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The current paper aims to tell the stories of six female supervisors who have successfully managed to access this high‐level position in the Bedouin educational system, putting forward some implications for understanding and exploring the lives and career of women in patriarchal, minority groups.

Six female Muslim supervisors, who work in the Bedouin pre‐school system in Israel, participated in semi‐structured interviews conducted by the authors.

The stories illustrated a connection between “power” and “femininity” in leading positions in a patriarchal, tribal society different from the one constructed in the western literature on leadership. Thus, in spite of the inferiority of femininity in the traditional Bedouin society, the female supervisors perceived their femininity to be an advantage and powerful in, among other things, minimizing tribal‐professional conflict characterized by a contradiction between traditional and rational codes, and in taking on a social role in the empowerment of Bedouin women in all spheres of life.

The paper puts forward some implications for the recruitment and employment of women leaders living and working in patriarchal social groups within a multicultural society.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is a first attempt to document the lives and careers of female leaders in Bedouin society which is embedded with entrenched norms in respect to gender and the “place” of women in the society. The paper, then, provides insights into alternative interpretations of female leadership, power and career.

The ‘Terrible Mother’ traditionally connotes monstrous aspects of motherhood and devouring femininity, encompassing two stereotypical representation of women in myth, fairy tale and fantasy: The Seductress and the Wicked stepmother. The Seductress personifies female malevolence and is characterized as rebellious, manipulative and relentless. Furthermore, she often adopts male aggressiveness, especially sexual, thus usurping male prerogative. Ironically, the temptress is condemned for exhibiting traits which the male hero is lauded for, while also embodying a warning to other women regarding their fate should they rebel against male authority. These narrative strands converge in Cersei, who becomes an embodiment of male anxiety and stands as the chief moral foil and greatest sociopolitical threat to male hegemony.

Concomitantly, Cersei plays the part of the wicked stepmother to Sansa Stark, the series' archetypal damsel in distress. Like Sansa, Cersei began with starry-eyed dreams of womanhood, but quickly grew disillusioned. Despite this, Cersei subjects Sansa to the same injustices she suffered. This re-enactment of her own mistreatment situates Cersei as the female accomplice to the patriarchy. Yet, Cersei also attempts to educate Sansa about women's position vis-à-vis the patriarchy and the tools at their disposal, thus layering the role of the wicked stepmother. Furthermore, Cersei's narrative is complicated as she becomes a point of view character: her focalization becomes a fertile ground for myriad challenges to an androcentric culture, opening avenues for social criticism and possible reimagining of gender roles.

While feminist scholars have highlighted the fact that citizenship should not simply be equated with political representation, they have also emphasized the importance of equity of participation for women in the formal sphere of politics (e.g., Lister, 2003; Staeheli & Kofman, 2004). Thus, the focus of this chapter is on women's representation in mainstream politics and more particularly, within the political arena of local governments in rural and regional areas. The aim of the chapter is to use a feminist theoretical lens to examine gender and representation in rural local governments in Australia. To do so, I draw on data from nineteen interviews with women elected mayors in the Australian state of Queensland. While women continue to be seriously under-represented in the local government sector in rural areas in Australia (see Table 1), women's presence has increased dramatically in the arena of local government in recent years (Sawer, 2001; Pini, Brown, & Ryan, 2004). Nineteen represented a record number of women mayors in the state of Queensland in 2002. Furthermore, all of these women represented constituencies outside the state's capital city of Brisbane. In fact, ten were located in very sparsely populated shires in the western areas of the state (populations ranging from 400 to 7,000 people), two in areas with populations of approximately 15,000, and the remainder in regional towns with populations ranging from 40,000 to 120,000.

This chapter explores how traditional femininity as a form of emphasized femininity influences single mothers’ decisions to be involved in romantic relationships. It explores how women negotiate the boundaries of emphasized femininity in making their choices related to involvement in romantic relationships.

The data for this study were collected by conducting in-depth interviews with 30 Malaysian Tamil women. They were selected using a purposive sampling method. The main criterion of selection was that participants were Malaysian Indian single mothers identifying Tamil as their mother tongue. Latent and manifest content analyses were used to scrutinize the interviews.

Single mothers identified their responsibilities qua mothers as the most important part of their life. Many have remained single because they were concerned about the well-being of their children. Other than that, many single mothers chose not to be involved in a romantic relationship because it may be stigmatized by their family or community. Involvement in a romantic relationship is seen as a transgression from the notion of traditional femininity, which is a form of emphasized femininity in Tamil society. Motherhood and karpu (chastity) are seen as central to the traditional notion of femininity in Tamil society.

This study contributes to the understanding of how emphasized femininity in a minority group in Malaysia influences single mothers’ decisions about romantic relationships. Furthermore, there are very few studies in Malaysia focusing on the experiences of single mothers from minority ethnic communities.

In this chapter, we used a research-based case study titled “The Desirable Prince Meeting” to explore how interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives on the child can be used to prompt critical reflection on socially just equity praxis in early childhood education. We argue that using multiple theoretical perspectives to analyze teaching and learning can generate and drive critical reflection on equity praxis more effectively than using a single perspective that presents a single truth about teaching and learning moments.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether business students' gender, age and culturally‐anchored values affect their perceptions of their university course experience.

Culturally diverse business students (n=548) studying at an Australian university were surveyed using previously established scales. Multivariate analysis was used to test six hypotheses.

High uncertainty avoidance explained unique variation in the six dependent variables analysed using OLS regressions. These dependent variables were: goals, generic skills, good teaching, intellectual motivation, learning community and learning resources. Each of these variables identified different dimensions of a students' university education experience. High collectivism also explained unique variation for all except for goals. High masculinity only explained unique variation for learning resources. Age only produced a unique variance explanation for good teaching, and gender did not produce any. Nevertheless, most of the six independent variables had significant zero‐order correlations with the six dimensions of university experience examined in this study.

Changes in business students' perceptions over time is a limitation of this study, as it was an exploratory cross‐sectional one.

This study's findings may help universities improve their relationship with their total student population by recognising the non‐homogeneous nature of this business student cohort, especially their culturally‐anchored values.

This paper suggests that it may be both possible and useful to identify different student customer segments based on students' culturally‐anchored value orientations, which may be valuable to universities in their efforts to attract, retain and grow an ongoing relationship with students, especially international full‐fee paying students.

This chapter explores women leaders’ outward appearance in the male-dominated world of rail, through the lenses of postfeminism and neoliberalism. Drawing on 31 interviews with women leaders in rail, it maps how a postfeminist logic is evident in women leaders’ narratives of aesthetic femininity. Aesthetic femininity refers to women leaders’ outward appearance which they describe as feminine. The research participants justify their feminine ‘work style’ through postfeminist themes of individual choice, natural sex differences, irony, personal initiative, skill and empowerment. The findings also show a patterning of justification around aesthetic femininity that fits a neoliberal self-governance as enterprise, self-flexibility and self-confidence. It is argued that whilst these iterations of aesthetic femininity are rooted in postfeminist and neoliberal contexts, they have consequences for sustaining gendered inequalities and traditional feminine norms in the highly masculinised culture of rail. Women’s narratives, whereby gender inequalities are acknowledged then subsumed into individualised agency through dress and appearance, do little to challenge the gendered culture in this sector.

Over the last decade, there has been a substantial rise in the popularity of tattooing in the UK, and a subsequent increase in tattooed female bodies. As explored by Walter (2010), key for the women of today is that they have a choice, to conform to stereotypical constructions of femininity, or resist them. However, tension lies in the ways that these choices are already constrained by socially imposed boundaries. In exploring constructions of tattooed female bodies, a stratified sample of 14 tattooed women were interviewed, with the transcripts being analysed using a discursive–narrative approach. Reflexivity forms a key part of the analysis, as I research a tattooed woman, with some of the insider–outsider intersections informing the analysis. Here, the discourse of unwritten rules and social norms is explored, with a specific focus on how tattooed women construct ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ choices in respect to the tattoos they and others get, the expectation and the normalisation of the pain of getting and having a tattoo, and finally, the generational difference in respect to how tattoos are accepted and understood.