Search results

Family as a domestic group is seen to be crucial for the production and replenishment of human capital from generation to generation. With the consequences of demographic aging process, there is a rethinking into the structure and function of the institution for critically analyzing the contemporary challenges. In India, graying of the population became one among the major reason for scholars to pay more attention to interpret family attributes. Women’s social status, autonomy, and entitlements had marked serious shifts according to subsequent changes that happened. Using mixed methodology, aged women from Hindu families in India were studied. An examination of the existing structure, functions, social duties, and responsibilities in Hindu families, sociocultural constructions of identities within the sphere of family, and the impacts of age identities in determining the health-related quality of life and subjective well-being of aged women were the objectives of the study. While Bourdieu’s concept of habitus was used as a theoretical basis for the study, the researcher gives prepositions for sociocultural constructions of age identities through the concepts of Reverse Metamorphosis and Identity Cocoons. The study reveals that the self and social identity constructs explain interactive behavior as well as the interplay of personal meanings, family dynamics, and informal factors across the life span under the sociocultural underpinnings in a multicultural society like India.

The social role of women in Brazil is subject to significant change in both capacity and scope. While women constitute the majority of the population in Brazil, they account for 40 per cent of the workforce, and thus, they remain comparatively invisible in public life. This is evident in political representation, as although Brazilian law stipulates that political parties must reserve at least 30 per cent of their nominations for women for legislative elections, this does not occur in reality. Furthermore, despite Afro-descendant Brazilians constituting the majority of the population, in the Chamber of Deputies, for instance, there are only 9 per cent Afro-descendant representatives. Therefore, this study focuses on understanding issues of political representation of Afro-descendant women in political spaces in Brazil – a country where politics is still predominantly white and male. Thus, despite a rhetorical position of an ‘open country’ with opportunities for all, the whiteness and masculinity of Brazilian politics illustrates the degree of mythology concerning the rhetoric of Brazil’s racial democracy. We employ a qualitative research approach in this study and we employ an oral-history-informed post-structuralist approach. We focus our empirical analysis on in-depth interviews with an Afro-descendant female accounting professor who was elected to an important political position. We argue that discussions about democracy in Brazil go beyond formal aspects of civil rights, as our study highlights the necessity of reshaping political processes to engender greater female and Afro-descendent participation, to engender both groups to seek political careers as well as to encourage political parties to include more female and more Afro-descendent candidates. The ultimate goal of such institutional reform is a reformation of ‘racial democracy’ as Afro-descendent women interact with, stand and succeed in Brazilian elections.

Commodity racism, as conceived by Anne McClintock (1995), describes a novel cultural formation, binding difference, power, and consumption to one another, a creation at the interface of imperialism and industrialism in the late 19th century that offered an emergent language to simultaneously make sense of difference, fashion identity, cultivate desire, and sell stuff. Importantly, as it remapped the world, placing peoples and cultures in ranked social locations, it also reconfigured gender, the body, and taste as it rerouted the flows between public and private spheres. At its core, as expressed quite clearly in the soap advertisements McClintock analyzes, commodity racism stated the (then) accepted facts of white supremacy, underscoring the propriety of imperial expansion and settling, in many ways, for consumers hailed through it the racial question of the day.