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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.

In this paper we explore the gendered ways in which academic staff resistance and compliance is configured in a post-1992 University in England, including the emotions implicated in the navigation of neo-liberalisation and research intensification of their academic institution and its associated disciplinarian mechanisms.

We draw on data from an interview study of a diverse sample of 32 academics of different gender, discipline and academic grade. Analysis informed by a feminist post-structuralist framework of power and discourse explored different forms of academic resistance and compliance; how the embodied academic subject was (re)negotiated within gendered discourses of neo-liberal research excellence and managerialism and the gendered emotions generated in processes of resistance and compliance.

Institutional change and expectations to engage with research performativity generated fear, anxiety and anger. Female staff appeared to actively resist the masculinized research subject performing all hours work and individualism in the context of private and institutional gendered relations and labour. Male staff though actively resisted the feminization of higher education and the neo-liberal instrumentalization of caring and therapeutic cultures and ideologically resisted the surveillance mechanisms of higher education including the REF.

Our work contributes to scholarship problematizing the assumed neutrality of resistance and compliance and highlighting women’s symbolic struggle to (dis)identify with a masculine professional norm. In terms of theorising academic resistance to neo-liberalism and identity construction, further attention should be given to the mobilization and symbolic capital of academics and emotions positioned differently due to their gender and intersecting differences.

Our study addresses a gap in the scholarship of academic resistance and compliance by advancing the understanding of gender inequalities and emotions implicated in the process of resistance and compliance against neo-liberalism.

The body has been one of the central tools in analysing connections between sport and postcolonialism in India, given how sport was an essential part of the colonial ‘civilising’ mission, which involved disciplining and controlling Indian bodies. Any discursive understanding of sport and postcolonialism in India must consider how it relates to existing concepts of the body and shapes the experiences of the people involved in it – acknowledging not just the power of colonialism in moulding sporting experiences but also the force of internal hierarchies that exist in Indian society. This chapter explores the experiences of students who studied in higher educational institutions in Kerala under the ‘sports quota’, a system that reserves seats in colleges/universities for high-performing sportspersons in India. Through their interviews, the sustained exclusion of the sporting body in contemporary Indian pedagogy is illustrated here. Specifically, the continuing prevalence of the colonial emphasis on the sporting body, as one whose strength and instrumentality are paramount, as well as its corollary postcolonial position, which treats this sporting body as inferior to the ‘refined mind’ of studious pupils, can be observed. Approaching the sports quota with a decolonising lens would require re-examining the disembodied nature of pedagogy in India’s higher educational institutions, acknowledging sporting students’ lived experiences, and a seamless integration – as opposed to separation/exclusion – of the sportsperson into higher education.

This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women’s entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework.

The article critically examines the current state of women’s entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology.

The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women’s entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance of considering the ontological dimensions of lived experiences of situatedness, intersubjectivity, intentionality and temporality in analysing women entrepreneurs’ agency within gendered institutional contexts. It also demonstrates that feminist phenomenology could broaden the current scope of IPA regarding the embodied dimension of language.

The adoption of feminist phenomenology and IPA presents new avenues for research that go beyond the traditional cognitive approach in entrepreneurship, contributing to theory and practice. The proposed conceptual framework also has some limitations that provide opportunities for future research, such as a phenomenological intersectional approach and arts-based methods.

The article contributes to a new research agenda in women’s entrepreneurship research by offering a feminist phenomenological framework that focuses on the embodied dimension of entrepreneurship through the integration of IPA and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT).

Red Riding Hood is said to have been assembled from folktales that pre-date the collector Charles Perrault's 1697 re-telling and initial publishing (Dundes, 1989; Zipes, 1993). Since then, it is a story that has been re-told and re-imagined many times in various media contexts, with Beckett suggesting that it is one of the most familiar icons of Western culture, and a ‘highly effective intertextual referent’ (Beckett, 2002, p. XVI). Even though this story has been generally regarded as a children's tale, adult themes of sexuality and transgression have been explored in modern re-conceptions. In this chapter, we examine the representation of gender and masculinity in commercial media output: the 2011 American film Red Riding Hood (Hardwicke, 2011) and the pilot episode of the NBC series Grimm (2011). In Red Riding Hood, a romantic horror film, the male characters may be regarded as satellites that cluster around the female protagonist, whereas in Grimm, through its generic fusion of police procedural and horror genres, the text plays upon strong established examples of traditional male roles alongside more nuanced and contemporary representations of masculinity. Our analysis explores themes of transformation and heteronormativity and the extent to which the texts challenge or conform to traditional tellings.

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.

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.