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In her most renowned work – The Symbolic Order of the Mother – the Italian philosopher Luisa Muraro urges women to resist living within an improper dimension, namely the one they experience within the paternal symbolic order. In her attempt to completely avoid such a life, she prescribed to women the necessity, or rather the duty, of loving their mothers or learning to do so. However, this duty is here questioned as a risky and once again normative move, reaffirming the essentialist nature of second-wave Italian feminism. My aim is to demonstrate how, in fact, it is within Italian feminism, and more precisely in the writings of Carla Lonzi, that we can find an alternative approach. This alternative does not conceive of difference as something given in terms of content, but rather as the possibility of living in a dimension of authenticity, where subjectivity is capable of articulating its own desires and principle of pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing presence of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) in the media raises questions about their rhetoric and convictions, particularly on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), where contentious debates unfold. Given the limited existing research on TERFs, this study aims to deepen our understanding of the TERF movement’s dynamics. Two document analyses were conducted to uncover insights into their online behaviour and its interplay with sociopsychological group dynamics. The first analysis scrutinized feminist journals and diverse X platform posts to delineate TERFs’ categories and belief systems. The objective of this analysis was to provide a comprehensive overview of recent online discourse concerning gender criticism directed at trans individuals from a feminist perspective. In a second analysis, a literature review compared the identified categories, belief systems, and group dynamics with empirical findings, revealing alignment with recent literature. It was shown that TERFs exhibit typical group dynamics that can also be found in other conservative and authoritative ideologies. Nonetheless, further analyses are needed to fully grasp TERFs’ group dynamics and elucidate their online behaviours and belief structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the ongoing project of recovering and (re)integrating early modern European women philosophers, scholars have been re-examining not only who counts as a philosopher, but what kinds of works are properly understood as philosophical. Madeleine de Scudéry is best remembered as a novelist, but some scholars have argued that her dialogues are richly philosophical. Here, I examine an early and overlooked text from Scudéry – Illustrious Women – which is a collection of speeches of historical women who find themselves in dire circumstances. I argue that Illustrious Women offers a sophisticated critique of patriarchal power: Scudéry exposes the conflict between epistemic and practical agency under conditions of gendered oppression and illustrates specific manifestations of this harm concerning control, autonomy, and consent. In so doing, particularly through the genre of oratory, Scudéry’s Illustrious Women is both a work of seventeenth-century feminist resistance and a subversive educational tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we will explore advant-aged women, aged 50 to 70, who write and perform Spoken Word Poetry. This term aims to replace commonly used terms such as middle age or mid-life by stressing advantages and opportunities that come with advanced age. As advant-aged women, entering a field usually associated with the young, the present study aims to investigate how these women experience self-ageism on Poetry Slam stages - Spoken Word Poetry competitions - and how they challenge it. This is a feminist qualitative study; we relied on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 21 advant-aged women Spoken Word Poetry artists. The findings reveal that these women reconstruct theis self-identity. Identities play a crucial role in clarifying, managing, and giving meaning to individuals’ inner and social worlds. Through Spoken Word Poetry, these women reconstruct their self-identity in opposition to societal labels that deem them “old”, thus challenging self-ageism as well as rewriting and redefining old age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses ‘transition’ within feminist media activism by exploring how archival material is reanimated and mobilized within contemporary forms of online activism. Recent scholarship examining the ‘archival turn’ in feminism has illustrated the potential of archives to intervene in the political present, yet the uptake of archival material within online media generates ambiguous and contentious outcomes. This article explores the controversial reanimation of the New Zealand feminist magazine Broadsheet (1972–1997) by a Facebook page titled ‘Broadsheet, New Zealand’s Feminist Magazine’ (2015). Using critical discourse analysis to examine comments made by followers of the page, I explore how the promotion of increasingly hostile trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) discourses precipitated contention over the legitimacy of the page’s affiliation with Broadsheet. Conspicuously absent from these discussions is Broadsheet’s archival material itself, despite its recent digitization. Instead, commenters invoke experiences and memories of Broadsheet to either validate the Broadsheet Facebook page or to substantiate claims that it appropriates the magazine’s name and legacy. I argue, therefore, that feminists’ engagement with archival materials is structured by nostalgia, whether remembered, encountered, or culturally learned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe summer of 2014 was a flashpoint of conflict between popular misogyny and popular feminism. While #GamerGate harassment campaigns raged across Reddit and Twitter, the experience of discrimination took on a different character within Wikipedia. One year prior to #GamerGate, Wikipedian women came together to address systemic gender bias on the encyclopedia and created the Gender Gap Task Force (GGTF). Following July 2014, the GGTF WikiProject saw intense contestation between editors who wrestled with the question of how to navigate the incommensurability between misogyny and feminism while creating encyclopedic knowledge. This article demonstrates the complexity of the GGTF’s response by theorizing it through a sociotechnical history of its formation as a counterpublic. Drawing on 443 discussion threads from the GGTFs talk pages, and numerous WikiProject pages, news reports, arbitration cases reports, and user pages, I argue that the GGTF played a significant role in making the identity of Wikipedian women legible and legitimate to the broader community. At the same time, the task forces’ activism as a counterpublic was significantly curtailed by trolling and harassment. In detailing this account, this article demonstrates how the design of an online community was exploited to support geek hypermasculinity and mobilized to exclude women from shaping the identity of “the Wikipedian.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patriarchy in the Arab, mainly Saudi culture, is charged with complexities and contradictions as it thrives on the instrumentalisation of strict religious discourses and social norms, which are often used to legitimize the patriarchal oppression of women and the denial of their rights. This article examines patriarchy in two Saudi novels, one written by a male author and the other by a female author within their contexts: Hend and the Soldiers and Ikhtīlas. It also seeks to distinguish between patriarchal norms and Islamic teachings. The analyses draw on Islamic feminist theory, benefit from its cultural and literary dimensions that align with the Saudi context, and use an interdisciplinary approach; the study explores how women’s writing strategies in the selected novels challenge sociocultural and patriarchal perceptions and stereotypes of Saudi women’s roles and status and seek change in the male-dominated Saudi sociocultural system. The article challenged stereotypes of Saudi women by emphasizing their diversity and complexity. It also showed that women’s issues are universal concepts that can be expressed in ways that respect different cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe essay reviews Charles L. Briggs’s book “Incommunicable: Towards Communicative justice in health and medicine”. Through critical reading and drawing on psychoanalysis and anthropological phenomenology, the essay review examines the different and distinct ways incommunicabilities develop and take form in the text, along with their productive effects. For this, the articulation between affections, body and words is traced. Special importance is given to the scholar’s proposal of incommunicability-free zones and their relationship with justice in Health. Finally, it draws on decolonial feminist theory, specifically that of María Lugones, to articulate coloniality and gender as indissociable processes to stress a comment/question on the book what effects will have in Charles L. Briggs’s argument to include race-gender as a foundational ground of coloniality? And how will it reframe health/communicative equity and justice? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delves into the multifaceted nature of the placenta, both as a physiological organ and a cultural symbol, through personal narrative, Indigenous-feminist scholarship, and scientific inquiry. Beginning with the author's pregnancy experience and reflections on birth practices, it navigates the placenta's role in childbirth, its cultural significance, and the lack of discourse surrounding its importance. The inquiry expands to incorporate contemporary issues such as microplastic pollution and its presence in human placenta, emphasizing the interconnectedness of environmental pollution and colonialism. Through the lens of anticolonial science and art as ritual, the article proposes artful avenues for engaging with placenta/placentae as an object lesson and environmental activism, advocating for a deeper understanding of our relationship with the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores actress Keira Knightley's unique star image, focusing on the tension between her roles in period dramas and the media's objectification of her body. Topics include Knightley's preference for feminist, period roles, the duality in her public persona created by the intersection of these factors and the impact of media scrutiny, body image discussions, and the influence of Knightley's own views on her star image.

The article examines the evolution of female authorship representation in film, moving from the traditional romantic genius to the emerging demotic author concept. It analyzes how women writers have been portrayed in movies, transitioning from romantic geniuses to madwomen and part of a female chorus. The feminist implications of the death of the author theory and the shift towards demotic authorship, characterized by collaboration and direct audience engagement, are explored using examples from the film "Colette." The analysis showcases how Colette's transition from traditional authorship to demotic authorship in the film signifies her liberation from patriarchal constraints and empowerment as a feminist writer. [Extracted from the article]

This article uses critical media literacy to approach themes of sexism and gender inequality depicted in the 2023 film Barbie. Teachers cognizant of the need to address women's rights issues in American history often struggle to find resources that are accessible and meaningful for their students. Furthermore, the use of film in social studies instruction can be an engaging and culturally relevant way for students to grapple with contentious issues in social studies education. Additionally, by using human rights concepts to frame inequality and inspire advocacy, teachers can address dimensions of oppression and inequality with a more 'neutral' or objective framing. Given the current political climate that instills fear in educators who teach about issues of gender, strategic approaches can empower social studies teachers to engage students in examinations of this contentious topic in American schools. Lastly, this article introduces perspectives of Black feminists and international activists to provide intersectional analyses of women's rights issues to curb the common emphasis on White feminism. The lesson plan offered in this article includes a film viewing guide, enrichment opportunities, and an activity that connects themes in Barbie with women's rights movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores women's agentic practices in expressing their sexual dissatisfaction in the context of male sexual 'non-performance'. Much scholarly work on male sexual 'non-performance' in Tanzanian context largely focus on the voices of men in making sense of their sexual performance concerns. Common limitations of these studies are isolating women from male sexual 'non-performance' and their narrow focus on the voices of women. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Tanzania, and building on the Afro-feminism perspective, this article demonstrates women's cheating habits, breaking up with their partners, naming and shaming and, participating in non-sexual intimate matters as agentic practices of their sexual dissatisfaction in heterosexual relationships. While these practices that women devise to handle their male partner's sexual 'non-performance' challenge the patriarchal structures of sexuality and gender relations on the one hand, they performatively reproduce them on the other hand. The findings of this paper indicate that women are active social actors, who are often sexually expressive and devise various agentic practices for handling their partners' sexual 'non-performance'. In a nutshell, women's viewpoints in this paper highlight the need to further consider how women demand and achieve sexual satisfaction in their sexual relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I highlight some of the narratives that I collected from tutor-mentors and students about their experience as Spanish or Portuguese-speaking youth in the Toronto public education system and within a community-led academic success program (Our Youth Success program). I use testimonio, a method from Latina feminism, to present their narratives of marginalization from the mainstream educational spaces and community building within the Our Youth Success space. I pose that the youth in OYS engage in a pedagogy of cariño that is predicated upon authentic caring and sharing of consejos within a transnational context that promote youth wellbeing beyond academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the key to the experimental novel The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754) by Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier lies in the contrasting temporalities of the text's two genres: the endless debate in the frame narrative and the resolved marriage plot narrated by the heroine Portia. By placing repetition and progression side by side, Fielding and Collier emphasize the gulf between the pain of lived experience and the illusory comfort provided by fictional convention. Amid eighteenth-century literary debates on whether didactic texts should favor realism or idealism, The Cry insists that truly educational novels must represent womanhood pragmatically – as rife with oppression, frustration, and repetition. Through formal features, the co-authors use pace and duration to force their audience to experience the pain of womanhood in real time, then propose a way forward through their heroine's progressive neologisms. Drawing on Sarah Fielding's literary criticism, responses to The Cry by eighteenth-century readers, and feminist theory, this essay examines how the novel critiqued the social utility of conventional domestic fiction and exposed the true experience of womanhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video activism is among the predominant forms of contemporary digital activism. In networked cultures dominated by social media platforms, video activism has seen various transformations. This paper investigates the role of video activism within the feminist movements in Turkey in the context of digital culture. In-depth interviews have been conducted to explore the tactics of feminist video activists. In particular, the tactics of feminist video activists have been analysed at four levels: video production, video distribution, video ethics and video archiving. The results show how networked video activism contributes to the feminist movements at three levels: the creation of feminist media as an alternative to patriarchal narratives, the organisation of affect and solidarity among women and finally, self-reflexivity and subjectification for activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surviving R. Kelly (Part I) (SRK) was intended to amplify the voices of tens of Black and Latino women who have faced sexualized violence at the hands of singer Robert Kelly. The creators hoped to highlight the fact that these women's testimonies had been deemed untrustworthy by the American legal system, and accosted within mainstream American media. Given that a lack of mainstream outrage regarding the violent experiences of Black women is neither new nor isolated to those victimized by Kelly, and considering that SRK documents the stories of visibly Black women, the docuseries constitutes a potential space for resistance to the harms perpetrated against Black girls and women overall. Thus, I will use a feminist critical theoretical lens to examine the extent to which SRK disrupts the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal paradigm within which Black girls' and women's accounts of sexualized violence are systematically denied credibility and/or attention. I argue that, while SRK begins to critique the harmful social norms that hinder the testimonies of Black victims/survivors from being both heard and believed, the docuseries falls short of holding responsible both the people and the systems complicit in the marginalization of Black female victims/survivors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper works towards a social geography of eating disorders through the lens of the coronavirus pandemic in the UK. Through an empirical engagement with experience-centred knowledge, I couple nine in-depth interviews with autoethnographic material, drawing out the spatial (real and virtual) and temporal (habit, routine, anticipation, non-linearity) dimensions of eating disorder experience, management and recovery; highlighting principally how pandemic lockdown conditions intensified space-time, mind/body and social relations across various micro-domestic and macro-governmental scales. I engage 'lightly' with Foucauldian concepts of disciplinary and biopolitical power to draw out broad-brush themes around matters of containment, control and surveillance; taking feminist inspiration to think through Foucault critically as I explore a nexus of gendered pandemic power relations. In doing so, I contribute towards new feminist understandings of the disciplinary gaze, emphasizing the ongoingness of surveillance through both physical body-checking and what I term psychological 'guising'. Through such (in)voluntary disordered bodily practices, and an engagement with the feminist mind/body dualism, I emphasize the complexity of EDs as embodied mental illnesses, further complicating feminist understandings of control. I close by discussing the ethical-methodological importance of 'empathy' while emphasizing the overall imperative of critical qualitative inquiry for socio-cultural geographies and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses the Women in Revolt! Art and Activism exhibition at Tate Britain, showcasing feminist artworks from the UK between 1970-1990. The exhibition aims to address the historical absence of women's art and their experiences of legal subjectivity in museum spaces. It explores themes of law, art, and feminism through over 100 women artists, highlighting social, economic, and political changes affecting women during that period. While the exhibition received critical acclaim for its impact and timeliness, some critics raised concerns about inclusivity, representation of trans and Black women, and the international scope of the exhibition. The aftermath of attending such exhibitions is emphasized, encouraging viewers to reflect, take action, and seek support on issues raised. [Extracted from the article]

Consequent to colonial policies that restricted women's participation in public space, the Nigerian woman of the colonial era experienced strenuous socio-political and economic marginalisation/oppression. This marginalisation spurred many of the affected women into acts of subtle and overt resistance. However, historical narratives have typically downplayed narratives portraying women's agency as an integral and essential part of the anti-colonial resistance. Contemporary efforts at redressing this imbalance have resulted in the identification of women activists including Funmilayo (Ransome) Anikulapo-Kuti (FRK), Margaret Ekpo and Oyinka Abayomi to mention a few. Such efforts at identifying feminists and women activists have nevertheless significantly downplayed or outrightly ignored earlier generations of women activists whose successful activisms paved way for this group of identified activists. This study, therefore, sets out to interrogate the socio-economic and political philosophy of Alimotu Pelewura, an unlettered activist and the leader of the first mass-based women's interest group in colonial South-west Nigeria. Utilising historical and analytical research methods, it presents an exposition of Pelewura's economic, social and political activities and subjects such to critical analysis, with a final aim of distilling her socio-political and economic philosophies from these activities, thus, presenting Pelewura's philosophy as an African feminist narrative towards decolonisation efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents results of a collaborative research with indigenous women from Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombian. Here, I discuss the possibilities of the intercultural dialogue between authentic movement, dance movement-therapy and rituals and communitarian Wiwa dances. I seek to answer certain questions such as: How does an authentic movement from dance movement therapy dialogue with the ritual dances of Wiwa women in Colombia to restore human and nonhuman sexualities in the postconflict scenario? What functions do the roles of mover and witness discharge? What challenges and possibilities emanate from such a dialogue vis-à-vis the deep healing of our sexualities and the reconceptualization of dance movement-therapy and authentic movement? The results presented here are the mixture of a fieldwork in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta during the last four years and the intercultural authentic movement experience with Wiwa Elders and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the legitimation of antifeminist ideology within the manosphere, based on qualitative analysis of posts from an antifeminist Reddit community. Taking a discourse-historical approach to CDS, I analyse the nomination and predication strategies used to represent feminists in addition to the argumentation strategies used to convince others of the illegitimacy of feminism. Overall, I find that users typically did not distinguish between 'good' feminists and 'bad' feminists, instead making negative generalisations about feminists as an entire group. Arguments against feminism typically relied on the topos of justice in order to portray feminism as an illegitimate movement for equality given that it supposedly does not treat men and women in the same way. Alternatively, feminism was argued to be a threat to the 'natural' social order and men and women's historical gender roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely acknowledged that the dangerously low birth rate threatens China's future socio-economic stability. The existing literature typically regards China's population crisis as a natural development trend, attributes it to family planning policies, or associates it with particular social, economic, and cultural conditions. Drawing from the social reproduction theory of feminist political economy, we develop a more encompassing analytical framework for China's population crisis. We contend that the overarching context of China's population crisis is the institutional transition from a balanced socialist social reproduction regime to an unsustainable developmentalist one. China's employment structure is crucial to the structure of its social reproduction regime. Specifically, the formal economic sector facilitates a more accessible distribution of social reproduction cost for working-class families that maintains their willingness and ability to have children. Using provincial-level panel data from 1990 to 2021 and the General Method of Moments regression technique, we find positive, significant, and robust correlations between China's formal sector employment and birth rate. These findings suggest that effective policies addressing China's population crisis should focus on expanding the formal sector employment, expanding the social welfare system, and regulating the informal sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel approach to youth mental health by examining the connections between young Finnish men’s mental health, ideals of masculinity, and public discourses of mental health. Drawing from critical sociological and feminist theories on gender, power, and therapeutic culture, we apply a thematic discursive analysis to a questionnaire data (n = 910) about men’s mental health targeted at young men (primarily aged 15-29). The findings illustrate how young Finnish men consider ‘traditional’ ideals of masculinity widespread in Finland, restricting the actions of men, and upheld by narrow representations of gender. In addition, young men display critical reactions to the public discourses of mental health, especially the ones they feel are repeated in the media. These discourses are seen as insufficient and too individualised, echoing therapeutic culture. Based on our results, we argue that the highly individualised and gendered discourses of mental health, deriving from therapeutic culture and rooted in Finnish cultural and institutional practices, are inadequate for supporting young men’s mental health. Instead, these practices can create a vicious cycle where the often-well-intended efforts can limit and guide young men towards restricted gendered possibilities to express themselves, talk about mental health, and seek support if needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, TuoMeiYi (escaping beauty duty) has emerged in the Chinese digital space as a distinct feminist proposition. Advocating for women to break free from the constraints of beauty, TuoMeiYi feminists strive to redefine what a woman should look like, and actively practice their anti-beauty stance by shaving their hair into buzz cuts. This everyday feminist politics attempts to reclaim women’s autonomy over their bodies by transforming their feminist body into a rebellious project. Diverging from the prevalent media discursive approach in Chinese digital feminism studies, this article examines TuoMeiYi feminists’ explorative body project through the lens of affect grounded in corporeal and phenomenological feminist theories. Using digital ethnography to explore an online TuoMeiYi forum, this article recognizes that pride and shame have been discursively mobilized as pivotal tools to sustain the anti-beauty feminist ideal. Yet, the construction of the proud feminist subject also involves a highly self-autonomous logic that tries to eliminate feminist embodied feelings. In the end, this article argues that it is not ‘feeling good’ but the ‘strange feelings’ that demonstrate the feminist body is neither a docile nor consciously autonomous entity, but a rebellious affective being capable of feeling in unplanned alternative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By packaging the television show Yellowjackets as a gender-flipped Lord of the Flies meant to reveal that girls can be just as violent and predatory as boys, the Showtime series successfully tapped into the market of popular feminism. Inspired by Sayak Valencia’s discussion of “gore capitalism” in hypermasculine popular culture, this article presents a close reading of Yellowjackets in order to problematize popular feminism’s cannibalization of heteropatriarchal iterations of death and gore. A seemingly edgy and purportedly subversive stand-in for girl power, I contend that “gore power” or “gore empowerment” rhetoric incoherently portrays women’s adoption of hegemonically masculine traits as both a symbol of empowerment and a warning sign of moral decay. Transposing abject hegemony in a manner that further degrades women as unscrupulous and maladjusted monsters, such programming bolsters a necro-neoliberal regime in which women’s achieved liberation is manifested by a gender-equal—but racially hierarchized—hunger for domination, blood, and death. By interrogating the televisual coupling of indiscriminate violence with women’s empowerment, this essay provides further analysis of white feminism’s necropolitical commitments as they function rhetorically to undermine the political projects of equity, women’s leadership, antiviolence, and racial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist groups in Mexico City started a mobilization in August 2019 that would later be called the Glitter Revolution. The protest was a reaction to the alleged rape of a 17-year-old girl by four policemen. The protest earned the name after one of the protestors showered Mexico City’s chief of police with pink glitter while he was trying to address activists and reporters. A second protest turned violent, and one of Mexico’s best-known landmarks was defaced by protesters who covered it in graffiti with signs reading “Mexico feminicide,” and “rapists.” This paper engages with literature on the protest paradigm and feminist theories to conduct a qualitative content analysis of news coverage of the two protests. This research shows how: 1) news stories by mainstream media adhere to the protest paradigm deploying a marginalizing framing device to cover the feminist protests; 2) heavy reliance on official sources and information is still prevalent in mainstream news, reinforcing official narratives and discourses; 3) the emergence of new frames that assign more value to historical monuments than to women’s access to justice; 4) and alternative news provided different frames such as feminist movement/activism and gender violence to contextualize the protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the luminous exchanges that animate contemporary Western geoscience ways of imagining the Earth. Inquiring into fluvial geomorphology, it employs creative research practice and feminist materialist ideas to interrogate the multiple roles of light in the ways in which rivers become configured, envisioned, and known. Focusing on the River Torne in northern Finland and Sweden, the article contemplates creative gestures of sensing the Torne via various “technologies of light,” which draw the researcher into a haunted, intra-active, and ecological exchange with the riverscape. This immersive engagement with the Torne prompts reflection on the particular riverine knowledges, ecologies, and archives that become presenced in luminous research encounters—prompting a recognition of a distributed cognition in our practices of knowing riverscapes. In the process, the geomorphological notion of a riverscape archive becomes situated amid complex ecologies of light, which invites a radical commitment to the memory and lively potentiality of place and encourages care-full research entanglements within our luminous research archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poet, editor, and critic Kathleen Fraser underscored the significance of Charles Olson’s seminal manifesto ‘Projective Verse’, emphasising the vital role the text played in expanding the methodological possibilities of Avant Garde writing by women in the 1970s to the present day. I ask why Fraser, who maintained great concern surrounding the neglect of the female writers who pioneered the modernist tradition, and editorially and pedagogically resisted the continued marginality of innovative women writers in her contemporary, might controversially position ‘Projective Verse’ as an ‘immense, permission giving’ moment. Gesturing toward the importance of Fraser’s HOW(ever) and How2 journals, I make a case for the continued significance of Olson’s projective poetics in relation to feminist poetic practice in North America and across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the usage and implications of the term “transnational” in research articles published in the prominent journal of Technical Communication from 2013 to 2023. Employing content analysis techniques, metasynthesis, and transrhetorical reading as self-reflective methods, this research reveals the diverse ways in which transnational is employed. The findings of this study suggest the adoption of transnational feminist frameworks to advance the goal of social justice in Technical and Professional Communication (TPC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RED, as a platform primarily focused on visual imagery to drive consumption, has been a bastion of pseudo-feminism in China, propagating standardized beauty ideals like the “wanghong face.” However, the active engagement of numerous women in shaping discourse on these platforms has also witnessed the resurgence of feminism on the Chinese internet. In 2023, a notable trend emerged on RED under the banner of “rejecting beauty duty.” Represented by this movement, these women are referred to as “radical feminists” on the Chinese internet, a group that has become quite emblematic in the current feminist movement in China. This movement disrupted existing forms of female expression and catalyzed a fresh wave of feminist dialogues. Through the application of Critical Discourse Analysis, this article explores how Chinese feminism seeks to reconceptualize the narrative of neoliberal feminism within the context of the post-socialist era. By juxtaposing historical perspectives with contemporary realities, this article sheds light on the intricate dilemmas inherent in Chinese feminist discourse that warrant attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractMenstrual leave is a policy allowing menstruators to take paid or unpaid time off work if experiencing painful menstrual cycle-related symptoms or illnesses. Scholars have displayed an increased interest in menstrual leave, primarily owing to the rise in companies offering menstrual leave. Efforts have been made to theorise the potential benefits and drawbacks of menstrual leave. Building on prior work, this article conducts a thematic analysis of twelve menstrual leave policy announcements from companies in five countries. Guided by an intersectional feminist theoretical framework, the article uncovers two themes in menstrual leave policy announcements: (1) recognition of menstrual stigma and the potential to normalise menstruation and menstrual health; and (2) the potential for increased worker power. It subsequently develops two critical arguments: (1) menstrual leave may perpetuate (hetero)sexist beliefs and attitudes, and (2) menstrual leave may reify individual responsibility to manage menstruation and facilitate a positive culture around menstrual leave. This research adds to menstruation literature by being one of the few studies to investigate company-level menstrual leave policy announcements in a transnational context. A broader conceptualisation of menstrual leave, including the transition to ‘menstrual flexibility’ as an umbrella term, could help such policies become equity tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I focus on a practice that is legally referred to as assisting or abetting abortion. Using the example of Margarethe Hardegger (1882–1963), a Swiss women’s rights activist and socialist who was charged with this crime in 1915, I analyze how she defended her assistance before the criminal court of the city of Bern. I seek to show how her conception of voluntary action as feminist women’s solidarity entered into a battle of interpretation with patriarchal thought and legal-economic ideas of order, whose exponents sought to impute a commercial character to her engagement. Additionally, I explore how the medical profession positioned itself in this dispute and what the women who had abortions with her help had to say. In light of this case study, the article aims to bring out the multiform interpretations of a voluntary social practice and thus gain insight into the contemporary power dynamics and forms of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses geographies of internationalism, feminism, pacifism, and anticolonialism, by investigating the case of pacifist and feminist activist Clementina Batalla Torres de Bassols (1894–1987) and her son, geographer Ángel Bassols Batalla (1925–2012). Based in Mexico and involved in global conferencing on pacifism, women’s rights, and geography, this activist and scholarly family provided examples of voluntary commitment to internationalism as both an ethical stance and a political option. Although not extraneous to Cold War logics, as they explicitly sympathized with the Eastern Bloc between the 1950s and the 1980s, the Bassols Batallas acted independently from party logics, following their family history rooted in the independent socialist traditions of Cardenismo and of the Mexican Revolution. They voluntarily contributed to international circulation of ideas without seeking any leading role in the international associations with which they worked. This case allows for constructing ideas of voluntarism and individual agency as drivers for internationalism and informal diplomacy. Furthermore, although some aspects of their pacifism and feminism might seem outmoded, these scholars and activists fostered ideas of social and cultural struggles across plural axes through transnational, anticolonial, and multilingual engagement that can still inspire critical and decolonial geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that critical epistemology should aim at centering the voices and perspectives of those who have been excluded and silenced, proposing a way of doing that by combining Black feminist standpoint theory and Latina feminist theory as they converge in María del Rosario Acosta López’s philosophy of radical listening. The article also argues for the crucial significance of aesthetic interventions for creating epistemic friction that can transform our sensibilities so that we can start to listen to silences. The author offers an analysis of the subversive potential in Doris Salcedo’s public art as an illustration of how aesthetic resistance can be used in practices of epistemic activism that resist insensitivity and promote new ways of listening to silenced voices and liminal sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyze the news media discourse around menstruation in women’s sport by examining news media coverage of two tennis players, Heather Watson and Qinwen Zheng, who attributed their defeat in 2015 and 2022, respectively, to “girls’ things.” Using thematic analysis, the article analyses four themes: (1) breaking the menstrual taboo in sport, (2) specificity and marginalization of the female body, (3) the risk of a leaking body and (4) the wider context beyond the world of sport. The analyzed discourse is part of the broader changes observed since the mid-2010s regarding the greater presence of menstruation in public discourse. The most significant difference between the 2015 and 2022 corpora lies in the framing of menstruation as taboo. Whereas an open statement about menstruation in 2015 was perceived as something both brave and shocking, such discourse was practically absent in 2022. Despite this change, this discourse illustrates the tension between the public exposure of menstruation alongside efforts aimed at keeping it hidden. It can be read in the framework of neoliberal feminism by emphasizing the privileging of the male body and the current product-focused menstrual activism by highlighting the need to keep menstruation invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how the Women’s International League (WIL) dealt with the changing ideas of nationhood, internationalism, imperialism, and freedom when supporting the cause of Irish independence. Their actions included seeking to protect Britain’s good name while simultaneously criticising that very same nation for its war in Ireland. The ‘small nations’ rhetoric that had emerged during the First World War was used by British feminists to divorce the atrocities of the British Crown force, the Black and Tans, from the wider colonial experience of oppression. Comparing the occupation of Ireland in 1919–1921 to that of Belgium during the First World War enabled British internationalist-feminists to support the sovereignty of Ireland’s nationhood, without necessarily having to engage with the colonial dimension or history of the conflict. This entirely changed the parameters within which British feminists could show solidarity with the Irish republicans while still maintaining positive views of British imperialism and the empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist theories have broadly delved into the discourse surrounding bodies (Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Their contributions have subverted the idea that bodies are merely passive matter, opening up new ways of conceptualizing the world in corporeal terms. Their insights have been useful in understanding that human bodies emerge in situated-historical encounters, and cannot be separated from mind. This holds significant implications for the field of education (hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Abingdon: Routledge). In this article, we depart from the project ‘TRAY-AP: Learning trajectories of undergraduate students: conceptions, strategies, technologies, and contexts'. Reading from ‘posts’ perspectives such as feminist new materialisms, the affective turn or posthumanisms, helps us to think through relational ontologies, beyond dualisms, embracing a commitment to the human and morethan-human bodies. Through these perspectives, the project helps us to deepen into how Spanish higher education students conceive their bodies and the role of bodies in their learning trajectories. The paper concludes by shedding light on how bodies are still considered inert beings, but students see their learning processes as corporeal and embodied, intersected by gender struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s conception of ‘black study’ (2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.) as an enactment of a feminist ethics of response-ability. As such, this article inquires: how might ‘we’ conceive of study as a response-able practice of ‘collective knowing and doing’ (Haraway, D. J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.) through the confluence of thinking-with feminisms, posthumanisms, black studies, and affect theories? This article experiments with study as an ecological mode of engagement that affirms difference through the decentring of individual identity in favour of foregrounding co-constitutive relations. I do so by proposing response-able reading, sensing and storying as practices of study that might contribute towards new educational imaginaries for thinking and doing higher education differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the gendered linguistic patterns of tweets discussing state-sanctioned and vigilante violence against African American women. The paper considers representations of Black women and Black death as engaged on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. We utilize the theoretical frameworks of Patricia Hill Collins’ (2022. Black Feminist Thought, 30th Anniversary Edition: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Taylor & Francis) conceptualization of Black feminist epistemology and controlling images and Kimberle Crenshaw’s (2018. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics [1989].” Feminist Legal Theory 1: 57–80) intersectionality to understand the ways that Black women are discussed, remembered and advocated for on social media platforms in relation to their Black men counterparts. The analysis of over seven million tweets utilizes both qualitative content analysis and computational tools. The paper’s findings concluded that there were differences related to passive and active language based on the gender of the victim of state-sanctioned or vigilante-race-based violence, as well as homophily, specifically name events most frequently used within the context of the state-sanctioned killing of Black women versus Black men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the subjectivities of Christian women migrant workers within the context of China’s social transformation, characterized by the interactive advancement of global capitalism, rural-to-urban migration, and “Christian fever.” Despite the burgeoning literature on women migrant workers in global capitalism within geographical scholarship, there has been less focus on women migrants’ religious subjectivity and agency. Drawing on empirical research on the intersectional experiences of women migrant workers, this article seeks to advance a postsecular feminism by bringing intersectionality into conversation with debates on postsecularity and gender inequalities. First, we examine the intersectional “matrix of domination” imposed through state power, Chinese patriarchal culture, and the gendered and class-based disciplinary labor regime under global capitalism, which serves as an ontological condition in which women migrants’ religious subjectivities form and are shaped. Second, we use intersectionality to help understand the process of becoming and a relation of emergence, wherein multiple agential qualities of women migrants—manifesting as counterpatriarchal subjects or through docile, tolerant, self-sacrificial, and pious femininity—arise at the intersections of religion, class, gender, and family. We therefore argue that postsecular feminist critique needs to carefully consider the patterns and diverse effects of intersectionality where both domination and religious agency are engendered and interwoven. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses findings from interviews conducted in England with 15 self-identified feminist mothers about sex and relationships education in the home. Participants’ understandings and enactments of being sexuality educators for their children involved what they described as open and honest ‘sex positive’ communication with their children, based on their subjective views about gender and sexual rights, safety and wellbeing. Participants were concerned about protecting their children from oftentimes gendered risks of judgement shame and abuse. Feminist sex and relationships education in the home for these mothers was shaped, and sometimes constrained, by the gendered sociocultural conditions of their children’s lives. Implications are discussed regarding the need for self-reflexivity amongst feminist mothers, supported by collaborative local and community educational initiatives to identify and collectively tackle the social contexts in which risks and harms arise for children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Society - and the way it is organized - along with families, shapes who is available and suitable as a partner, who we encounter, what traits we seek in a partner, and who we form relationships with. In turn, our partner choices impact society at large. Given this bidirectional relationship, partner selection is expected to evolve alongside broader societal changes influenced by factors such as economic shifts, wars, migration, and sociocultural transformations like secularization, feminist movements, and sexual revolutions. The central question of this special issue is how societal transformations have influenced long-term trends in partner preferences and choices. This is being explored through new sources - online genealogies, matrimonial and contact advertisements, data from marriage agencies and dating apps – and approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-2010s, interest in Olympe de Gouges as a pioneer of feminism has consistently grown in the wake of fourth-wave feminism and international social movements such as #MeToo. After almost two centuries of oversight or representations of de Gouges as illiterate and a victim of her time, a number of historians and authors have been working to reinstate her legacy as a writer and actor of the French Revolution. In conjunction with this newfound interest in feminist figures like Olympe de Gouges, the literary field experienced a metamorphosis with the growing popularity of graphic novels, from both popular/mainstream and scholarly perspectives. This article proposes to analyze how the depiction of Olympe de Gouges in the eponymous graphic novel by Catel and José-Louis Bocquet in 2012 contributed to the mainstream recognition of de Gouges as well as subsequent feminist figures, and enabled the development of graphic biographies as a literary sub-genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of 'King Kong', exploring its complex treatment of race, gender, colonialism, and ethics. Topics include Jackson's feminist reimagining of the relationship between Kong and Ann Darrow, the film's efforts to revise the primitivist themes of the 1933 original, and its portrayal of the seemingly mute Skull Island natives, which displaces and caricatures Native histories.

Calls to think or embrace an 'after' to rights, particularly ones that suggest adopting alternative ways of thinking or acting politically, often do so because of frustration with the liberal dimensions of rights. In this paper, I draw insights from theories of performativity and feminist phenomenology to show that rights claiming remains a site of contestation over key elements of the liberal tradition. Turning my attention to efforts to make menstruation a human rights issue, I show how rights claims that cite norms and conventions from the phenomenological tradition work to shift ways of thinking about the subject of human rights, offering new ways of thinking about human vulnerability and agency. This has implications for how we think the 'after' in two senses. First, it expands what counts as an 'after' that is an effect of specific rights claims and second, it provides important lessons for any effort to think an 'after' as a future with or without rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay engages contemporary narratives of black maternal ambivalence to unsettle residual attachments to choice within the frame of reproductive justice. The contemporary fiction of Brit Bennett's The Mothers and Tayari Jones's An American Marriage, as well as Black feminist work on Assisted Reproductive Technologies, reconsider the difficult ways that race and 'choice' have been in tension with each other in political and medical discourse around reproductive rights. Feminist choice debates have been intentionally reframed away from 'rights' and toward 'justice' as an attempt to account for the hyper-control of Black reproduction across a modern history that includes enslavement, mass incarceration, and myths of hyper-reproduction. Complex narrative accounts of thwarted or uncertain Black reproduction built from the embodied experiences of blackness can consider both choice and justice without romanticising motherhood or autonomy. This article troubles the weight on black feminism to conceive and carry children – symbolic and material – into and through precarious life chances into secure (political) futures. Through thick descriptions of the reproductive that run through desire, uncertainty, debt, and vulnerability, black feminist thought and expressive culture can displace autonomy as the underpinning and endgame of feminist reproductive politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the growing phenomenon of Anglo female critics who embed narratives of their own walking into their scholarly texts to examine the connections between contemporary Anglo women writing about walking and feminism itself as a movement. Topics include an examination of Rebecca Solnit's interdisciplinary study of walking "Wanderlust: A History of Walking" and other scholarly works that embed the walking experiences of women intellectuals such as Leslie Kern's "Feminist City."

In the last century, South Korea has experienced a foreign occupation, a civil war that left at least 1.5 million civilians dead, a series of dictatorships, and economic development at breakneck speed. For the older adults in their 80s whose childhood and early adulthoods might have been spent under foreign occupation or war, the world of their childhood no longer exists. South Korea has changed from an agrarian, deeply conservative Confucian country to one that is urban and industrial, with changed values and mores. Using a critical feminist framework, we present the ways in which a group of older women have made meaning out of their past struggles and make sense of—and savor—their current lives. Through the narratives, the participants talk about the meanings that they constructed from the struggles, savoring of past fond memories, and current appreciation of their improved circumstances and enjoyment of daily living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to a prominent argument, citizens in unjust societies have a duty to resist injustice. The moral and political principles that ground the duty to obey the law in just or nearly just conditions, also ground the duty to resist in unjust conditions. This argument is often applied to a variety of unjust conditions. In this essay, I critically examine this argument, focusing on conditions involving institutionally entrenched and socially normalised injustice. In such conditions, the issue of citizens' duties to resist is complicated. I conclude by considering how my discussions may clarify a contemporary problem about engaging in resistance to aid potential migrants who have been turned away by states in accordance with widely accepted rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]