Contemporary Feminist Research Articles

Racial Oppression against African American woman in Selected Novels by Alice Walker

The contemporary feminist writer Alice Walker sheds an illumination on the existence of the Black American woman in the American society through some of her works, "The Color Purple", "Meridian" and "The Third Life of Grange Copeland". On one hand Alice Walker tries to make an original character, provide a sound to the black woman in American community during latest era and give them self-assurance spiritually socially and emotionally on the other hand she showed the horrible things in what waythat the African American woman has been endured and represent the pulp of walker's fiction, such as racial bias, patriarchal injustice, domestic brutality, the Civil Right Movement and bondage. Walker devised an expression of black feminism that is aggregation of culture, strength and flexibility in the woman called "Womanism". The author expresses her subjects through by her heroine character to give the person who reads an actual and aware description to send a message to the whole world about the mistreatment, disregarding and multi-faced abuse that the largest number of the Black American females have been undergone to decades. Finally in order to disclose the steady progress and public alterations in lifetime of her heroine's character from silence, self-denial and helpless to self-proof, confrontation and enablement.

Fantasies of white feminism: the human as “Other” in Captain Marvel

ABSTRACT This essay examines the first woman-centered film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Captain Marvel (2019), which was both lauded and criticized in reviews for its unambiguous feminism. I use intersectional and Black feminist theoretical frameworks to argue that the film exemplifies a white feminist ideology whereby protagonist Carol Danvers’ (Brie Larson) humanity and womanhood come to stand in for her marginalization as an Other within the logics of the film. I analyze three sets of encounters between Carol and individuals or communities that the film marks in opposition or in alignment with her, sometimes interchangeably: the Skrulls, alien shapeshifters who are mistaken for terrorists but revealed to be refugees; Carol’s human advocates: her friend, Maria, and colleague, Agent Fury; and the Supreme Intelligence, a deceptive A.I. designed by the Kree, an imperialist alien race determined to control Carol and her powers. Ultimately, I conclude that Captain Marvel’s themes of individual empowerment and heroism operate as symbolic of a contemporary feminism that reinforces the familiar narrative that a white woman’s oppression and subsequent rebellion can stand in for the human experience, broadly writ.

“Stories last a long time after you go”: female solidarity in Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars and Elaine Feeney’s As You Were

ABSTRACT This article explores Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars (2020) and Elaine Feeney’s As You Were (2020) within the context of the Celtic Phoenix (2013–the present) particularly in relation to the political discourses of recovery from the Great Recession (2008–2013), recently carried out national referendums, constitutional changes, the reports on the systemic abuse in Magdalene Laundries and The Mother and Baby Homes, and contemporary feminist hashtag activism. Set in hospital wards, both novels depict Irish women’s struggles with their health problems to address a variety of social, cultural, political, legal, and economic impediments they face throughout Ireland’s traumatic history and emphasise shared compassion and care that reinforce the experience of communal beingness and solidarity among them. These hospital wards can be regarded as matrixial borderspaces that transform its inhabitants by means of female bonding. This article argues that both novels challenge the neoliberal discourses of recovery in the Celtic Phoenix period by deploying the discourse of illness to expose violence, injustices and inequality against women and present the female body as a site of collective empowerment, emotional support and empathy.

Feminism Is forBeginners: Learning from Straight Men Doing Queer Feminism

This essay argues for the importance of cisgender straight male perspectives to contemporary feminist theory and practice. I identify four lessons to be learned from what I call male affirmative feminist theory written by people of all genders, defined as any feminist thought that considers cis men critical interlocutors to feminism and legitimate subjects of gender and sexual freedom projects. These lessons include the value of androgynous thinking; the necessity of anti-essentialist approaches to male gender; the importance of understanding nonviolent and anti-sexist male perspectives on gender dynamics; and the potential queer investment that cis straight men might have in feminist politics, namely the freedom from heteronormative policing. I offer an intellectual genealogy of cis male contributions to feminist thought, followed by a close reading of Mike Mills's Academy Award–winning film Beginners (2010). The movie presents a visual account of straight male masculinity as it is positively impacted and influenced by feminist and queer perspectives, without necessarily becoming them. The film makes a powerful male feminist argument for the value of “beginning,” asking what feminist and left social justice projects might gain by splitting their gaze between a focus on failed relations across gendered difference—grounded in the seemingly endless betrayal of women and queers by straight cis men—and a productive openness to the inauguration of unexpected relationships between all gendered subjects.

حقوق نسواں کی عصری تحریکیں اور ان کے مقاصد کا ناقدانہ جائزہ

The Progressive Feminists think that all human are equal, the up and down of classes is harmful for Humanity, and Women cannot enjoy freedom in the Capitalism. End of exploiter and oppressions against women, their equal rights as humans, equal chances for education and to make ideology in Philosophy are the main objectives of World Feminist Movements. To perform their duties and gain the rights as the teaching s of Islam are the objectives of faithful women in Muslims. There are also many types of Feminist Movements in Pakistan. Some movements have the objectives of women’s empowerment through politics and legislations. These movements are struggling for women’s equal rights in the society. Most of them want Secularism to ensure their objectives. The implement of Islamic teachings is the objective of such women who have the Islamic background. Muslim women should be aware that the objectives of the Western Feminist Movement are leading to Antichrist. To obey the West is the loss of this life and the next life after death, as it is foretold by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). It is a narrative research about the worldwide Feminist movements and in Pakistan and about their objectives. The objectives of contemporary Feminist movements are analyzed and criticized in this article.

Women’s Rights, Peace, and Democracy

This paper analyses the reformulations of citizenship, positive peace and democracy‎ of both contemporary feminist theory and the feminist movement. ‎In doing so, it will explain the interrelationship between the feminist movement‎ as a democratic movement and its proposals for reformulating concepts‎ and ideas that make up what we can call the “grammar of politics”. Following ‎Seyla Benhabib, the “democratic iterations” that have been achieved in the ‎framework of human rights will be presented, giving some examples at national‎ and international levels. Finally, the changes and challenges in women’s‎ demands for rights in current scenarios will be analysed.‎

‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall’: Female Subjective Dialectics in the Work of Paul Howard, Louise O’Neill and Naoise Dolan

This essay will examine how the three authors Paul Howard, Louise O’Neill and Naoise Dolan see the gaze, and the male gaze, as constitutive of subjectivity and identity in a twenty-first-century Irish context. It uses a theoretical matrix that combines the work of Jacques Lacan, Laura Mulvey and a range of contemporary feminist perspectives to critique the hermeneutics of identity and the concept of the image. In Howard’s work, Ross, the central character, reifies and commodifies women according to how they look, as being with a woman who is beautiful is how he validates his own quite insecure masculinity; his is the gaze of commodification and power. In Asking for It, Louise O’Neill offers a binary image of the power and the allure of visual beauty as her central character looks for the gaze of the other and manipulates it, but is then subject to the rape and the aftermath wherein she has no control over her images on social media and the subjective dehiscence that ensues. In Exciting Times, Naoise Dolan’s central character is the object of a male and female gaze, as a bisexual character who oscillates between two lovers; Ava, therefore, problematizes and complicates the theory of reflection and the gaze.

Telling Feminist Philosophy Stories

This introduction reflects on practices of telling stories about works by influential contemporary feminist philosophers, interrogating what is considered impactful feminist philosophy. I frame this edition through a particular kind of re-citational engagement with Heyes’s work—through her own previous writings and my first-personal experiences with the text and her role in my intellectual formation as my dissertation supervisor. I draw on Clare Hemmings’s (2011) work on the grammar of feminist intellectual storytelling, offering brush strokes through embodied and relational stories that help me make sense of Anaesthetics, in order to tell alternative stories to frame the work, specifically Heyes’s methods, impacts, and the relations amongst her previous works. In reflecting on the embodied realities and feminist intellectual networks that inform our framing practices, I consider how we are relationally and affectively invested in figures and thinkers, our schools of thought, our style of philosophy, and our forms of participation in the discipline. Through these reflections, I trace Heyes’s work as grasping life examples with rich opportunities to grapple with stubborn philosophical ambivalences in conceptualizing embodied freedom and agency, while developing adaptive methods that probe their transcendental conditions.

Mitos Kecantikan Naomi Wolf dalam Religi: Analisis Hermeneutika Hans-Georg Gadamer


 This article investigates the concept of beauty as a “religion,” as articulated by Naomi Wolf. Employing a qualitative research methodology, the article adopts a hermeneutic approach informed by the framework established by Hans-Georg Gadamer, encompassing four key stages: theory effective-history (history of influence), pre-understanding theory, fusion of horizons (inter-melting horizon) and implementation or application theory. Primary data is sourced from Naomi Wolf’s seminal work, The Beauty Myth, while secondary data is drawn from diverse scholarly literature, including books, journals, and other relevant sources. The findings reveal that according to Naomi Wolf, the myth of beauty is construed as a religion wherein women are deified, with beauty perceived as a tool for societal advancement. Beauty rituals instill fear in women regarding non-ideal bodies, underscoring the urgency of the contemporary feminist movement's advocacy for body positivity. This study underscores the significance of challenging traditional beauty norms and fostering self-acceptance among women.

Gender relations in Indigenous Yorùbá culture: questioning current feminist actions and advocacies

Gender hierarchy and inequality are attributes of Western colonialism enforced in several colonised societies. Similarly, feminism (Western), as the antithesis of European sexism, has permeated colonised societies and has been assimilated without proper reflection. This is concretely evident among the Yorùbá people of south-western Nigeria. Before European colonisation, Yorùbá culture was gender-neutral and gender-silent; women were seen as complementary and not subordinate to men. Hence, according to Oyěwùmí’s work on The Invention of Women, caution and reflections must be raised on the continual adoption of mainstream Western feminist philosophy in Yorùbá culture. In essence, the colonial imposition of the Western gender binary in Yorùbá society and women’s anti-colonial and feminist activities are discussed. Furthermore, the paper challenges some feminist approaches and ideologies in Nigeria, while advocating for a communal, transformative, and Pan-African feminism in Yorùbá and African societies. The decolonisation of Africa and the Yorùbá education system are recommended, alongside a proper history of Indigenous Yoruba people and knowledges. Contemporary feminist campaigns (including digital feminisms) and movements must also develop a ‘shared text of blackness’. The duo should align and improve the worth of women based on the indispensability and esteemed status offered to women in ‘pre-colonial’ Yorùbá society.

Leavy, P., & Harris, A. (2019). Contemporary Feminist Research from Theory to Practice. New York, NY: The Guilford Press

Reviewed by Valerie Amyot, MA student, Concordia University

What’s at stake in contemporary feminist theory? A review of current writings on women, gender and feminism

What’s at stake in contemporary feminist theory? A review of current writings on women, gender and feminism

Towards a Weak Avant-Garde, Re-Shaping the Canon

Feminist discussions in art history usually focus on the exclusion of women artists and the reification of women’s bodies. A growing constellation of queer and feminist theorists today, however, analyse failure and cuteness as aspects of contemporary feminist avant-garde practices, suggesting that alternative currents in art practice and theory are emerging that challenge traditional notions and modes of art production. In my article, I discuss these debates in relation to “weak universalism” and weak messianism in order to reshape our understanding of avant-garde theory and practice from a feminist perspective. I argue that feminist analysis transforms what was previously thematized as conditions of exclusion into an important part of artistic legacy in works made by previously excluded groups. I propose that the concept of a weak avant-garde might help to theorize these shifts.

Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era

Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era

Female Identity Crises and Resolutions in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and The Lady from the Sea

This paper examines female identity crises and their comparative resolutions as dramatized in Henrik Ibsen’s two stage plays, A Doll’s House (1879) and The Lady from the Sea (1888), focusing on the female protagonists’ self-realization and subsequent crisis resolution strategies. Ibsen’s stage realism anticipates a notion of contemporary feminist perspectives with its emphasis on consciousness-raising and change in women’s role in society. Nora’s identity crisis in A Doll’s House stems from her economic dependence on her domineering husband Torvald Helmer, together with her anxiety over secretive financial transactions undertaken to save his life. Helmer’s reactions when her secret is revealed prompts Nora to forsake him in order to explore her identity as human being. However, this dramatic self-awakening raises questions regarding her responsibility as a mother and a wife. Ellida’s identity crisis in The Lady from the Sea also emerges from inner conflicts, in this case between her attachment to a past love and her responsibility as Dr. Wangel’s wife and stepmother to his children. Unlike Nora, Ellida chooses to remain at her family home, even after her husband acknowledges her right and freedom to choose. Her choice of resolution affirms that freedom is subjective and that a true marriage is sustainable through mutual trust. This analysis of female identity crises and their consequences illustrates the journey of the female protagonists from marginalized objects under patriarchal dominance to self-conscious, independent subjects. Accordingly, it is noteworthy that Ibsen’s dramatic insights foreground the economic and/or sexual pressures that still exist for middle-class women in many societies today.

HASHTAGS, HIERARCHIES AND HEGEMONIES: MAINSTREAM DIGITAL FEMINIST ACTIVISM AND INTERSECTIONAL CRITIQUES

This paper focuses on the digital-material hybridity of the contemporary feminist activist, particularly the problematic and progressive potential offered by the technological affordances of the Internet and digital social media. In addition, the paper highlights the associated anxieties for feminists of being online and engaging in what is often, in this “age of surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019) and toxic masculinity, a hostile, commodified and misogynistic milieu. Furthermore, the digital affordances enabled through the proliferation of Web 2.0 technology inform the nature of feminist online discourse and campaigning, which has, at times, contributed to the moral panic that surrounds attempts at centering marginalized voices, particularly members of the trans community and sex workers. The paper will explore the relationship between online tools and platforms adopted by mainstream contemporary feminists and the role they have played in constructing ‘othering’ hierarchies within feminism, as well in enabling the intersectional critique of these narratives. Avoiding either cyber-utopian or dystopian arguments, or a techno-determinist or utilitarian stance, this paper accounts for the complex and contradictory environment that the Internet offers to feminism. The paper also recognizes the enmeshed nature of feminists with their digital tools and platforms as well as the problematic and progressive feminist activism taking place online.

Dissonance and defensiveness: orienting affects in online feminist cultures

ABSTRACT Are there certain shared feelings that orient contemporary feminists? And what does it mean to feel like a feminist now, at a time when digital networks and media culture significantly shape the conditions for what feminism ‘is’ (Banet-Weiser 2018)? This paper considers how digital culture, as a crucial but potentially disorienting site of feminist encounter and contestation, may reshape norms of feminist feeling, and what feminist feeling is used to do. Feminists have long understood feeling as an ‘orienting device’ (Ahmed 2006). in the question of how subjects come to know the world and situate themselves in it. Feminism itself has been associated with a ‘willfulness’ creating dissident subjectivities moving against the grain of prevailing patriarchal gender norms. Following Ahmed’s queer phenomenology where feeling is theorized as an ‘orientation’ towards objects, this paper considers how the affective infrastructures and dynamics of digital culture orient and draw boundaries for feminists along particular lines. We explore self-identifying feminists’ accounts of learning, interaction and deliberation as feminists within digital environments, suggesting that what it means to be feminist is significantly determined by what it means to feel feminist. While digital culture makes feminism more ‘accessible’ to many, we suggest that the commercialized architectures and rhythms of digital culture complicate and intensify the politics of emotion connected to differences and histories of power relations within feminism.

We are all the Smallest Woman in the World

This essay explores the place in Clarice Lispector’s literature that seeks to touch a primary ground of the living with a language that exceeds the symbolic in order to read it from an anthropocenic, posthuman, and feminist present. It argues that the story “A menor mulher do mundo” (Laços de família, 1960) takes to an extreme what happens in all of Lispector’s literature at the point that we can find in Macabéa’s character from A hora da estrela (1976), a sort of continuation of the smallest woman in the world. In both – the story and the novel – materiality comes to life and it is associated with a neutral background that goes beyond the difference between the human and the nonhuman, the feminine and the masculine, and that coincides with language, with the word. Both characters are residue and resistance, and operate in the stories in the same way that the word operates in Lispector’s writing. The Deleuzian concept of minor and its continuation on the concept of immanence are therefore read not only as a way to think beyond the species, but also as that which operates by destabilizing the concept of “woman” as a universal. Lispector’s writing, then, allows us to separate contemporary feminisms from an affirmation of the identity of the feminine and the masculine, to take them instead into an order that – regardless of whether embodied in woman – is outside the patriarchal.

The multiple status of food in contemporary feminist dystopias: a neo-materialistic approach to The New Wilderness by Diane Cook


 
 
 The feminist dystopia has always resorted to material contexts and features to substantiate its political positions. Among these, food has a peculiar position; in relating issues pertaining to both the biologic and affective spheres, it can dismantle oppositions between material and immaterial. These multifaceted aspects can be analysed through New materialism, framing food procurement, preparation and consumption as performativity (Barad, 2003) between human and non-human. The analysis ofDiane Cook’s (2020) The New Wilderness in this direction will show how food substantiates the intersection between the animality of the Wilderness and its scientific framing, merging human bodies with surrounding contexts.
 
 

빨간 구두의 굴레와 여성주의적 재해석

For Hans Christian Andersen the red shoes syndrome indicates the supposedly feminine vanity and pride; contemporary feminist writers unveil the womanly innate desire for artistic behavior represented by the syndrome. But since this feminine desire had been a taboo, they had to interiorize it, but were not able to completely dampen it, hence often-times their desperate attempt to satisfy it, coupled with death instinct. This essay explores the red shoes syndrome in the works of Anne Sexton, Kathryn Davis, and Yideum Kim (a contemporary Korean poetess), as well as Alice Walker and a couple of others, with the special intention to demonstrate the shared desire among women a generation after another. As was already shown in “The Red Shoes” by Andersen, the shoe cannot be detached from human body and won’t stop dancing even after being separated. In the final analysis, this paper argues that the undying shoe is a zombie, which has only one-dimensional principle of behavior just like an object or a machine thus programmed. A zombie is, in this regard, an object the way that the red shoes are. In turn, the unremovable red shoes from the feet can be equivalent to a certain non-organic part of female body. Human body already has lots of non-organic ingredients in it, which are, of course, objects. The object of the red shoe, the non-organic bodily part, generates the affect of artistic satisfaction in our (especially, women’s) body.