Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2016

Female roles and sexuality on television have come a long way since the traditional representation of women as homogeneously soft, passive and (sexually) submissive. However, these representations are often still trapped in a rigid, binary framework on gender and sexuality. Representations of LGBTQ1 subjects have also become far more common, although they are still often stereotypical, while transgender people continue to be marginalised on mainstream television. The Netflix series Orange is the New Black seems to challenge this view by presenting characters who present different ways of being a woman and by showing women in different sexual roles. This paper presents a qualitative content analysis of this women-in-prison drama, exploring in-depth how femininity and female sexuality are represented. Four main characters were selected as the focal point of the analysis. Our analysis indicates that Orange is the New Black combines more progressive with more conservative elements: on the one hand, femininity is represented as an arbitrary construction and sexuality as fluid, while common stereotypes such as the butch lesbian are used in a self-conscious and humorous way. On the other hand, Orange is the New Black does have a tendency to employ problematic tropes, as the show’s portrayal of African-American and Hispanic women as more tough and streetwise shows us. On the whole, we argue that Orange is the New Black does partly depart from mainstream conventions of female representation and therefore has some subversive potential.

Drawing on records held in missionary and colonial archives in both Indonesia and the Netherlands, this article discusses the education of Javanese boys and girls by Dutch Catholic missionaries in the educational institutes in Muntilan and Mendut. The missionaries intended a vital role for their pupils in spreading the Catholic faith and bringing “civilisation” to the local people in Java. As such, these students were trained to become local intermediaries in the colonial project of the Catholic mission. This article focuses on the fashioning of these students in particular, which would enable them to play this agential role. Instilling proper gender roles was an important aspect of this fashioning, as these were central markers of “civilised” Catholicism for the mission. In this way, Dutch Catholic missionaries contributed to the export of the European ideal of Christian gender roles and norms to the colonies. With this, the article introduces new players and the factor of religion into existing Dutch debates and scholarship on the civilisation mission and domestication of empire in the Dutch East Indies.

Whether, and how, marginalised groups can locate their voices and achieve change within mainstream development organisations is one of the driving concerns of both political scientists interested in policy development and activists seeking social improvement. In development circles, the Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) approach has come to be seen as an effective tool in strengthening women’s voices and interests in policy and budgeting, particularly among the poor and marginalised (UN WOMEN, 2015). Indeed, budgets can play a key role in transforming societies, but much depends on how this approach is used and for whom. Enabling individual females to be better accommodated within highly unjust and unequal patriarchal societies is not enough. In this paper, I analyse how GRB has been framed in the current development discourse from a postcolonial feminist economics lens. I discuss the core GRB assumptions regarding women’s oppression and its implications for the female subaltern. In developing the argument, I map the GRB framework’s implicit a priori social analysis and its promotion of idealised modernist institutions and reformulated neoliberalism, and I then criticise its widespread assumption that paid labour empowers women. I argue that feminist concepts and political tools like GRB must return to and reaffirm their transformative dimensions, thereby reasserting their association with forms of postcolonial collective action and solidarity that involve possibilities of social change.