Exploring the Logic of Gender Complementarity using Chimakonam’s Ezumezu System

In this essay, I want to argue that the existence of gender most times translated as gender binary, is a biological fact. What is at stake is a framework for transcending unequal gender binary to gender complementarity. Here, I propose to use Chimakonam’s Ezumezu logic as a mechanism for disclosing gender complementarity. The illogical, irrational and subjective perspectives on lopsided gender differences between men and women will be challenged in this essay. I will analyze the thrust of Ezumezu logic, its major principles, structures, and pillars of thought. I will also demonstrate its global and contextual relevance. I will submit that Ezumezu logic can ground gender complementarity across global cultures. I argue that regardless of the physical differences between males and females, it is illogical to exploit such differences to promote gender stereotype. Keywords: Gender equality, Ezumezu Logic, Gender Complementarity, Jonathan Chimakonam

Hybrid Femininities: Making Sense of Sorority Rankings and Reputation

Gender researchers have only recently begun to identify how women perceive and explain the costs and benefits associated with different femininities. Yet status hierarchies among historically white college sororities are explicit and cannot be ignored, forcing sorority women to grapple with constructions of feminine worth. Drawing on interviews with women in these sororities (N = 53), we are able to capture college women’s attitudes toward status rankings that prioritize adherence to narrow models of gender complementarity. Sorority chapters were ranked according to women’s perceived heterosexual appeal to elite men. Women believed that top-ranked sororities conferred social power whereas middle- and bottom-ranked sororities offered greater freedom from policing over members’ bodies, fashion, and socializing. However, middle- and bottom-ranked sororities sometimes sought to rise in the rankings. When this occurred, existing members were marginalized, and a new pledge class with a greater tolerance for socializing with high-status “rapey” fraternities was sought. Women’s discussions of sorority rankings show evidence of a hybrid femininity that fuses practices from traditional models of gender complementarity and more recent models of women’s empowerment.

The Resilience of the Común and Its Legacy

Although colonial Spanish- and Republican-era governments tried to undercut comuneros’ political philosophy of popular sovereignty, the común has persevered. Racist conclusions about Indians tarred comuneros as backward and pre-modern. To “modernize” them, comuneros’ lands were privatized and auctioned off, and laws officially eliminated ayllus. Comuneros gained the right to vote with the 1952 Bolivian revolution, many moved to cities, but most failed to prosper economically. They were officially “campesinos,” or peasants—a euphemism for race. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century anthropologists’ ethnographies show that reducción towns and annexes still exist, and the cabildo and civil-religious hierarchy still function. In 2005 Evo Morales, a self-identified Aymara, was elected president of Bolivia with comunero support. Bolivia’s 2009 constitution incorporates Aymara ideas of gender complementarity, gave legal personhood to Pachamama (Mother Earth), promotes collectivities as ethically superior to capitalist individualism, and recognizes legal pluralism. Many of these ideas echo the late colonial comuneros.

Agents of Change

This article examines the intersection of religion, gender and development through an analysis of religious practice and development engagement among women activists in two religio-political aid organizations in contemporary Pakistan. Situated on the margins of the mainstream aid and development field, these women are rarely conceded agents of development. Yet focusing on improving women’s position and wellbeing, their activities are similar to those of many other development NGO s. As part of religio-political movements advancing gender complementarity and segregation, women’s activism and conceptions of development reflect a particular intersection of religion, gender and class. A close read of women’s discourse and practice reveals how women interpret and appropriate Islamic teachings, local cultural practices, and global norms by balancing ideology and pragmatism. In the process of negotiating, upholding and resisting norms and practices, these activists can be seen as active agents of change in their local contexts.

An Alternative to Gender Complementarity: The Body as Existential Category in the Catholic Tradition

This article reevaluates the concept of “woman” in the Christian tradition by arguing that the body is shaped ontologically not by binary sex (gender essentialism), but by history. While there have been many theological critiques of gender essentialism and complementarity, there have been few attempts to offer an alternative, bodily ontology in the Catholic tradition. I argue for an understanding of the body that reveals it as an existential category, a category that implies complicity, interruption, hope, and holiness. I conclude that when we experience our bodies as structured primarily by our histories, it facilitates the freedom to be in full relationship with each other and with God.

Religious Agency and Gender Complementarity

The aim of the article is to probe the unique tradition in central China’s Hui Muslim community of women-only, female-led mosques and their enduring, expressive culture of chanted worship, learning, and celebration as trans/local translations of Western feminist core notions of “agency” and “gender equality.” Women’s agency—here understood as entailing the capacity for informed and purposeful choice from context-specific options and resources—is framed by a religious faith-infused subjectivity, by women’s aspirations to reach their full potential as Muslim women. A broad outline of the evolution of women’s mosques from inward-oriented and assigned facilities to outward-oriented institutions provides historical context for both the institutionalization of an intense gendered piety and for mosque-based facilitation of educational and development needs. Moreover, the popularity of rediscovered Islamic chants among Hui Muslim women has ignited heated debates surrounding the propriety in Islam of performed, publicly audible female sound. It is the contention of the article that global references and values, such as “gender equality,” continue to matter as references for local translations. The changing nature of “gender complementarity” as a vernacular version of “gender equality” is seen by Hui Muslim women as testifying to changing times and opportunities.