Suchergebnisse

Offers four strategies of deconstructing gender symbolism, one of the methods & goals of contemporary feminist theory & practice - politics. (1) Lesbianism denaturalizes the institutions of 'compulsory heterosexuality.' (2) One can question the belief that sexual violence is the natural expression of male aggression, & women are men's victims. A better strategy seems to be to take the violence as a discursive matter that can be redescribed. If the narrative about successful resistance prevails over the narrative of woman as a natural victim, the aggressor's expectations can be changed. (3) Beauty discourses lead women to be weak, unable to resist violence, & susceptible to mental diseases like anorexia. (4) Maternity discourses associate women with maternity & see a woman's body as the subject of necessary control by the psychomedical sciences. They form an idea of woman's nature that is invariable & unchangeable. This notion is questioned by feminism as a serious limit on women's agency.

In the article, issues relating to the sociopolitical measures aimed at increasing flexibility in managing the relationship between the spheres of work & family on the individual level of life strategies are examined within the framework of the gender theories of organization. The environment of management is described as a gender regime in which an organizational masculinity functions. This a priori establishes unequal conditions for the formation of women's career patterns. On the basis of a case study of the life strategies of women in managerial positions & other results drawn from research on the management environment from a gender perspective, the author identifies strategies employed toward women, who in the management environment are in the position of tokens, by the gender regime & its actors in the highest positions of the organizational hierarchy, & identifies the strategies that in connection with these conditions are created by women who desire to succeed in an environment set up in this way. The certain degree of flexibility that on the individual level can be achieved in the management environment is founded on a gender contract, which in the end continues to disadvantage women because it emerges in connection with the given structure of set rules of the environment. If flexibility is to be introduced as a nondiscriminatory mechanism, organizational masculinity as such must be called into question.

The following comments compare the present orientations of Czech sociology with recent developments in European sociology. The analysis of sociology in Europe shows that the attention of European sociologists has shifted to social theory & social philosophy, sociology of culture, media, gender & feminism, political sociology, nationalism, ethnicity, & racism. Czech sociology, in the opinion of the author, still does not pay sufficient attention to such pressing issues of Czech society as national identity, nationalism, value transformations, the role of traditions, & European integration processes.