumstance, and of how gender—including their senses of changing gender roles in post-immigration and postmarital contexts—plays out in these trajectories. The results of this exploratory study illustrate the value of transcending dichotomous conceptions of the relationship between gender and migration, and of opening spaces in which to better understand immigrant women's increasingly diversified life trajectories and the range of barriers they encounter along the way. The study also reveals multiple opportunities for social work contributions: tackling systematic barriers to settlement, facilitating social support in the community, and recognizing individuals’ diverse trajectory potentials (including the potential for this typically unwelcome event to be integrated as personal growth and transition).

Renegotiating Gender Identities and Sexual Bodies: Zimbabwean Migrant Women’s Narratives of Everyday Life in South Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kezia Batisai ◽  
Lylian Manjowo
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Migrant Women ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Migration Research ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Gender And Migration ◽  
And Migration

A wide range of literature reveals that women in many African societies have historically been faced with the challenge of patriarchy and lack of freedom in their households—a challenge also mirrored in institutions of education, the economy, law and politics. This gendered position produces gendered inequalities which lead women to experience poverty more severely than men. The feminisation of poverty has over the years resulted in the feminisation of migration, which implies a change in women’s migratory identities and roles, where women are increasingly migrating as independent migrants rather than to rejoin male family members. Often, women migrate due to a desire for greater autonomy and a decrease in social restrictions on their productive and reproductive bodies. They also migrate to enhance their economic opportunities and seek new survival strategies in their endeavour to cater for their family’s needs and those that pertain to their being. It is against this backdrop that this article explores the experiences of migrant women and the strategies they employ as they, against all odds, renegotiate and reconstitute their gendered identities and sexual bodies in order to survive the complex realities of living in a “foreign” space. The article focuses on 15 Zimbabwean migrant women’s experiences of feminised poverty that pushed them out of the boundaries of their homeland, and the sexual and gendered livelihoods that emerged as part of their survival strategies in South Africa. As the article engages with Zimbabwean migrant women’s experiences prior to and after moving to South Africa, it is at work to illuminate how sexuality and migration shape and reshape one another. The article analyses the role of sexuality in gender and migration research that has not been given the pre-eminence it should in the Global South. Overall, the article reveals that the often subsumed and hidden role of sexuality in gender and migration research adds another complex layer of vulnerability to the bodies, identities and roles of Zimbabwean migrant women in South Africa.

Nonphysical Abuse and Coercive Control

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-61
Author(s):  
Heather Douglas
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Abuse ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Linguistically Diverse ◽  
Culturally And Linguistically Diverse ◽  
Coercive Control ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Financial Abuse ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Diverse Backgrounds ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores women’s experiences of nonphysical forms of abuse. Most women reported that the most difficult form of abuse they dealt with was nonphysical abuse, especially emotional abuse. Many women stated that nonphysical abuse deeply impacted on their sense of self and freedom and that it continued to affect them years after they separated from an abusive partner. Other forms of nonphysical abuse that the women highlighted included abusive tactics targeting their role as a mother, isolation within the relationship, and financial abuse. This chapter also considers the particular impacts of nonphysical abuse, including isolation, financial abuse, and threats about their visas, for women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, especially those with insecure visa status.

Leaving violent men: A study of women’s experiences of separation in Victoria, Australia

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crystal Bruton ◽  
Danielle Tyson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Influencing Factor ◽  
Male Partner ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Decisions To Leave ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Relationship

Despite decades of feminist efforts to educate the community about, and improve responses to, domestic violence, public attitudes towards domestic violence continue to misunderstand women’s experiences of violence. Underlying such responses is the stock standard question, ‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ This question points to a lack of understanding about the impacts and threat of violence from an abusive partner on women’s decisions to leave the relationship. Moreover, it places sole responsibility for ending the relationship squarely upon women, assuming women are presented with numerous opportunities to leave a violent relationship and erroneously assumes the violence will cease once they do leave. This study explores women’s experiences of separating from an abusive, male partner through women’s narratives (n = 12) in Victoria, Australia. Findings reveal that fear was a complex influencing factor impacting upon women’s decision-making throughout the leaving process. The findings show that women seek to exercise agency within the context of their abusers’ coercively controlling tactics by strategically attempting to manage the constraints placed on their decision-making and partner’s repeated attempts to reassert dominance and control.

Violence, Trauma, and Resistance: A Feminist Appraisal of Metz's Mysticism of Suffering unto God

Horizons ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann M. Vento
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Feminist Theology ◽  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Essential Contribution ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACTThe trauma that results from violence against women presents a challenge to theological reflection on the meaning of suffering. The mysticism of suffering unto God in the theology of J.B. Metz offers an essential contribution to this reflection. There is a remarkable compatibility between women's experiences of trauma and healing and Metz's understanding of suffering unto God, especially in its refusal to glorify suffering. Further, Metz's understanding presents a much needed mystical-political dimension to theological reflection on violence against women, because of its capacity to nurture on going resistance to the victimization of all women, past and present. Metz's mystical stance, holding together both anguish and radical hope, challenges feminist theology, in its treatment of violence against women, to attend to the relationship between the mystical and political.

Poetry, Paratext, and History in Radcliffe’s Gothic

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
JoEllen DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Female Gothic ◽  
Heroine's Journey ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
Feminist Historiography ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Gerard Genette

This chapter argues that attention to Ann Radcliffe’s use of Scots poetry in the epigraphs of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) transforms the female gothic into an historical instead of a psychological analytic. In the tension between Udolpho’s representations of female sensibility and its paratext—what Gerard Genette calls the “border” or “threshold” of the text—this chapter finds an uneven and non-linear feminist historiography capable of producing unconventional accounts of women’s experiences of British imperial and commercial growth. Specifically, Radcliffe uses James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence (1748) and James Beattie’s The Minstrel (1771) as signposts for her heroine’s journey, grafting Emily St. Aubert’s “progress” onto debates about history, the relationship between manners and economic structures, and the place of women in historical narrative.

scholarly journals “Should I Stay, or Should I Go?”: The Experiences of, and Choices Available to Women of South Asian Heritage Living in the UK When Leaving a Relationship of Choice Following Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Kalwinder K. Sandhu ◽  
Hazel R. Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Partner Violence ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Partner Violence ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Intimate Partner ◽  
Abusive Relationships ◽  
Arranged Marriage ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
The Relationship

Researching South Asian women who have departed social norms and married outside the social conventions of their culture widens our understanding and knowledge on the topic of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). This paper will investigate how the women participating in the research navigated the socialisation of arranged marriage and expectations on them as women, and how this influenced their decisions to remain in violent and abusive relationships. Often without family support or the “safety net” of an arranged marriage, the women stayed in abusive relationships longer than they would have done if the marriage had been arranged. The findings show that the women’s experiences of leaving the relationship are mediated by the context of forming an intimate relationship. A qualitative research approach using Black Feminist Standpoint Epistemology employed thematic analysis to give voice to South Asian women’s experiences and insights into their experiences of, and responses to, leaving abusive relationships. The analysis shows that women’s agentic act of choosing a partner became the very barrier to leaving the relationship if it turned violent and abusive.

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