Suchergebnisse

This paper examines the combined effect of three socioeconomic deprivations: education, wealth, and health on the utilisation of maternal health care services (MHCSs) among Bangladeshi women using the data of Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2014. Both bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses were employed in this study. Multivariable logistic regression analysis is used to examine the effect of the multidimensional socioeconomic deprivations on the use of MHCSs. Of the women who had given at least one live birth in the three years preceding the survey, 43% were non-deprived by any dimension; 31% were deprived in one, 20% in two and 6% in all three dimensions. The prevalence of receiving four or more antenatal care (ANC) services was 31%; 38% used facility-based delivery (FBD) and 42% sought skilled birth assistance (SBA). When education and wealth deprivations were combined, women were significantly (P<0.01) least likely to seek assistance from SBA (OR=0.18, 95% CI: 0.14-0.24) and FBD (OR=0.17, 95% CI: 0.12-0.22); and when all three deprivations were combined women were less likely to receive ANC at least once (OR=0.16, 95% CI: 0.12-0.22) than those who were not deprived. Programmes should be undertaken to expand maternal health voucher schemes in more sub-districts and quality of care should be ensured for equal accessibility and availability of MHCSs targeting deprived and disadvantaged areas and women to ensure safe motherhood practices in Bangladesh. Our findings show that the situation of maternal health care in Bangladesh is not satisfactory.Antenatal care

Utilising data from Nepal Demographic and Health Survey from 1996-2016 and some landmark verdicts of the Supreme Court on reproductive rights since the early 1990s, this article evaluates the pace of continuity and change in women's health status, particularly of reproductive rights of women. Thus, this study aims to identify sociocultural factors that influence women's health, particularly their reproductive health. Although in the last few decades, Nepal has made substantial achievements in reproductive health service delivery and reduction of childhood mortality, however, performance is rather slow in achieving nutritional and health seeking behaviour. for family planning services, elimination of harmful and discriminatory practices that influences on girls and women's health adversely. The Supreme Court of Nepal through its series of verdicts has greatly contributed to safeguarding women's reproductive health progressively, although the full implementation of these landmark verdicts has yet to be materialised. Key findings of this analysis show that health remains gendered in Nepal, from childhood. A major breakthrough could be possible only by removing the social determinants of women's health.

This research paper explores linguistic techniques employed by Fawzia Afzal-Khan in her memoir Lahore with Love: Growing up with Girlfriends, Pakistani Style (LWL) to challenge patriarchal norms and structures. The theoretical frameworks used for this research are drawn from structural linguistics including the works of Mills (1995), Spender (1980), as well as French Poststructuralists: Cixous (1975) and Irigaray (1985). Through analysis of the linguistic features of her narrative such as tropes, metaphors, imagery, wordplay, polyphony, genre-mixing, and code-mixing, the paper strives to illustrate the alternative writing style of the memoirist. The objective is to reveal that her linguistic and stylistic methods differ from the dominant structural and patriarchal writing styles, and mark her feminine individuality expressed thematically and stylistically in her memoir. The significance of our approach is that our analysis of her narrative is informed by a combination of the literary insights of the French feminists along with the ideas gained from the discipline of feminist linguistics and feminist stylistics. We hope that this paper goes some way in filling the research gap in the domain of Pakistani women's memoir-writing: an emerging arena of literary studies which is ignored and dismissed both in its literary merit and political significance.

This paper presents an investigation of the linguistic choices employed in harassment complaints submitted to the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women and four police stations located in Lahore during 2017-2018. In a patriarchal society such as Pakistan's, where a woman's honour epitomizes the whole family's honour (Atakav 2015, 52; Sharlach 2008, 96), sexual harassment, a stigmatizing issue is hardly ever reported (Ali and Kramar 2015, 241). This paper, using Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis's (Lazar, 2005, 2007) theoretical perspective of asymmetrical gendered power relations mirrored in harassment complaints, explores the form and severity of harassing practices which had prompted women in Lahore to report them. In order to unwrap the complex interplay of gender and power, linguistic features of the complaints are examined through Fairclough's text analysis (1989, 1992), the first dimension of the 3D model which explores lexical choices such as adjectives, adverbs, culturally informed metaphors and metaphorical extensions, which are embedded in grammatical structure exemplified through transitivity analysis. In this paper, harassment complaints are analysed as important documents invested with socio-cultural gender ideologies that underline the need for dismantling gender oppression to achieve social transformation.

Ignored or less voiced representation of victimized mothers may appear in the form of certain explicit psychological reactions within generations. Maternal trauma may seep through generations resulting in a psychologically paralyzed nation. The main concern of this paper is to study Sorayya Khan's novel Noor to unearth treachery and to unfold unspoken traumas (PTSD) inflicted specifically upon mothers during violent incidents. Mothers have always been the carriers of distortion, loss, violence, abuse and acute callousness, transmitting confused and anxious situations to the next generation. Sorayya Khan's first novel, Noor, addresses such violence and prejudice, thereby reflecting how such intense traumatic experiences actuate the suffering of mothers. This epic piece of art brings forth the hushed voices of both mothers and children who are marginalized, forgotten, oppressed, traumatized, subjected to dislocation and exposed to violence and sexual assault against the backdrop of war. This research tends to unveil the ways in which mothers have been subjected to trauma to cripple the sound psychological foundations of the community/nation. The main purpose of this essay is to address certain essential questions such as: what in fact trauma is, how war affects the life patterns of society, how the trauma inflicted upon women (Mothers) becomes an irresolvable disorder, how trauma can act as a catalyst for the disruption of all sectors of the society, and finally how inherited trauma gives birth to a traumatized nation. The focal point of this research is to examine and explore the issues faced by the fallen ones (Mothers) during times of war and how these issues become precursors for the future lives of the characters, thereby resulting in a hollow nation.

During the Partition of India in 1947, communal riots triggered unspeakable acts of horror against women of rival communities. A large number of women were abducted; some were later recovered and returned to their families. The trauma suffered by these abducted women and survivors extends all proportions. This paper analyses the dislocation, pain and trauma of abducted women, as depicted in two short stories: The Lost Ribbon by Shobha Rao (2016) and Banished (1998) by Jamila Hashmi originally published in Urdu as Banbas (exile) in Aap-Beeti, Jag-Beeti (1969). I consider the abducted women's plight in view of the distinction Giorgio Agamben made of zoè (bare life) and bios (political life as a citizen) in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) and The Use of Bodies (2015). I analyse how Partition reduced women to bare life, despite offering them hopes of life as a citizen of their respective independent countries. In this regard, I discuss their sufferings and trauma due to double dislocation, first stemming from rape, abduction and captivity in the wake of communal violence, and second due to the nature of the states' intervention in their recovery and rehabilitation. My analysis also shows that recovery of abducted women should not be taken as synonymous with restoration because restoration of a traumatised human being to her pre-abduction state of mind and life is not possible.

This article documents the experiences of childless Pakhtun women of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as narrated by them. These narratives present primary data on the most significant issue about which research studies are relatively scarce. This exploratory study drawing upon in-depth interviews of 45 childless women and 20 men in the 3 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa through convenient purposive sampling techniques, presents a narrative of the physical and mental health and lifestyle behaviours of childless women and men currently within 25-60 years of age. Research findings indicate that childless women become more anxious about their social and economic security and hopelessness escalates as the end of childbearing approaches. Further, their self-esteem goes low and depression, anxiety, and grief goes up. Stigmatization, conjugal dissonance and stereotypical attitudes of society injure their selfidentity. This empirical study recommends more studies to be undertaken on the plight of childless persons.

Language as a form of social practice is an essential tool to wield power and dominate the weak. What appears to be a simple narration of an anecdote may be a perpetuation of certain perspectives and a disguised manipulation of the reader. About a Burning Girl by Daniyal Mueenuddin is a text which depicts a married Pakistani woman of lower social strata struggling not just for her acceptance but also for her life. Socially as well as economically subjugated, she is a convenient scapegoat and the softest of the targets in a male dominated patriarchal society. To highlight the destruction/de-structuring of female identity through language in the text, in relation to Hodge and Kress's (1993) analytical model, this study aims to analyze the selected text from the Marxist feminist perspective, which sees women as the exploited working class. Analysis of the representative syntagms in the selected text shows that the female subject, as perceived by the male author, is represented as a de-structured, voiceless, dead character. The study thus exposes the underlying ideology of the text and its social implication as discourse with respect to women being represented as weak, speechless objects of male manipulation in Pakistani literature.

This study is part of a larger PhD research project on marital satisfaction of Breast Cancer Patients and their spouses in the Discipline of Sociology. The study was conducted by using a mixed method design. An interpretative research approach was used to collect data from 12 couples confronting breast cancer to unveil their experiences of marital satisfaction, while data from 279 couples were taken through a survey. In this paper the qualitative finding will be presented to highlight the couples' nuanced experience as a consequence of their diagnosis. The findings reveal that the majority of participants experienced distress in their marital relationship. Breast cancer-confronting couples stated that breast cancer affected their intimate and /sexual relationship, besides acquainting them with individual psychological and mutual spousal issues. Difficulties in dealing with physical deformity and psychological effects resulting from breast cancer, and the ways these changes influenced their marital satisfaction, were observed by a majority of the participants. The findings suggest that couples with strong emotional bonding and understanding dealt with these consequences in a better way.

This paper discusses veils and walls in Mohsin Hamid's novel Moth Smoke (2000) and shows how the woman in the novel, named Mumtaz, responds to her role as a wife and a mother. This essay has three parts: the first part compares the figure of Mumtaz with the seventeenth-century Mughal empress upon whom the character in the novel is based. The second part shows how Mumtaz tries to free herself from the walls of socially assigned roles and resists predetermined gender roles. The third part then analyses how names and titles function as veils to hide the individual behind a constricting network of nomenclature. Acquiring a male pseudonym, Mumtaz, defies the walls of a gender-specific identity.

All those desires, discriminations, success stories, and confrontations that otherwise might not have seeped into mainstream discourses are subtly said through the stories that mirror Arab women"s lives. Girls of Riyadh is a postmodern cyber-fiction that delineates subjects we usually do not get to hear much about, i.e. the quest of heterosexual love and matrimony of young Arab women from the less women-friendly geography of Saudi Arabia. Though in the last two decades the scholarship on alternative discourses produced by Muslim women have been multitudinous, there is a scarcity of critical investigations dealing with creative constructions of postfeminist, empowered Muslim woman, not battling with patriarchal power structures, but negotiating aspects that matter most in real life: human associations and familial formations. This paper engages with the categories of love, marriage, and sexuality, drawing upon the lives of four educated, successful, "velvet class" Saudi women. The significance of this study is linked with carefully challenging some of the stereotypes about Arab women as victims of forced marriages and their commonly perceived discomfort with love at large. The study reveals that it is men who need to "man up" against cultural conventions since women are increasingly expressive in their choices and brave enough to face the consequences audaciously.

The present study embarked with a supposition that there are similarities (traditional, under-developed, agri-based) between the Punjabi and African cultures, so the gender ideology might have similar patterns, which can be verified through the analysis of oral genres of the respective cultures. From Africa, Nigerian (Yoruba) proverbs are selected to be studied in comparison with Punjabi proverbs, while taking insights from Feminist CDA (Lazar 2005). The study has examined how Punjabi and Yoruba proverbs mirror, produce and conserve gendered ideology and patriarchism. Punjabi proverbs are selected through purposive sampling from 'Our Proverbs' (Shahbaz 2005) and Yoruba examples (with English translations and interpretations) are elicited from a dictionary of Yoruba proverbs (Owomoyela 2005), as well as articles written about gender by native Yoruba researchers. The investigation has uncovered through thematic content analysis that the portrayal of women in both communities is primarily biased, face-threatening and nullifying. Both languages have presented womenfolk mainly as unreliable, insensible, loquacious, insincere, ungrateful, opportunist, materialistic and troublemaking. Men have been depicted for the most part as aggressive, rational, prevailing, and anxious to take risks. This analysis infers that in asymmetrically organised Punjabi and African (Yoruba) communities, proverbs are deliberately sustaining inequality.

All those desires, discriminations, success stories, and confrontations that otherwise might not have seeped into mainstream discourses are subtly said through the stories that mirror Arab women"s lives. Girls of Riyadh is a postmodern cyber-fiction that delineates subjects we usually do not get to hear much about, i.e. the quest of heterosexual love and matrimony of young Arab women from the less women-friendly geography of Saudi Arabia. Though in the last two decades the scholarship on alternative discourses produced by Muslim women have been multitudinous, there is a scarcity of critical investigations dealing with creative constructions of postfeminist, empowered Muslim woman, not battling with patriarchal power structures, but negotiating aspects that matter most in real life: human associations and familial formations. This paper engages with the categories of love, marriage, and sexuality, drawing upon the lives of four educated, successful, "velvet class" Saudi women. The significance of this study is linked with carefully challenging some of the stereotypes about Arab women as victims of forced marriages and their commonly perceived discomfort with love at large. The study reveals that it is men who need to "man up" against cultural conventions since women are increasingly expressive in their choices and brave enough to face the consequences audaciously.

This paper discusses veils and walls in Mohsin Hamid's novel Moth Smoke (2000) and shows how the woman in the novel, named Mumtaz, responds to her role as a wife and a mother. This essay has three parts: the first part compares the figure of Mumtaz with the seventeenth-century Mughal empress upon whom the character in the novel is based. The second part shows how Mumtaz tries to free herself from the walls of socially assigned roles and resists predetermined gender roles. The third part then analyses how names and titles function as veils to hide the individual behind a constricting network of nomenclature. Acquiring a male pseudonym, Mumtaz, defies the walls of a gender-specific identity.

This paper uses the material from a Project of the Ministry of Women and Child Welfare, which we undertook in 1991-92, related to the study, rehabilitation and organizing of Jogins in Andhra Pradesh in India. As researchers, we faced a lot of dilemma while making the research design and evolving a methodology for the study. Jogins are the modern form of the traditional Devadasi system, which existed in India from the 10th century. Dedicated to the temple to carry out various temple-related duties, these girls were married to an immortal God, and since they could never become widows, they were regarded as auspicious ones. Centuries later, by the time India was colonized, all these girls were practicing prostitution. The system was finally abolished in 1947 by law. In spite of this, a large number of women and girls, especially from the lower castes, continue to be dedicated to God in different regions of southern India, especially in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. These girls become the keep of the village headman through whom they have a number of children. Since the whole system is institutionalized under the wraps and cover of religion, the exploitive aspect of the institution is often missed. As most of these women are from marginalized sections of society and are also employed as wage labourers and live below the poverty line, they are merely seen as labourers. Their main identity gets subsumed under this category, but here too they are invisible and are marginalized and often missed by policy makers and researchers. This paper documents the experiences of these marginalised and often forgotten women.