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This study maps the interactions of the Hindutva brand of political populism, which is in rise in India, with the feminist politics and concerns. To study this interaction, the article qualitatively studies the phenomenon of Hindutva-populism and feminist politics and uses the Bhartiya Janata Party, the Hindu-rightist political party, as the site to explore the gendered political culture and the complex relationship that populism and feminism share on the women question in their quest for political and social transformation in India. For this purpose, the article focuses on the broad themes, highlighting the differential visions of both projects, of: the lens through which the problems are diagnosed, the solutions proposed to these problems and the role of the related variables such as power, state and leadership, which puts them in a fundamental clash with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the contribution that the figure of economy can make to understanding gender in contemporary Britain, focusing on gender as a social quality and legal category that is produced, allocated and used. The article proceeds in two parts. The first part considers the politics of sex-based feminism and gender-as-diversity through an economic frame. The second part focuses, in detail, on one specific juncture where these diverging politics meet: decertification – a law reform proposal to dismantle the system for assigning, registering and regulating legal sex. Decertification is a controversial strategy. Advocates argue that self-expression and interpersonal communication, whether through gender or against it, is hindered by a state-based disciplinary certification system. Critics disagree. They argue that dismantling legal communication about a person's sex makes it harder to put categories of female and woman to remedial use. Drawing on other uses of certification, including commercial ones, this article suggests that certification not only communicates information about a process, quality or thing; it also contributes to their production. The impact of decertification on how gender is produced, what gets produced as gender and the uses to which gender is put are central to determining whether decertification is beneficial to a progressive transformative gender politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the interplay of left populist and feminist politics through a case study of Podemos ('we can'), a Spanish left populist party that reproduces a dominant gendered logic of politics despite its feminist interpretation of democratic renewal. I argue that this is the result of fundamental contradictions between the feminist and populist projects of political transformation that coexist in the party. Even if left populism offers a more productive terrain for gender equality than right populism, central tenets of populism disrupt feminist commitments and goals. Chief among these are the oversimplification of the political field based on a limited diagnosis, the exclusionary appeals to the homeland and to a homogenizing collectivity of the people, the dominant masculine and personalistic logics of charismatic leaders, the prioritization of electoral success over other forms of political transformation, and the resulting gendered political culture that marginalizes empowerment, inclusion, and participatory democratic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populism is everywhere in Europe today: in politics and in research. Most research on populism has neglected the relationship between gender equality and populism. The aim of this symposium is precisely to scrutinize the relationship between feminist politics and right-wing and left-wing populist parties in Europe. The contribution of the symposium is twofold: to empirically investigate the relationship between feminist politics and both left and right populism, so as to provide a more holistic picture of their impact on feminist politics; and to study populist political parties both at the national level and at the level of the European Parliament. The symposium demonstrates the centrality of gender issues in the politics of populist parties and documents the effects populism has on gender relations, gender equality policies, and feminist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses three different conceptions of ethics within contemporary feminist theory and how they depict the connection between ethics and politics. The first position, represented by Wendy Brown, mainly describes ethics as a sort of anti-political moralism and apolitical individualism, and hence as a turn away from politics. The second position, represented by Saba Mahmood, discusses ethics as a precondition for politics, while the third position, represented by Vikki Bell, depicts it as the 'external consciousness' of the political, and as destabilising political discourse by confronting it with singularity and 'radical' difference. Though they represent distinct positions, the article argues, all three suffer from a tendency to reify ethics by failing to give a contextualised account of it. The article then introduces the ethical perspective of Judith Butler, arguing that she – while offering both a transhistorical and a contextualised dimension – tends to psychologise and individualise ethics and politics. The last part of the article introduces Terry Eagleton and what, in a Marxist vein, could be called a 'materialist ethics' or an 'ethics of socialism', and argues that this way of framing the relationship between ethics and politics provides a solution to the trap of reification identified in the three described positions. This part also discusses how Eagleton's theory relates to – but also differs from – arguments made by Butler. One advantage of Eagleton's work, the article argues, is that it does not psychologise and individualise ethics and politics as Butler's work does. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As queer owned and operated spaces shut down and we increasingly find ourselves annexed to public institutions and/or private corporate spaces, how do we build truly radical community practices? This piece critically reflects on the practical aspects of organising RadFem/Trans: A Love Story – an event on feminist history and trans inclusion that took place at BFI Flare 2018. It also examines how we might to create the conditions for a better conversation, greater trans inclusion, and deeper organisational thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial piece introduces a special issue on the feminist politics of shame. It locates the special issue in the larger framework of scholarship on feminist approaches to shame and specifically feminist psychological emphases, and contextualises the foregrounding of the productive possibilities of shame for feminist social justice projects. The introductory piece overviews the contributions to the special issue through a thematic lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the writing practices most often associated with French feminist thought called écriture féminine and subjects it to debates concerning embodied writing in management and organisation studies. Écriture féminine explores the intersections between language, sexual difference and writing from the body. Often considered a distinct and alluring strand of feminist writing and philosophy, I draw together possibilities for its use and explore implications that emerge for teaching and researching management and organisations. With focus on two modes of writing the feminine, through Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, the intersections between sex/text are examined and form ways of decentring conventional modes of writing. The article concludes with discussing the politics of writing differently for researching, teaching and writing about organisations, the need to expose the effects of a masculine singularity in writing and how it may suppress and conceal possibilities but also offer opportunities for claiming space for an affective feminist politics inscribed in language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following in Joan Scott's anti-foundationalist footsteps, Linda Zerilli argues for a theory of feminist political judgement not framed in terms of epistemological certainty but assimilated to aesthetic judgement. Tani Barlow criticises Zerilli for not taking adequate account of history in her theory. I analyse the implications of Zerilli's ‘abyssal’ approach to political judgement and Barlow's critique of it. Despite their shared concerns, Zerilli's, Barlow's, and Scott's abyssal approaches struggle to effectively ground the validity of historical analysis and political judgement within a context of plurality and historical difference. All three thinkers focus extensively on discursive and imaginative potential for change while marginalising the role of materiality in the creation of new horizons for women. Incorporating a dynamic account of the materiality of human life into their work would allow them to tie politics and history to an explanation of the role material life plays in constituting plurality, factuality, and historicity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Women representation in decision-making and law-making is considered as a vital step in women empowerment. The Martial Law regime of General Pervez Musharraf1 brought in a drastic change in the composition of Pakistani legislatures at both central and provincial levels and has increased 17 per cent of reserved seats for women in 2002. However, this was much less than the 33 per cent stated in Strategic Objective G-2 in the plan. This step was deemed as a landmark in materialising the long-cherished dream of empowering Pakistani women. The purpose of this study is to assess the discourse on women's political empowerment and their level of participation in mainstream politics by analysing the gender gaps in the Election Laws—General Elections of 2002, 2008 and 2013. Women are now present in all the legislative assemblies of Pakistan from more than a decade. How far this change has remained useful in addressing and solving the problems faced by Pakistani women? Furthermore, how these women legislators have performed on specific women-related issues or is this step just an extension of strengthening the dominant families in Pakistani politics? The issue of quota discourses in the Parliament is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article defends the importance of metaphysical inquiry in feminist philosophy and interrogates possible directions for such a project. A key aim is questioning the possibility of revisionary metaphysics as well as emphasising the consequences of the linguistic turn for any such project. I argue that before we can embark on any metaphysical inquiry – feminist or otherwise – we are doomed to repeating Immanuel Kant's monumental question of how is metaphysics possible? I then ask how metaphysics is understood in feminist discussions and focus on one contemporary effort to create feminist metaphysics, namely Christine Battersby's The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (1998). Through a critical analysis of her position I tease out the problems, paradoxes and obstacles that the project of feminist metaphysics faces. Finally, I explicate the politicised conception of reality that I find in Michel Foucault's thought and conclude by considering its consequences for our understanding of feminist metaphysics and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mourning, especially melancholic mourning, has recently emerged as a significant site of expressing and addressing loss in feminism. While feminism's hard-won successes in achieving institutional power globally have brought exuberance over achievement, they have also come with an acute sense of despondency and loss; one that is not easily mourned or relinquished. The institutionalization of feminism in governmental, non-governmental and academic sites has precipitated this sense of loss in India, wherein the discussion of this article is located. In exploring the politics of loss in contemporary feminist discourse in India, feminist melancholia is seen to condition a fetishized attachment to the past, and to past modes of knowledge, action and consciousness in ways that demand the generational reproduction of feminism rather than its renewal in times of perceived crisis. Present-day anxieties over the 'co-option' and resultant depoliticization of the Indian women's movement constitute a narrative of loss in which a politically more 'authentic' past functions as a normative standard for feminist politics in the present, and as a prescriptive model of feminism's future. Advancements in Women's Studies and activist (now 'NGOized') practice that are seen to be deviating from the redemption of such an idealized past are thus deemed apolitical. In interrogating contemporary anxieties about feminism's present and impending future (that resonate beyond the bounds of India), the article demonstrates how melancholic loss can inform a potentially conservative politics that seeks to contain feminism in a once loved but now lost 'home'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the ways in which the fields of gender studies, feminist theory and politics have grown and developed in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the last decade are largely unaccounted for in feminist scholarship, their lessons, insights and potentials are relevant for scholarship and politics that weaves through the traumatic knots of postcoloniality and biopolitics. This article looks at the politics of witnessing through a creative approach to losses and the potential politics of hope in such a context. It engages with several lines of inquiry through a dialogue of 'local'/'global' feminist and postcolonial theory and practice, through subaltern lenses of transnational feminist solidarities and informed by the lessons of non-institutional public spaces of thinking, judging and acting as instances of vernacular cosmopolitanism in the field of cultural production within Bosnia. Continuously re-emerging postcolonial/biopolitical fractures, induced by the global/local political economy of capital and violence, also produce political (cultural/artistic/public) practices of witnessing which shake and reshuffle our quests for social and political transformation. Embracing them effectively is one of the most important lessons of Bosnian (postcolonial, post-war, post-communist . . .) ambivalences and forbearances. Such hopeful political navigation through injustices and injuries inflicted by global/local regimes of biopolitics and capital is fundamentally about reinvigorating the scholarship and politics of gender, witnessing, postcoloniality and trauma along creative feminist trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]