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This chapter focuses on the discursive strategy of the new anti-rights organizations in Latin America and their efforts to rekindle antinomies that feminist thinkers have already addressed: feelings and desires versus reason, the particular versus the universal, and ideas versus reality. While one item of each of these pairs is presented as illusory, the other is put forth as objective. The theory of ideology provides a framework for this critique.

The chapter analyses the shifting relationship between feminist politics and the state in Finland in the 2010s, with the aim of providing new insights into this relationship in a changing political context. The chapter focuses on a particular form of neoliberal and managerial governance that aims to make government decision-making processes more strategic by narrowing down policy objectives and aligning them explicitly with fiscal objectives and that have moved the Finnish welfare state in the direction of becoming a strategic state, in which economic imperatives overrule other political concerns. The chapter asks: i) How do different feminist actors operate in the strategic state? And ii), how are gender issues politicised in the strategic state by different feminist actors? The chapter approaches these questions through three different conceptualisations of feminist politics in Finland: namely, the idea of the velvet triangle; governance feminism; and intersectional feminism. The chapter shows how the network model of the velvet triangle is challenged in the context of the strategic state, while both governance feminism and intersectional feminism are strengthened. acceptedVersion

This chapter considers the history of the ‘nagging wife’ trope, and how this is insidiously mobilised to discredit women’s political speech. It analyses the 1973 television debate series No Man’s Land, paying particular attention to the ways that it was critically received and reviewed. It shows how the programme’s explicitly feminist politics was typically interpreted as an egregious affront to television’s gendered modes of address and that the talk of its feminist participants was understood as a form of televisual nagging. While much scholarship argues that television has democratised public speech because it tends to be friendly and non-didactic, this chapter argues that we must account for the gender politics of ‘friendliness’—and that women’s speech that is angry, complaining, ‘nagging’ or ‘rude’ should not be precluded from being considered ‘democratic’.

In this chapter we challenge scholars of sport and physical culture to consider the implications of the ‘biological turn in social theory’ and, in particular, the possibilities of new materialist approaches for understanding the bio-socio-cultural complexities of moving bodies. It begins by mapping the important works of feminist and body studies scholars who have been exploring alternative non-dualistic models of feminist engagement with biology, corporeality, science, and matter. It then focuses specifically on the distinctive contributions of three feminist scholars—Lynda Birke, Samantha Frost, and Elizabeth Wilson—whose work has advanced understandings of the complex relationship between the biological and cultural, as well as a rethinking of feminist politics. In the second part of this chapter we take up Wilson’s Gut Feminism to explore a complex health condition (Low Energy Availability, LEA) affecting female athletes and exercising women. In doing so, we highlight biology as more dynamic, non-consilient, and less deterministic than many sport feminists have presumed.

Using data from a national UK study about experiences of online abuse amongst women who discuss feminist politics, we use debates about Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) and hate crime to consider the continuities and breaks between online and offline victimisation. Online abuse can be considered to be a form of VAWG and a hate crime, although these categories are problematic because they reflect inappropriate distinctions between private and public offences, because ‘hate’ is a clumsy description of the complex emotional context when perpetrators are known to the victims, and because ‘hate crime’ has not reflected the intersectional nature of some offences which target victims’ identities. A victim-centred approach helps deepen our understanding of the experiences of and continuities between on and offline abuse.

Moving beyond entrenched biology-culture, structure-agency impasses this chapter opens up our exploration of the entanglement of biopsychosocial forces that shape the gendered phenomenon of depression and recovery as it is researched, managed and experienced. Drawing upon creative analytic writing practices we offer ways of reading-thinking that seek to question normative responses to affective states, emotional life and biomedical claims to truth. There is much to learn from women’s subjugated knowledges of recovery that can trouble the micropolitical assemblages perpetuating distress, as well as produce other ways to feel-move-think our way through more vital bodymind relations. In the traditions of critical, post/decolonial and feminist pedagogies, learning to recover also involves the practices of unlearning master narratives and normative framings of issues, identities and solutions.

This chapter reinterprets the most well-known civil rights play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), arguing that playwright Lorraine Hansberry situates the fight for civil rights firmly within black left feminist politics. In her characterization of Walter Lee in Raisin and his later analog in the posthumous Les Blancs (1970), Hansberry challenges prevailing assumptions about black masculinity. By analyzing the scripts and production histories of these plays, along with Hansberry’s essays in The Village Voice, Burrell demonstrates how Hansberry opposed stereotypes propounded by white liberals like Norman Mailer, who cast black men as violent and hypersexual. Ultimately, Hansberry transformed enactments of black masculinity on the American stage, creating a space for progressive black masculinities.

This chapter untangles Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s (The CW 2015–2019) several strands of crudity and overall offensiveness to make the case for the show’s complex commentary on postfeminism and contemporary media culture. Rather than looking at its musical interludes or comic elements as clashing with the show’s exploration of feminist issues, the chapter positions these as essential to the biting critique that has made this portmanteau-hyphen television outlier—a female-lead dramedy-cringe-musical series—a critical, if not commercial success. It outlines the show’s critique of ‘abject postfeminism’, before tracing its rejection of the romanticizing of ‘crazy women’ in US-American popular culture. Exemplary readings of select scenes detail how the series employs different levels of offence to push the limits of female representation in contemporary television.

Getting by in times of austerity often requires intricate tapestries of care, carefully woven fabrics of familial and extra-familial relationships, or what I describe as ‘everyday social infrastructures’. In this chapter I start to apply the relational framework outlined in Chap. 2 and weave these ideas together with more detailed empirical accounts. To situate these ethnographic findings, feminist concepts of care, particularly care ethics and social infrastructures of care, are applied and extended. I illustrate the extent to which austerity transforms relational geographies of care (who does what, for whom and where), whether inter- or intra-familial, within friendships and other intimate relationships. While proponents of care ethics typically prioritise where care takes place or how care changes over time, I advocate a closer look at the relational qualities of care: how care is embedded within, and has the potential to shape, everyday social infrastructures. Starting with an overview of literature on feminist politics of care, gendered labour and social infrastructures, the chapter is arranged around three key themes that emerged from analysis of the empirical data: intergenerational and gendered infrastructures, tangled, knotty and textured infrastructures of care, and fieldwork as care work.

The intersections of race and sex historically depict a polarized and complex relationship which was only exacerbated by second-wave feminist failures to incorporate the needs of women of colour into their politics. Through an analysis of data relating to the Bill Cosby rape allegations, this chapter analyses how these intersections continue to undermine feminist politics through specifically racial rhetoric while reaffirming misogynistic dogma and manifestations of rape culture. The data, collected from Twitter during February 2016, depicts a notable correlation and polarization between racial identity and feminist politics.

In this chapter, we write through an academic-arts collaboration, or ‘creative research assemblage’, to explore the dilemmas surrounding cultural representations of women’s experiences of recovery from depression. We focus our discussion on the Mindshackles website that was created by the second author, Iesha, to offer ‘personal stories about reclaiming life from mental ill health’. By documenting diverse stories with photographic images, film, and sound, Mindshackles makes visible the everyday leisure practices that women enact as self-care in recovering their sense of aliveness. We explore feminist questions about how documentary practices can shape digital representations of mental health in ways that both reveal and conceal gender issues.

The Trump presidency, still, incredibly, in its infancy as this edition of the book goes to press, puts into stark relief the barriers that still stand between Black women and specifically, Black feminists, and their full participation and power in the American political process.

For the majority of Black Americans—and, it must be said, for plenty of other Americans of color and for many white Americans, too—the transition of presidential power that occurred on January 20, 2017, was a devastating sociopolitical, cultural, and historic moment. It wasn’t simply the fact that America’s first Black President was leaving office after two terms, the end of an era that, for all its flaws, was still historically, socially, and politically significant.

This chapter draws upon a range of empirical sources to examine a somewhat subdued, but consistent lesbian aspect of the Sarajevo-based PitchWise festival. We claim that this manifestation provides an insight into the ways in which lesbian identities, communities and activist endeavours are articulated in spite of the socially unfavourable circumstances marked by high levels of lesbophobia/homophobia. In the absence of a specifically lesbian activist organisation, such as those that exist in other countries of the region, PitchWise constitutes an ephemeral network of affective ties that promote lesbian belonging. More specifically, this festival performs a double function: on the one hand, it operates as an intimate—and perhaps also therapeutic—gathering for its women/lesbian participants and, on the other, acts as a sensitising agent that feminises the public sphere and visibilises lesbian existence within it. Both of these functions squarely locate lesbian liberation in the domain of affective, intersectionality-sensitive and regionally/transnationally-oriented feminist politics.

This chapter demonstrates how religious women involved in the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s challenged male-centered sacred language and symbols, with repercussions for understanding feminist politics in the late twentieth century. Their embrace of feminism represented the outgrowth of a spiritual quest for a sustainable theo-politics in which ideas about the divine were not distractions but essential to political work. In their search for personal and cultural transformation, they carried into the Women’s Liberation Movement an inherited religious vitalism that precipitated a reimaging of theology and religion. Cutting across the politics of the New Left, Women’s Liberation, and a fragmented liberal theological establishment, they built a bridge between religion and radical feminist politics and represented a fundamental shift in many women’s religious attitudes.

The introduction outlines the core themes of the book through the story of Susan Brownmiller’s foundational feminist anti-rape polemic, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. While the book presents itself as a journalistic and historical account, this account is built on a foundation of personal narratives told in Brownmiller’s consciousness-raising group. The introduction traces their originary role in this text and, through it, in feminist anti-rape politics. It examines the reliance of feminist politics on personal narratives and the power dynamics that exist between feminist experts such as Brownmiller and the women whose stories they tell. The introduction finishes with a reflective account of my own relationship to the book and the stories told within it.

This qualitative analysis of mediated discourses produced in and by US media throughout August 2016 unpacks how postfeminist sentiments were used to frame two Muslim sportswomen who represented Team USA during the 2016 Rio Olympics: Ibtihaj and Dalilah Muhammad. Findings suggest that whilst both women were positively framed in and through a range of “individual willpower” and “empowerment” discourses, media articulations of their individualised femininity and feminist politics also consolidated a range of established myths about the Muslim female subject, and the superiority of Westernised forms of femininity. While Ibtihaj was sensationalised as a “hijab-wearing” heroine, Dalilah was depicted as an uncovered, self-assured, (athletic) “queen”. Hence, while Ibtihaj’s veiled success further corroborated notions of American neoliberal superiority, Dalilah’s uncovered success was an emblematic celebration of the superior forms of Western freedoms awaiting those who transcend religious and cultural affiliations.

Measuring women’s political empowerment (WPE) poses an important challenge. Approaches to an empirical understanding of WPE are not thoroughly consolidated, thus preventing a comprehensive explanation of the status of women’s political empowerment globally. In this chapter, we contribute to the research on women’s political empowerment, adding a new dimension related to security and equality issues. We argue that to understand WPE globally, academic approaches must consider variables on the security status of women worldwide. To fill this gap, we developed a multivariable index using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) as our main methodological strategy. The results provide researchers with inputs that will help explain women’s political empowerment through multidimensional components.

Through the analysis of Emer Martin’s novel Baby Zero (2007), Chapter 12 explores how transnational feminist politics are an appropriate tool to resist and dismantle those dichotomies derived from what Samuel P. Huntington identifies as a ‘civilizational clash’, and a reading of the world which turns women and their bodies into its battleground. This analysis emphasizes the possibilities of approaching the veil trope offered by transnational feminism which undermine not only Eastern veils’ tokenistic and fixed meanings in hegemonic ‘veil narratives’, but also their correlated image of uncovered—equated to liberated—women in the West.

In exploring the roots of postfeminism, from its association with postmodernism to its intersections with the third wave, this chapter offers a brief look into how postfeminism as a concept and a phenomenon has evolved. Links are made between the impact that postmodernism has had on disrupting a feminism equated with homogenizing grand narratives and reliant on the seemingly unified and universal category of ‘women,’ to the emergence of third-wave feminism associated with promoting the individual and the importance of ‘empowerment.’ Postfeminism’s shift from suggesting a new form of feminist politics, to signaling the complete disavowal of feminist initiatives and aims, is charted in order to highlight the complexity of its intersections with both third-wave, and now fourth-wave, feminism.

In the Introduction, Bodil Formark, Heta Mulari and Myry Voipio discuss the history, key themes, and societal position of Nordic girlhood studies. They focus on the development of the research field in Nordic countries and pay special analytical attention to gender equality and the societal model known as the Nordic model. They also discuss femininity as a political issue in Nordic feminist politics and research and contemplate the specific academic and linguistic boundary conditions of doing Girlhood Studies in the Nordic countries.

In this concluding chapter, Calvin addresses why FESF matters, and what it might offer for a larger feminist politics and practice. This conclusion argues that epistemic exclusion inflicts harm on the body politic, and that it excludes certain members of society from full participation in society. The questions that feminist philosophers have asked of epistemology and the questions that feminist science fiction writers ask point to a new form of identity politics no longer predicated on the individual Subject, but rather, on an epistemic community.

In this chapter, Lidstrom Brock asks whether realist biography can also be feminist. Exploring the critical portrayals of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer in realist biography, her proposed answer is that these biographies fulfill feminist needs by presenting their respective subjects as warnings to readers, rather than as positive examples and feminist inspiration. By linking the purportedly objective author positions taken up in the two biographies to the genre’s truth-producing practices, Lidstrom Brock goes on to show that the genre relies on the ideological usurpation of the subject’s own life story. Her readings of the critical depictions of Friedan and Greer clarify how competing definitions of feminism result in distinct types of biographical plots, thereby exposing the ideological dimension of all life writing.