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Drawing on findings from 15 focus group interviews held with 65 young (aged 18–25) women university students in Turkey who describe themselves as feminists, this paper attempts to reconcile gender and youth studies and introduces social generation as a theoretical tool. The paper demonstrates how these feminist university students, as the members of a generation who had lived all their lives under the Justice and Development (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi- AKP) governments, articulated the difficulties of being young and a woman at a specific conjuncture in Turkey during which the gender regime has been going through a period of deterioration. They discussed their process of transition from childhood to youth, and expressed how in this process they became aware of a social gaze that repositioned them as 'young women' and thus forced them to face the social and political challenges of being a young woman at this specific conjuncture. Feminism did not only empower them to confront these challenges but also turned them into subjects of opposition in a political regime which had adopted an anti-gender agenda and which at the time of the research decided to withdraw from the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combatting violence against women, also known as the Istanbul Convention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports an announcement made by the "Journal of Gender Studies" inviting research papers addressing future of feminism and its political dimensions. According to editors of this journal, in exploring questions of feminism and fiction, not only "fiction" comes under scrutiny but "feminism" too, its diverse forms and its relation to gender, race, class and sexuality. These papers are required to be written between 5,000 and 7,000 words and should follow guidelines set out in the "Notes for Contributors" section of this issue. All papers should be submitted by September 2005.

The article invites papers related to feminism, sex and the body for the special issue for 2011 of the periodical.

The gender politics of the current moment have revitalized forms of feminism and anti-feminism. New collective engagements reflect both the power and problematics of group identity politics to, on the one hand, mobilize political resistance in struggles for gender justice but, on the other hand, homogenize and alienate 'others'. Mindful of these issues, this paper examines the group identity politics of the equity-focused clubs at an elite independent school in the USA. Drawing on interview data from 16 student leaders, the paper considers the gender dynamics within these clubs that both supported and undermined gender justice. The focus is on the polarizing of gender produced by the clubs that positioned equity as a minority issue, stigmatized homosexuality and presumed boys to be non-caring and not interested in equity. It is also on the school's approaches to disrupting this polarization through teacher mentorship and critical discussion. In terms of addressing issues of gender justice, the paper highlights the significance of students being able to access such mentorship and critical discussion within a variety of spaces that support them to be heard and reflect their commonality of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the rise of fertility apps and what data-sharing in this arena can mean for app users. The paper offers a brief background of some available fertility apps, how they work and where they are situated in the sphere of health-tracking apps. Exploring how exactly these apps market themselves in terms of feminist-empowerment discourses, the author examines how these claims fit within broader critical discussions around fertility data, data sharing and the ways that applications and algorithms are designed to configure particular versions of reproductive femininity. The author shows the way that intimate data takes on a new life as it is sold on in order to identify women as potential targets for purposes of commercial marketing, as well as the more subtle ways this works to remind female users of reproductive expectations within societies. The paper illustrates the way that fertility apps can play a role in the further medicalization and regulation of the female body as a newly-digitalized reproductive machine, as these apps become a new mode of inducing conception under a veiled guise of appearing to be a harmless and empowering way for women to re-learn and re-claim their bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against a back-drop of ongoing hostility between sections of feminism towards trans communities, and particularly feminist antagonism towards trans women, this paper explores the relationship between feminism and transgender. Through the use of original case study material, gathered by virtual methods, the paper explores events that have occurred since the millennium that are used to highlight particular epistemological and political tensions between feminism and trans. Central themes running through the case studies include the constitution of 'woman', the policing of feminist identities and spaces, and questions of bodily autonomy. In conclusion, the paper stresses the importance of rejecting trans-exclusionary feminism and of foregrounding the links between feminism and transgender as a key social justice project of our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muslim feminist scholars highlight, and seek to transform, racist, sexist and Islamophobic discourses through feminist interpretations of their religion. This paper reports on data gathered from an interview-based study involving four young Muslim women from the same Brisbane (Queensland) community. The focus is on how these young women are understanding, and finding spaces of agency, within these discourses with reference to their faith. The Islamic principle of ijtihad (jurisprudential interpretation of religious text) and the practice of feminist ijtihad are theorized as powerful tools in supporting the young women to counter the Islamophobia and gendered Islamophobia in their lives. Using these tools, however, as this paper argues, is not unproblematic and can reinscribe disempowering gender and ethno-cultural relations. Amid unprecedented gendered Islamophobia and the clear imperative of supporting Muslim women to access the tools of feminist ijtihad, the paper provides important insight into the possibilities and problematics of these tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by feminist new materialist and posthuman activist philosophy, this paper speculates on what happens when data entangles with arts-based methodologies in a school-based participatory activist project with six teen girls (age 15) on gender-based and sexual violence. Mapping the journey of how data becomeda(r)taand how da(r)ta becomed/artaphacts, the paper follows how theRunway of Disrespect, theShame Chain, theRuler-Skirtand theTagged Heartripple through peer cultures, school assemblies and national policy landscapes. Each journey provides a small glimpse into how bodies, space, objects, affects and discourse ‘intra-act’ in dynamic assemblages to produce d/artaphacts crafted from and carrying experience. The paper concludes to consider the ethical-political affordances of how participatory arts-based methodologies and the im/personal vitality of objects might support young people to safely and creatively communicate and potentially transform oppressive sexual cultures and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is Florence Nightingale becoming unfashionable? The UK's largest union UNISON voted to drop the use of Nightingale's image for their union as she was considered to be unrepresentative of modern nursing. One of those backing the motion is on record as saying, 'All over Eastern Europe, statues of Lenin are being taken off their pedestals, dismantled and pulled off to be cut up.... It is in the same vein that we must enter the new Millennium, start to exorcise the myth of Florence Nightingale'. This paper will discuss modern attitudes to Nightingale in terms of her feminism (not a term she used of herself) and survey scholarly articles that address Nightingale in relation to the position of women. It ends with reflections on the iconography of notable women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the one-child policy in China, post-80s women have experienced dramatic social, economic, and political changes that differ from previous generations. This article explores post-80s women’s experiences of beautification in their different life stages from a feminist perspective, drawing upon 14 in-depth interviews with post-80s women to examine their perception of beauty and beauty practices in different life stages. Three main themes emerged that were intricately associated with two distinct life stages. During their transition from schoolgirls to young women, (1) participants perceive their younger selves as naïve, passive receivers of the beauty culture. When transitioning from young women towards becoming wives and mothers, (2) their values regarding beauty shift from emphasizing outer beauty to emphasizing inner beauty. (3) They also transition to embracing natural beauty standards. This paper argues that these women’s perceptions of beauty and beauty practices are fluid and change across different life stages. ‘Trivialised’ everyday beauty discourse exists to enable them to negotiate beauty practices and gender roles. This research suggests that young Chinese women, especially those leaving high school and entering university, would benefit from readily accessible academic feminist knowledge and debate regarding beauty culture to facilitate critical thinking and informed decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on how women construct resistance, project their agency and sculpt a positive identity for themselves. It employs feminist critical discourse analysis as a framework to examine how Nigerian blogs on gender issues constitute a discursive site for sociopolitical action, the interrogation and deconstruction of gendered social structures and the amplification of women's voices(s). The article analyzes discursive strategies used in the blogposts to resist gender inequality, women's exploitation and female subjugation while constructing a positive image for women and emphasizing their empowerment. The results reveal three main strategies: (1) denouncing patriarchy and gender discrimination, (2) countering toxic gender narratives and (3) calling out sexist attitudes and praising women who resist such behaviour. Together, these mechanisms contribute to a sociopolitical critique of systematic gendering of privilege aimed at social transformation and Nigerian/African women's emancipation. Implications of the study for research on marginalized, disenfranchised groups are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trans people face biases and barriers in healthcare including health professionals' lack of training and knowledge of trans health, bodies, and identities. Interactions between health professionals and trans people have been analysed as a site fraught with historical power imbalances, epistemological struggles that position trans people at a disadvantage and one where negotiations of access to adequate services and treatment continue. In this paper, I highlight the need to pay attention to not only how knowledge about trans bodies and possibilities is produced, negotiated and contested, but also to moments of claimed and/or actual ignorance that take place in healthcare. Applying a feminist epistemological lens, I ask what is at stake and what is the function of ignorance in the trans patient/health professional relationship. Such exploration is crucial if we recognize that practices of ignorance are often entangled with practices of exclusion and oppression. Methodologically, I draw on qualitative in-depth interviews with 18 health professionals in the UK conducted as part of a larger research project on trans health. In analysing the multi-faceted manifestations of ignorance within the data and linking them to feminist taxonomies of ignorance, I explore how ignorance can be critiqued and transformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper describes, interrupts and diffractively explores named patriarchal practices as performatively and situationally (re)produced via gender norms. We are attentive to ways in which heteronormative familial conventions maintain and reinscribe gendered binaries reductively as natural. We suggest that heteronormative familial relations re/produce gendered difference as intrinsically disadvantageous to female bodies and that this requires a response; a mobilization of creative feminist affirmative counteraction. In this paper, we respond to the failure of feminism (for us personally and at large) to re-signify gendered norms associated with parental care work that tie the female body naturally to reproduction. By making this move, we aim to (re)deploy theoretical analysis of so named patriarchal power. Through employing a diffractive analysis, we attempt to move on from a simple binary debate that we suspect only reiterates female oppression and disadvantage supported through compulsory heteronormative investment. We discuss a reframing of patriarchal power that necessarily releases it from the male/female, feminine/masculine dichotomy. We frame this relation of power as heteronormative affective violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research challenges mainstream discourses of the Global North through the debate between the activist group, Femen, and some Muslim women. International Topless Jihad Day (ITJD), hosted by Femen, ignited conflict with Muslim women globally. On ITJD, Femen insisted that women removed their veil since, they stated, it was the symbol of oppression used by Muslim males. Femen's message maintained the illusions of white superiority in public space through its assumption that all Muslim women are helpless and voiceless. Responding to the protest, a group of Muslim women formed the online movement; Muslim Women Against Femen (MWAF). This paper focuses on how MWAF reiterated the veil as agency, transforming Muslim women's online resistance. In expanding how this reiteration is embraced, this paper will lend post-colonial feminist perspectives to the contestation of the veil in public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Raja Alem's Sufi-oriented Islamic feminism is the fruit of the sociocultural atmosphere of Mecca; a city that contains Islam's holiest mosques, as well as Alem's own home, and is the main site of her feminist battles. In Alem's novels, her feminist discourse is interwoven with an epistemological one that locates women's religious agency within the confines of spiritual knowledge. Alem's My Thousand and One Nights sheds light on the way Sufi patriarchs exert power over the mystical in order to manipulate women's religiosity. This sets her apart from other Islamic feminists such as Saba Mahmood, who attempts to address the issue of gendered measures of religious agency by adhering to literal readings of sacred texts. Furthermore, this paper studies Alem's reference to spiritual knowledge as a resource for women's religious agency. This paper highlights Alem's belief that even though women's knowledge is acquired through inheritance rather than individual motivation, spiritual knowledge is the only way to combat the social hierarchy over the mystical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have begun to explore how those women academics committed to social justice, namely feminist academics, are navigating the increasingly managerial Academy. To understand how these multiple social identities, including gender and ethnicity, interact and intersect, this paper adopts an intersectional approach to understanding the heterogeneity of women's experiences in academia. Five focus groups with feminist academics (n = 6-10 in each focus group) reveal concerns of hampered career progression as a consequence of being female and openly feminist. Some ethnic minority academics felt that they were forced to choose between a feminist identity or that of their ethnic background. For some women, their feminist identity provided opportunities for challenging dominant practices. The paper concludes that the heterogeneity of feminist academics' experiences within academia is under-researched and that the lens of intersectionality helps to illuminate this. This paper advances understanding of multiple identities at work, though demonstrating that intersectionality can lead to the accumulation of advantage as well as disadvantage in relation to social identities such as gender and ethnicity, and a political identity such as feminist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2012, New Delhi (India) was catapulted into the global limelight for the brutal gang rape of a 23-year old woman travelling in a bus. This wasn’t the first time that sexual violence had been perpetrated on the streets of Delhi and nor would it be the last. Yet this universal fact of everyday violence in public spaces particularly streets, though acknowledged by activists and feminists, has been examined minimally in academic scholarship. Further, even though the United Nations has been instrumental in foregrounding gender-based violence as a critical human rights issue, it has only recently turned its attention to street harassment through its ‘Safe Cities Global Initiative’. Therefore, in this paper, we trace how a routine but understudied form of violence becomes central to United Nations’ agenda to eliminate violence against women. By specifically, analysing the Delhi Safe Cities programme as a case study, our second contribution lies in examining the adequacy of the contemporary Safe Cities framework as a model for addressing sexual violence in public space. We conclude the paper by offering critical conceptual and methodological recommendations to further strengthen the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows the emotional management of lone, independent women travellers as they move through tourist spaces, based on my doctoral researchEmbodiment and Emotion in the experiences of independent women tourists(2009–2012). Specifically, this paper will focus on ‘gendering happiness’ by arguing that women travellers are significantly compelled to feel and display characteristics of happiness, humour and ‘learning to be Zen’ in order to be successful travellers. The imperative to become, and remain, happy and humourous in the face of embodied, emotional and gendered constraints is a key feature of women’s reflections of their travelling experiences, mirroring the recent emergence of literature into happiness and positive thinking within feminist theory. Negotiating ‘bad’ emotions provides a powerful insight into the perceptions of women travellers; to remain happy can mask problematic power relations and other forms of resistance. This is not to say that emotional negotiation is not partly a form of effective resistance, rather, I wish to make room for the freedom to be unhappy and angry in travelling space without feeling failure for not achieving a successful travelling identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 is a landmark pronouncement on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. Not only does this resolution highlight the important role of the involvement of women in peace processes, but it also stresses the importance of their equal participation in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace. Furthermore, it also triggers the approval of some other resolutions, which are all further elaborations on that first document. The aim of this paper is to analyse, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, the way in which women are actually narrated in these pronouncements by means of the two conceptual metaphors that are most often repeated: WOMEN ARE VICTIMS, typically found in earlier resolutions, and WOMEN ARE AGENTS OF CHANGE, as the metaphor that has gained more strength and visibility as new resolutions have continued to appear. As metaphors are the cognitive lenses we use to make sense of abstract concepts, it is important that we look closely at each of those metaphors to see how they shape the characterization of women in times of armed conflict and post-conflict and, in doing so, how they guide our understanding and behaviour towards them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the ongoing increase of women in the medical force, gender inequalities persist in medicine. The purpose of this paper is to study the mechanisms that regulate the contemporary gender order through a critical discourse analysis. We conducted 21 narrative interviews with Italian physicians, and 1 focus group with 10 Italian senior-year medical students. We used Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework to explain how “hegemonic masculinity” shapes discourses of sameness aimed at silencing gender inequalities in medicine; “natural female domesticity” challenges this sense-making and introduces new sparks in the debate about female career paths; similarly, “influential group power” discourses nurture the reflections about elitism in the profession. Our findings show that the new generation of physicians challenges the dominant gender order proposing new ways of negotiating gender roles in favour of a greater gender equality. This paper offers causes for reflection on a profession that has profound implications in our society and about the ways it is powered by dominant socio-political discourses which potentially can influence doctors’ careers. We address the potential in discourses to subvert or sustain power structures permeating healthcare professions, disclosing the discursive mechanism underlying different forms of oppression and offering the means to raise awareness and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist research has played a pivotal role in uncovering the extent and nature of male violence against women and suggests that the main motivations for rape are the need for power, control and domination. This paper argues that, although feminist explanations of rape are robust and comprehensive, male victims of rape have largely been excluded from this field of research. While feminism has enabled the victimisation of women to be recognised, further understanding of the victimisation of men is required. Some feminist writers (such as hooks, 2000) have argued that men's emancipation is an essential part of feminism since men are equally harmed by gender role expectations and sexism. This paper makes a contribution to current knowledge through evaluating the social constructions, stigma and phenomenological realities associated with male rape (by both men and women), arguing that there has been neglect in this area that functions to support, maintain and reinforce patriarchal power relations and hegemonic masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a women's studies academic who has taught health and social care students for four years in the UK, it strikes me that much of what and how I teach is incompatible with my own pedagogic position. At a time of government cuts and economic austerity there are ever shrinking opportunities to work in women's studies environments within the higher education academy, and I often find there is a mismatch between what I am offering as an academic and what an employer is looking for. Occupying the most junior teaching post on a fixed-term contract, and coming from the discipline of women's studies – constructed often as irrelevant and/or too political and controversial, rather than a necessary philosophical foundation to critical thinking – I have diminutive curriculum influence and find myself, more often than not, delivering hegemonic groups of theories and practice. Drawing largely on level 5 health and social care interprofessional learning module course materials, this paper will analyse the discourses inscribed within them, and consequently expose the essence of the learning and teaching that takes place within the classroom. This paper will also act as a catalyst to explore whether it is possible to find, or construct, a feminist space in my learning and teaching practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we explore how pedagogies of perfection in fitness content on social media work as a postfeminist technology of the self, exhorting young women to act upon themselves to become 'perfect' but hiding the extent to which exercise as aesthetic labour is normatively demanded. We draw on focus group and individual interviews with 37 young women who follow fitness content on Instagram and a discourse analysis of the social media presence of Patry Jordán, a famous Spanish fitness influencer. Through the concept of pedagogies of perfection, we explain how fitspiration is a gendered public pedagogy of digital health through which neoliberalism and postfeminism are disseminated, providing techniques to develop individualized projects of the self. The perfect is the horizon of expectation for continued self-optimization, where young women engage in a never-ending project of the body that also demands the improvement of psychological attitudes. Through the careful articulation of 'positive' pedagogies, the idea of imperfection or failure becomes embedded within the perfect. This production of the self both as a problem and with possibilities represents the horizon of expectation, a powerful force that leads to the belief that all women can achieve 'successful' feminine subjectivities while reproducing gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I discuss a group of photographs that feature a place intrinsically related with Australian women’s photographic memories of pregnancy - the beach. Building on feminist interdisciplinary studies of family photography, I argue that family photographs of pregnancy contribute to alternative ways of knowing and interpreting the Australian beach landscape and the entangled social relations and interactions within these spaces. Data are drawn from a set of 34 pregnancy photographs that were taken at the beach in [Tasmania] between 1945 and 2013 and collected as part of a larger, ongoing mixed methods research project involving the analysis of 236 Australian family photographs of pregnancy. In this paper, I conduct a visual discourse analysis of three categories of beach pregnancy images including (1) the family holiday photograph, (2) the bikini photograph and (3) the ‘natural’ pregnant body/landscape photograph to enable a more precise account of how personal and cultural memories of the Australian beach intersect. In the concluding discussion, I suggest that the beach is a critical site for deepening sociological and feminist understandings of the production and expression of pregnant identities and Australian national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways in which girls and women are using digital media platforms to challenge the rape culture they experience in their everyday lives; including street harassment, sexual assault, and the policing of the body and clothing in school settings. Focusing on three international cases, including the anti-street harassment site Hollaback!, the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported, and interviews with teenage Twitter activists, the paper asks:Whatexperiences of harassment, misogyny and rape culture are girls and women responding to?Howare girls and women using digital media technologies to document experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and sexism? And,whyare girls and women choosing to mobilize digital media technologies in such a way? Employing an approach that includes ethnographic methods such as semi-structured interviews, content analysis, discursive textual analysis, and affect theories, we detail a range of ways that women and girls are using social media platforms to speak about, and thus make visible, experiences of rape culture. We argue that this digital mediation enables new connections previously unavailable to girls and women, allowing them to redraw the boundaries between themselves and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the Spanish case as a departure point, this paper explores a variety of causes for the slowdown in female employment growth in Italy over recent years. The paper analyses the peculiarities of the Italian labour market, with a higher propensity to inactivity than in other countries, as well as the generally low educational levels among the Italian population and the pervasive presence of the black economy. It goes on to examine institutional and political features, such as the organisation of social policies, the political weakness of feminism, the role of the Catholic Church, family networks and the North–South duality (which is particularly extreme with regard to gender equality). The features studied relate to each other in a logic which could account for the divergent paths of the social position of women in Italy and Spain. The article is based in Labour Force and Multiscopo surveys, as well as on interviews with Italian social policy experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper was given at the MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: LIFE WORK AND LEGACY conference held on 8 March 2017 to celebrate International Women's Day. It was hosted by the Centre for Gender Studies of the University of Hull as part of the Hull City of Culture 2017 programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to feminism in the university is parallel to what happens to feminism in other venues under economic restructuring: while the impoverished nation is forced to cut social services and thereby send women back to the hierarchy of the family, the academy likewise reduces its footprint in interdisciplinary structures and contains academic feminists back to the hierarchy of departments and disciplines. When the family and the department become powerful arbiters of cultural values, women and feminist academics by and large suffer: they either accept a diminished role or are pushed to compete in a system they recognize as antithetical to the foundational values of feminist priorities of social justice. Collaborative work to nurture diversity and interdisciplinarity does not register as individual accomplishment. This paper considers the necessity of this type of academic work to further the vision of a society committed to the collective values espoused by feminism and other areas in social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we reflect upon our experiences and those of our peers as doctoral students and early career researchers in an Australian Political Science department. We seek to explain and understand the diverse ways that participating in an unofficial Feminist Reading Group in our department affected our experiences. We contend that informal peer support networks like reading groups do more than is conventionally assumed, and may provide important avenues for sustaining feminist research in times of austerity, as well as supporting and enabling women and emerging feminist scholars in academia. Participating in the group created a community of belonging and resistance, providing women with personal validation, information and material support, as well as intellectual and political resources to understand and resist our position within the often hostile spaces of the University. While these experiences are specific to our context, time and location, they signal that peer networks may offer critical political resources for responding to the ways that women's bodies and concerns are marginalised in increasingly competitive and corporatised university environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the leisure lives of twelve women, from four families, across three generations. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with ‘trios’ of three generations of women, I examine changes and shifts in women's leisure across the life-course and within families. At the outset of the research I was interested primarily in identifying changes, but soon the data revealed that the women transmitted both habits and understanding of leisure down the generations. An important question for gender studies is if women transmit leisure values and practices across generations does this mean that women's leisure lives remain unchanged since early feminist leisure theory? The challenges for the participants of this study were to achieve some autonomy and change in their leisure patterns, even though they demonstrated that many of those patterns remained extremely similar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In both the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, femininity and beauty were traits often attributed to the ideal working mother portrayed and promoted in state media. But with greater exposure to global beauty ideals in the post-communist era, the sexualized and beautified female body acquired a social value that was independent of its role in the reproductive process. In this paper, I analyse changes in the way care for the female body was represented in two Russian women’s magazines Rabotnitsa and Krest’yanka (1970s-1990s). Over this period, the ideal of the working mother figures less prominently and there is an increasing focus on the ways that women-consumers ought to work on their individual body-projects. This might appear to be a radical change. But by analysing the representations of women more carefully, I show that the move towards the privatization of the body project was already under way in the late Soviet period, but only for some categories of women. That is, non-Slavic women of various ages could be working mothers, but individual consumption was a realm reserved for their Slavic countrywomen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary alarm about ‘laddism’ reveals what feminist research and activism has long-recognised; universities, like other social institutions, can be dangerous places for women. Research in the US and, more recently, the UK reveals alarming rates of violence, against women, the cultural and institutional norms which support violence and gaps in institutional responses. In the midst of this contemporary alarm about the university as a hotbed of laddism, there is a risk that the university – a site of potential empowerment and liberation for women (and men) – becomes re-positioned as a danger zone. The limited focus on danger and safety belies the potential of universities to enhance human freedoms through intellectual endeavour. We argue this progressive potential should remain centre-stage, as should university-based resistance to everyday sexism and laddism. This paper analyses accounts of young women feminists (n = 33) in UK and US universities. It explores their use of feminism and features of the university environment to resist and challenge oppressive cultures and practices. It argues that, despite encroaching neoliberalism and enduring sexism, universities continue to provide environments for engagements with feminism, enabling young women students to use feminism to resist and challenge sexism and to envision their feminist futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large and growing body of literature suggests that women and men often have differentiated relationships to water access, uses, knowledges, governance, and experiences. From a feminist political ecology perspective, these relationships can be mediated by gendered labour practices (within the household, at the community level, or within the workplace), socio-cultural expectations (e.g. related to notions of masculinity and femininity), as well as intersectional differences (e.g. race, income, and so forth). While these relationships are complex, multiple, and vary by context, it is frequently argued that due to responsibility for domestic provision or other pathways, women may be particularly affected if water quality or access is compromised. This paper reports on a statistical evaluation of a 478 household survey conducted in underserved areas of Accra, Ghana and Cape Town, South Africa in early 2012. Interrogating our survey results in the light of the ideas of gender differentiated access, uses, knowledges, governance, and experiences of water, we open up considerations related to the context of each of our study sites, and also invite possible revisions and new directions for these debates. In particular, we are interested in the instances where differences among male and female respondents were less pronounced than expected. Highlighting these unexpected results we find it helpful to draw attention to methods – in particular we argue that a binary male–female approach is not that meaningful for the analysis, and instead, gender analysis requires some attention to intersectional differences (e.g. homeownership, employment, or age). We also make the case for the importance of combining qualitative and quantitative work to understand these relationships, as well as opening up what might be learned by more adequately exploring the resonances and tensions between these approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to develop the already extensive writing on female bodybuilding by speculating on the 'possible' eroticism of the hyper-muscular female body. Most of the existing academic literature on female bodybuilding has either praised the built female body as feminist resistance to traditional ideas of femininity or else dismissed it as a strange form of erotic spectacle. Indeed, one of the fastest growing forms of erotic representation is the newly christened form of sexual fetishism termed 'muscle-worship' which has only recently reached public awareness through the new found availability of videos/DVDs and, most importantly, the Internet. This paper seeks to problematize readings of female bodybuilding which view it simply as feminist resistance or erotic spectacle. It argues that interpreting the image of the hyper-muscular female body is dependent upon its context and how it is coded within the representation. While mainstream bodybuilding representations attempt to create a sense of erotic numbness, asking the spectator to appraise the body like living sculpture, muscle-worship erotica contextualizes and eroticizes the body in a very different way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The precondition of any feminist politics—a usable category of "woman"—has proved to be difficult to construct, even proposed to be impossible, given the "problem of exclusion." This is the inevitable exclusion of at least some women, as their lives or experiences do not fit into the necessary and sufficient condition(s) that denotes group membership. In this paper, I propose that the problem of exclusion arises not because of inappropriate category membership criteria, but because of the presumption that categories can only be organised by identity relations or shared properties among their members. This criterion of sameness as well as the characterisation of this exclusion as essentialism attests to a metaphysics that is not conducive to resistance and liberatory projects. Following a strain of hybrid thinking in feminist and post-colonial theory, I outline an alternative pluralist logic that confronts oppressive binaries that impede theory work in gender, sexuality, and race theory, and limit political action and resistance. The problem of exclusion is neither irresolvable nor is it essentialism. Instead it is a denial of subjectivity due to pseudodualistic self/Other dichotomies that can be resisted by adopting a new categorial logic. While this paper focuses on the specific problem of formulating a category of "woman," it has implications for other areas of gender, critical race, and postcolonial theory. Rather than working toward an inclusive category founded on sameness, theorists need to develop independent and positive categories grounded in difference. Our current categorial logic does not permit such a project, and therefore a new metaphysics must be adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is our contention in this paper that though royal wives in "Oyo-Yorùbá" community are invisible in some social, political and religious lives of their people, they are visible in the sphere of poetic creation. We opine that "Yorùbá" kings are powerful in most spheres, but in orature, the power of women in general, and royal wives in particular, cannot be underestimated. Through the examples of "yùngbà" and "igbátítí," two poetic spheres created by tradition for royal wives from "Oyo-Yorùbá" community, this paper argues that royal wives reposition themselves as channels of poetic utterance. They use poetry to redefine their position as wives and women, reassert themselves and subvert unwanted values. In particular, they use their creative power as a weapon for subverting male-constructed structures and views in society. In exercising their creative power, the women use their power to speak, to perform and to decide the course of action. In conclusion, we state that contemporary women writers also enhance the efforts of women in orature. In this regard, the paper refers to Emecheta's novels that condemn the economic, sexual and social exploitation of women. Like the royal wives, Emecheta creates protagonists who use their intellectual power to decide on issues that concern them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the dilemmas encountered carrying out empirical research using a feminist methodological approach. Specifically, I recount my experiences while undertaking qualitative research, in which I explored the experiences of employed mothers in the UK. At the beginning of my study, I adopted a feminist "position." This paper explains how an initial decision to exclude men from the research sample proved more complex than anticipated, and was eventually reversed. The issue of equality between the researcher and participants is discussed and the question of whether the approach of the researcher should change, depending on the gender of the respondents, is considered. It is suggested that the experience of doing fieldwork may be different from the outcomes anticipated from the literature. In this case, the behaviour of male interviewees during the interview was very similar to that of female interviewees. Men were just as co-operative and articulate as women. This was not predicted on the basis of some of the existing literature on woman-to-man interviews. It is suggested that the application of epistemology in the field, especially in relation to woman-to-man interviewing, is complex, but that cross gender interviewing may be beneficial in terms of research outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to discuss new forms of citizenship in globalized cities from a gendered and feminist perspective and to connect them to women's everyday life and to cities' planning and governance. In doing so, I challenge the Lefebvrian notion of the right to the city using a gendered and feminist critique by arguing that the identification of the right to the city lacks sufficient attention to patriarchal power relations which are ethnic, cultural and gender-related and as such it doesn't produce a practical standpoint. I will develop this critique by looking at women's everyday experiences and their reflections regarding their sense of comfort, belonging and commitment to the city they live in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent feminist theory has been preoccupied with the politics of taboo emotions such as nostalgia, mourning and regret; emotions that are generally viewed as being in conflict with feminism's desire for future change. This paper seeks to break down the implicit dichotomy between the desire for change and the backward glance through a re-reading of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Earlier readings of Housekeeping have tended to read the novel as a female quest for the 'not yet presented'. According to Friedman, this plot structure serves to differentiate the novel from 'male texts of postmodernity', with their thematic of nostalgia for the loss of the patriarchal certainties. My paper argues, contra Friedman, that the narrative voice in Housekeeping serves to construct a poetics of nostalgic mourning, but one that longs for what might have been rather than what was. Through this re-reading of Housekeeping, the paper argues for the necessity of re-evaluating the concept of nostalgia for feminist and left discourses. It concludes by suggesting that nostalgic longings (by acting as reminders of what might have been) may actually provide an impetus for future change; as such they offer a means of recuperating the Utopian impulse that feminism currently mourns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the life history of one older woman, jean, and engages with feminist debates about the nature of women's agency within institutionalised heterosexuality. As the data show, Jean grew up within an environment organised according to the principle of heterosexuality, at the levels of family, peer group and the local community. Her account indicates that while Jean inhabited the categories of heterosexuality, she still resisted many of its aspects. The paper concludes with data which require us to consider the contradictory situation of women whose lives adhere to the characteristics of hegemonic heterosexuality, yet for whom heterosexuality is a self-directed system of thought and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Stevie Smith's revisionary fairy tales should be read as a feminist response to the conservative rhetoric of domesticity in the 1930s and 1950s, which encouraged women to continue as traditional wives and mothers. Following in the tradition of her Victorian predecessors who used the fairy tale for social critique, Smith retold fairy tales in order to offer the women of her time period alternative life scripts. Through her adoption of the fairy tale's basic narrative patterns, represented particularly in her favourite Grimm tale 'Hansel and Gretel,' she figured women's flight from traditional domesticity and envisioned positive transformations of home life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Brazil, the creation of all-female police stations to encourage the denunciation and prosecution of violent crimes against women represents one of several examples of state-institutionalised feminism. This paper recounts the history of the implementation of these innovative institutions, and examines difficulties encountered in this experience, with particular focus on the differences between the predominantly white, middle-class feminists that originated the idea and the predominantly black, working-class policewomen charged with carrying it out. Anti-essentialist theory is useful for understanding the flawed logic that produced inappropriate expectations of policewomen. However, the paper concludes that this perspective offers little direction for furthering the nascent reform of law enforcement, and offers a feminist version of an imagined communities model in its place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926–2003) is best known for her best-selling mystery novels, published under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, she also authored remarkable pieces of non-fiction which evidence an intense reflection upon female aging as well as her long-standing commitment to feminism. Works such asReinventing Womanhood(1979),The Representation of Women in Fiction(1983),Writing a Woman's Life(1988), andThe Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty(1997) explore the ways in which women in general and the author in particular experience the changes that maturity involves as an enriching process rather than as a path into decay and loss. This paper contends that these might perhaps shed a new light into her fiction as Amanda Cross, which includesThe Players Come Again(1990). Taking her essays in feminism and literary criticism as a basis, my aim was to reveal the extent to which Heilbrun's commercial mystery novels represented a springboard to the theories she put forward in her essays, which vindicated the difficulties as well as the joys involved in a gendered experience of aging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new millennium saw the emergence of two competing discourses in US pop culture on young women's sexuality: ‘girls gone wild’ and ‘new virgins.’ Feminists have seen these oppositional discourses – all women are either pressured to be either porn stars or chaste virgins – as being regressive and harmful, or have questioned how ‘empowering’ they really are. Levy's [Levy, A., 2006.Female chauvinist pigs. New York: Free Press] research identified the ‘girls gone wild’ discourse from auditions at the offices of Playboy, while Valenti's [Valenti, J., 2009.The purity myth. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press] research identified the ‘new virgins’ discourse at conservative religious youth group meetings. Despite their identification, we do not yet know if/how widespread these discourses are. Previous studies (Carpenter, L.M., 1998. From girls into women: scripts for sexuality and romance in seventeen magazine, 1974–1994.The journal of sex research, 35, 158–168; Durham, M.G., 1998. Dilemmas of desire: representations of adolescent sexuality in two teen magazines.Youth and society, 29, 369–390; Garner, A., Stark, H.M., Adams, S., 1998. Narrative analysis of sexual etiquette in teenage magazines.Journal of communication, 48, 59–78) have found examples similar to the ‘girls gone wild’ discourse in examinations of media specifically targeting younger generations. Although the findings are revealing, we cannot yet know whether this is mirrored in other print media with readerships spanning other generations, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds, or whether the two contradictory discourses have any relation to each other. This paper aimed to contribute to this absence by presenting the findings of an analysis of articles from ‘the big three’ US newsweeklies (Journalism.org., 2005.2005 Annual report: introduction. Available from:http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2005/narrative_magazines_newsinvestment.asp). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on signifiers of Islam covering the individual and preserving the privacy declaring the identity of wearer. Topics include embedding cultural politics of governance performing the policing through aesthetics, imagery, and feminisms; shaping through racism, whiteness, segregation, and hygiene; and giving justifications relating to gender oppression and national security in the Islamic dress.

Living apart together (LAT) is the relationship term used to describe those couples who are in a committed, intimate relationship with someone who lives in another household. LAT for those who have chosen this relationship form is a political act that subverts and transforms the gendered norms of cohabitation. This paper presents the findings of the first qualitative study of LAT conducted in Australia, reporting on the private and public implications of LAT for the women in this study. The findings give added meaning to why, for the cohort of women over 45 who have chosen to live apart together, they make the choice to LAT, their LAT relationships tend to last longer than the younger cohorts of LATs and their motivations for being in a LAT relationship differ from the younger cohorts. Situated within a feminist discourse, the study demonstrates that LAT has the potential to change women's lives for the better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of contemporary higher education, post white paper, ‘Students at the heart of the system’ [BIS, 2011.Students at the heart of the system[online]. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf, (Accessed 5 Feb 2014), in which funding and commodification of learning and of students dominate university mission statements and agendas, it is crucial that we collaborate with our students to engage imagination and critical faculties with issues of value, and of social justice. Teaching and researching contemporary feminist speculative fictions and feminist critical practice offer a priceless opportunity to make a difference, to challenge the intellectual impoverishment that this new austerity brings with it. Learning and teaching research into threshold concepts and signature pedagogies combine here with feminist critical practice in a discussion of teaching two speculative fictions which engage criticality and values: Atwood [Atwood, 2003.Oryx and Crake. New York: Nan A. Talese.) and Hopkinson [Hopkinson, 1996. A habit of waste.Skin folk. New York: Aspect, 183–202] each of which critiques flawed societies using tropes of waste, and rejection of difference. Each suggests recovery from damage done in the name of austerity, and imagines futures for the critical imagination, social justice, self-worth and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I explore the situation of feminist academics, positing a tension between the demands of feminist research and the norms of academia. Feminist research, I suggest, may be subject to de-legitimisation on the grounds of supposed lack of objectivity, to marginalisation from the main body of a discipline and to conceptual hostility when operating within the main body of a discipline. I then show that the situation of feminist academics can be conceptualised as a double bind: a set of circumstances in which an agent is given a set of competing demands, with no possibility of receiving clarification as to which demands to pursue. I argue that this interpretation of the situation of feminist academics is helpful because it prompts constructive ways of thinking. It encourages feminist academics to adopt a non-judgemental attitude towards ourselves and towards others, and it reminds us to fix our sights on long-term strategies. These suggestions in turn lead me to urge a renewed solidarity between feminists in academia. The form of solidarity I advocate is action based and inclusive, spanning disciplines, genders and research specialisms. Such solidarity can enable positive responses to the double bind facing feminist academics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including feminism, education of women and higher education in Great Britain.

An introduction to various papers published within the issue is presented including one about eating disorder diagnosis, another about Turkish feminism, and another about the link between masculine self and male body.