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This study aims to examine how women entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan's male-dominated sectors utilize the concept of positionality to navigate and redefine gender norms, focusing on their engagement with entrepreneurial masculinities and femininities. It explores the transformative potential of their strategic actions on gender dynamics within the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Employing qualitative research through 27 in-depth interviews, this study adopts constructivist grounded theory to delve into how women entrepreneurs interact with gender norms within their entrepreneurial context. This approach highlights the dynamic interplay between gender norms and the strategies employed by women entrepreneurs to navigate these challenges.

The findings reveal that women entrepreneurs actively employ and navigate entrepreneurial masculinities and femininities as strategies to challenge traditional gender roles. Their approaches vary from conforming to, challenging and creatively redefining the gendered expectations encountered in their entrepreneurial journey. This demonstrates their agency in reshaping gender norms and contributing to the diversity of gender performances within the domain of entrepreneurship.

While focused on Kazakhstan, the study's findings suggest broader implications for understanding gender dynamics in entrepreneurship across different cultural contexts. Future research could extend this inquiry to varied sociocultural settings, employing post-structuralist and ethnographic methodologies to further explore the performance of gender roles and the negotiation of belonging in entrepreneurial contexts.

By foregrounding the concept of positionality, this study enriches the dialogue on gender dynamics within entrepreneurship, offering fresh perspectives on the agency of women entrepreneurs in male-dominated sectors. It illustrates how gender identities and performances are not fixed but are actively constructed and negotiated, contributing to the evolving landscape of entrepreneurial masculinities and femininities.

Fairy tale narratives have placed significant emphasis on depicting female and male protagonists through a binary understanding of gender roles. Major male characters are portrayed with traits associated with hegemonic masculinity, reinforcing concepts that uplift masculine superiority, such as independence, exercise of power, authority, and strength. Conversely, female protagonists are often represented in ways that emphasise hegemonic femininity, aiming to disempower and marginalise them by highlighting traditional feminine traits like passivity, dependence, and helplessness. Any female characters deviating from these norms and depicted as powerful and dominant are positioned as villains in relation to the main female protagonist, embodying non-hegemonic feminine characteristics.

The representation of women in these ways primarily serves one purpose: to uphold masculine superiority. Hegemonic femininity portrays women as damsels in distress, awaiting rescue. On the other hand, non-hegemonic femininity manifests through villainous women performing antagonistic acts towards conforming female protagonists, thus forcing them into a helpless position. This is the critical juncture where the main male protagonists' step in – rescuing the helpless female protagonists and defeating the female villains – reinforcing masculine values in both scenarios.

However, the 21st century fairy tale narratives have challenged this ideology. I argue that recent fairy tale narratives have adopted the technique of ‘Feminist Quest Heroine’ to challenge and deconstruct male characters' heroism through the re-portrayal of female and male characters. The selected fairy tale narratives include Frozen (2013) and a comparative analysis of Sleeping Beauty (1959) and its cinematic adaptation Maleficent (2014). The findings suggest that these fairy tales rework the representation of male characters in three ways: the application of post-feminist masculinity, the modification of heteronormative temporality, and the prominence of sisterhood upon the critique of patriarchy.

This chapter draws on an ethnographic study with children aged 10–14 and their parents from heterogeneous socio-economic backgrounds in Türkiye. Building on a relational approach, it employs parental surveillance and children's individual privacy management in their intrafamilial relationships as a point of entry to reflect on childhood masculinities. From the perspectives of boys, girls and their parents, it illustrates how children's experiences of achieving privacy emerge as a gendered and age-related cultural phenomenon. Looking particularly at family negotiations around personal spaces and time at home and outside, it suggests that privacy regulation is a significant aspect of everyday family lives through which childhood masculinities and femininities are constructed, reproduced and performed. It further argues the ways that Turkish parenting culture may view intergenerational dialogue as a hierarchic category, rather than a relational category, contribute to a generational divide in boys' and girls' access to individual privacy.

Bengali sports history features very few women; some examples include enquiry into the representation of women in cricket stadiums as spectators (Naha, 2021) and the history of physical education in a women’s college (Bhattacharya, 2009). Likewise, young adult sports fiction in Bengali hardly engages with girls, with the notable exception of Moti Nandi’s Kalabati novels. This series of nine novels features the eponymous character as a high school student and a cricketer between 1984 and 2005. Belonging to a zamindar family, it is the possession of cultural capital post-abolishment of the zamindari system which allows Kalabati to play cricket. Situating the novel amidst India’s entry into neoliberalism, this chapter employs close reading to examine the ways adopted by the protagonist to manoeuvre new gender roles in conjunction with traditionally ascribed ones. Kalabati’s participation in a sport and a range of physical activities dominated by men goes against the societal codes prescribed for women. Despite that, masquerade and performativity allow Kalabati to assert her agency. Through alternately impersonating men and performing hyper-femininity, she effortlessly adjusts herself to different bodies, etiquettes and markers of gender identity. The fluidity in gender identities and emphasis on performance opens up the straitjacketed discussions around the former. This chapter argues that Kalabati’s exceptionality as a sportsperson is both an embodied and a genealogical trait.

This chapter advances understandings of emotion work by examining how “doing gender” and “doing health” are implicated in the pursuit of emotional tranquility. The study examines the role of hair loss in women’s illness narratives of cancer using in-depth interviews with 16 white women in the US Northwest who vary in age, marital status, diagnoses, and treatments. The absence of women’s hair presents an appearance of illness that prevents them from doing femininity, which calls into question their health status because of Western beauty standards. To overcome this barrier, the women use emotion work to manage the effects of their appearance through necessarily co-occurring bodily, cognitive, and expressive strategies (Hochschild, 1979). The required emotion work during women’s hair loss makes explicit the symbolic linking of the healthy body with the feminine body through women’s head hair. Pursuing treatment for cancer is often seen as a “fight” or a “battle” against the disease and the bodily assaults of such treatments, including unwanted visible bodily changes. A substantial body of empirical work has established the complex web of social psychological problems associated with breasts and breast cancer, but less attention has been given to the side effect of hair loss that is common across cancer types and treatments.

Fairy tales and their movie counterparts have, for decades, been a means of socialising children and audiences regarding gender (e.g., Shewmaker, 2015; Whitley, 2013). Specifically, Disney movies that portray fairy tales have strongly influenced how young children learn gender roles and gendered behaviours, yet deeper examination is needed of how Disney portrayals of masculinities have evolved among these films and across character type to understand how Disney may be reflecting or impacting dominant representations of masculinity that privilege certain identities and characteristics over others (Brode, 2016). While previous work has examined Pixar films as socio-culturally meaningful for representations of boyhood that remain grounded in traditional, hegemonic notions of masculinity (Wooden & Gillam, 2014), this chapter adds to the body of work by employing a critical content analysis of Disney films from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Disney's most recent addition of Strange World to answer the questions about how masculinities are portrayed. Through answering these questions of evolved representation throughout close to a century amount of work, we contribute to scholarship that attempts to understand media influences on boyhood culture, which is considered in crisis due to overemphasised representations of powerful, strong male characters that hide their emotions (Brode, 2016; Wooden & Gillam, 2014).

Based on qualitative data from a large study exploring Muslim experiences in the workplace, this chapter explains how Muslim dress standards inform identity and are influenced by US cultural ideals about self-presentation and perceived anti-Muslim hostility. Theoretical sampling was used to find 25 men and 59 women, 32 of whom are veiled. These individuals worked at major corporations as numerical minorities or held professions where they encountered non-Muslims regularly. Informed by theories of orientalism and social identity, findings examine hegemonic representations of organizational power and describe how men could employ masculine practices to navigate anti-Muslim discourse and foster a sense of belonging at work. Within immigrant-centered workplaces, women face cultural backlash for appropriating Western styles deemed immodest. While working outside their community, women who wore hijabs emphasized their femininity through softer colors, makeup, or “unpinning” their veil to offset the visceral reaction to their hijab. Thus, adapting to workplace dress expectations is structured by intersections of gender, religion, and workplace location. This chapter illustrates how Muslim dress strategies indirectly reflect how Western standards of dress, behavior, and self-expression determine qualifications and approachability within workplace structures, marginalizing Muslims and reproducing racial and gender hierarchies.

This study aims to examine the construction of feminine beauty by onnagata kabuki actors in Japan’s history, with a focus on their narratives in modern advertorials about beauty products. The objective is to identify emerging themes in their narratives and to analyze the symbolism and rhetoric used to persuade the audience to enhance traditional feminine “beauty” by using the specific brand in the wake of Japan’s modernization and Westernization.

The study primarily employs semiotic analysis of advertorials in the newspaper and in the kabuki theatre’s program. They are supplemented with images from premodern prints. Visual content is described and analyzed as well.

The narration of the onnagata in the advertorial is the process of “truth-telling,” where the primary concern of the storyteller is persuasion about truth, such as belief in the new method of makeup with the advertised brand, and falsehood, such as belief in the old method of skincare. Four themes and binary oppositions of values emerged from the data: (1) Identity: selves vs others; (2) Material objects, cosmetics: scientific vs primitive; (3) Practice: competent vs incompetent, and (4) Transformations: intentional vs incidental.

The research shows that Japan’s onnagata transvestism tradition and its influences on women’s beauty practice have existed since the premodern period, preceding contemporary cross-gender beauty practices observed in social media.

The role of the fairy godmother is a traditional archetype in the fairy tale genre, providing guidance and utilising transformative magic to enable the young heroes of the tales to find their happy endings. Shows such as Queer Eye feature LGBT+ people performing quasi-magical makeovers to reveal participants' ‘true selves’ and Pose and RuPaul's Drag Race have raised awareness of drag mothers and other forms of queer mentorship and support. As a result, the role of the fairy godmother is now opening up to include men and non-binary people.

One notable example is Billy Porter's ‘Fabulous Godmother’ in Cinderella (2021) who floats onto the scene, where the script, costuming, and performance underline his presentation as an openly queer character, taking Cinderella under his wing and providing her with the ballgown, chariot, and encouragement to attend the prince's ball. However, the fairy godmother is not simply gender-neutral. She remains a distinctly effeminate figure. Therefore, it remains to be seen whether this figure will eventually open up new forms of masculinity, reify existing images of queer femininity, or whether this diversity is simply a short-lived deviation from the existing trope.

The purpose of the chapter is to explain how boys learn to mask their expression of fears and emotions. The aim is to understand how boys internalize socially prescribed masculine traits, including masking of fear, certain emotional expressions and discomfort. The sample consisted of 20 parents, 30 school teachers and 50 boy students and 50 girl students between the ages of 11 and 14 from government-funded co-education schools in Delhi, India. School observation, focus group discussion, and interviews were used for data collection. The study found that gendered social norms are enforced on boys in the form of ‘boy codes’. These boy codes are so deep rooted in daily practices that they are considered as an essential ‘ideal male’ trait. Although the ‘ideal male image’ is presented as a uniform category among boys, the masking of fears and emotional expressions is not the same for all boys. Thus, many boys internalized the ideal male images in the form of hegemonic displays of masculinity, where they are focused on conforming to rigid masculine traits. However, through challenge, negotiation and renegotiation, many boys would like to conduct themselves according to their personal masculinity. There is a shift among some boys from the internalization of the traditional male image to giving meaning to personal experiences that deviate from the ideal male figure without the fear of being judged by society.