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Journal Article 11.1 Agadjanian, V. (2002). Men doing “women’s work”: Masculinity and gender relations among street vendors in Maputo, Mozambique. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 10(3), 329–342. DOI: 10.3149/jms.1003.329
Abstract: Gender inequality in sub-Saharan urban settings is perpetuated through the differences in men’s and women’s positions in the labor market. However, rising unemployment and increasing informalization of the economy that result from both the demographic structure and the structural adjustment reforms undermine men’s economic advantage by pushing them into low-income and low-prestige “women’s” occupations, such as street commerce. Men’s entry into such niches of the labor market leads to both degendering and regendering of the workplace, which in turn questions the broader gender hierarchy and stereotypes and transforms gender relations. I analyze these occupational dynamics and their profound implications for gender identity and relations drawing primarily on in-depth interviews conducted with men street vendors in Greater Maputo, Mozambique, in 1999. The analysis of the qualitative data is complemented with insights from surveys carried out in Mozambique in the second half of the 1990s.

Learning Objective: LO 11-6. Summarize different theories offered to explain the existence of gender hierarchies.

Journal Article 11.2 Lai, F. Y. (2018). Sexuality at imagined home: Same-Sex desires among Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. Sexualities, 21(5/6), 899–913. DOI: 10.1177/1363460716677286
Abstract: This article examines the contested meaning of home in shaping the sexual subjectivities of Indonesian migrant domestic workers by investigating their imagined future home. It points to the question of how individuals negotiate their sexualities when subjected to particular gendered positions. The author suggests that a transnational perspective is needed for understanding the sexuality of migrant women, who negotiate between the same-sex pleasure they obtain in Hong Kong and the family expectations they are supposed to fulfill in Indonesia. For these migrant women, sexuality is malleable because it is a continuing process of relating gendered positions to sexualities, and relating the future to the present.

Learning Objective: LO 11-8. Assess the changes in understanding of gender in the past decades and relate them to changes in family and economy.