Given the sociopolitical significance of these policy positions, it is surprising that their racial and ethnic contours have received relatively little analytical attention. Especially under-researched are attitudes of Asian Americans, the fastest growing racial group in the United States today.Popular American stereotypes depict the pan-Asian culture in monolithic terms-as gen-Traditional Asians? Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Policy Attitudes in the United States ruJun ya ng a nd m a r i a ch a r les American stereotypes depict the pan-Asian culture as monolithically traditional in matters of gender and sexual politics. Most national surveys include too few Asian respondents to assess the validity of these claims, much less to interrogate differences across Asian-ancestry groups. Using data from the 2016 National Asian American Survey, this study examines racial and ethnic variability in support for policies that would extend rights and protections to women and to sexual and gender minorities. Results provide no evidence of pan-Asian gender traditionalism, and they show much more attitudinal heterogeneity across Asian ethnic groups than is popularly recognized. Some of this heterogeneity is linked to ethnic differences in sociocultural traits, including religion, politics, nativity, education, and gender-identity salience. Substantial variability across Asian American groups remains unexplained, however. Future research should explore how this variability maps onto distinctive gender regimes in ancestral countries and different histories of immigrant reception within the United States.
Western stereotypes often characterize gender relations in Muslim-majority societies as uniformly traditional and patriarchal. Underlying this imagery is a unidimensional understanding of gender ideology as moving along a single traditional-to-egalitarian continuum. In this study, we interrogate these assumptions by exploring variability across and within Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian (MENASA) societies in beliefs related to two regionally salient gender principles: women’s chastity and marital patriarchy. Data from a new online survey of Muslim Facebook users show substantial heterogeneity across and within six MENASA societies in support for these principles. These data also reveal a multidimensional structure, in that societies show different configurations of chastity and marital patriarchy beliefs, and each of these gender principles is influenced by respondents’ religious beliefs and gender status in different ways. Although religious absolutism predicts agreement with both gender principles, piety is associated with support for chastity but not for marital patriarchy. Results also show a clear gender divide in attitudes toward hierarchy in marriage but not with respect to chastity. Findings complicate broad-brush depictions of patriarchy in the region and corroborate previous research on the multidimensionality of gender beliefs and the multifaceted attitudinal influences of gender and religious beliefs.
Despite modernization in women’s public roles, reproductive rights attitudes and policies are becoming more restrictive in some societies. While existing literature depicts abortion opinion as a clash of feminist pro-choice vs. religious pro-life frames, feminist analysis suggests that nationalism may influence reproductive attitudes. Yet no cross-national research has empirically examined the relationship between ethnonationalist sentiments and abortion attitudes. We use the 2017 European Values Survey to analyze how ethnonationalist attitudes are associated with abortion approval in thirty European countries. We find that strong ethnonational identity and distrust of foreigners are positively correlated with individuals’ disapproval of abortion. Counterintuitively, this association between abortion attitudes and ethnonationalism is stronger among less religious and more liberal individuals—and in more “modernized” European countries. Our findings contribute a new factor to the cross-national abortion opinion literature and an empirical demonstration of feminist theory with relevance for reproductive rights.
Modernization accounts of cultural change hold that economic development drives liberalization of social values, including gender beliefs. Some comparative gender scholarship suggests that societal affluence is often accompanied by the growth of gender-essentialist beliefs, and that these beliefs coexist comfortably alongside gender-egalitarian values. The multidimensional conceptualization of gender ideology that is required to assess these competing claims has been applied so far mostly to Western societies. China is an obvious case for extending knowledge of these relationships, given its rapid economic growth and its recent history of state-imposed gender-egalitarian discourses. Applying latent class analysis to the Chinese General Social Survey (2010–2017), this study links different tenets of gender ideology in China to temporally and spatially specific histories and gendered interests. The results show that the relative importance of modernization and gender accounts depends on the generational, regional, and gendered identities being examined. Unlike in the West, moreover, egalitarian and essentialist beliefs do not always coincide in contemporary China. The friction between these beliefs reflects the resilience of male-primacy ideology.
This article explores how liberal feminism has been received and hybridized with local feminisms in post-socialist China. Based on interviews and documents from four Ford Foundation projects, the results show how local actors appropriated elements from three strands of feminism: liberal, socialist, and cultural. Conflicts among these strands were reconciled by de-emphasizing the structural origins of gender inequality and putting impetus for change on individual women. The human rights-based understandings of gender equality are thereby converted into women’s obligation to improve their “quality” and exercise their legal rights, which ignores intersectional disadvantages confronting rural women.
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