Contemporary Feminist Research Articles

Contemporary Portuguese feminist activisms through the analysis of the International Feminist Strike website: subversive revolt and counterpower

ABSTRACT The International Feminist Strike, emerging in 2017, seeks to redefine International Women’s Day (8 March). Its objective is to reclaim and revitalize the day by aligning it with its original purpose, effectively re-politicizing the narrative surrounding it. Additionally, it aims to challenge the traditional conception of a strike, expanding its influence beyond labour strikes (pertaining to paid work) and evolving into a broader social strike. In Portugal, the integration of the feminist strike into the repertoires of action of national feminisms gained expression in 2019, displaying the dynamics of contemporary feminist movements within the prospective context of a feminist fourth wave. The March 8 Network, a coalition of feminist activists, created a website that functions as an archival and memorial repository for discursive objects (images, photographs, written texts, posters, banners, pamphlets). Through a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) of that website, this article proposes to determine how the International Feminist Strike was discursively conceptualized as a tool for social contestation and counterpower. The results reveal that the feminist strike is portrayed as a subversive force that transcends the conventional notion of a strike by confronting issues related to productive and reproductive work and challenging the power of neoliberal capitalism.

Confucian relational personhood and oppressed agents

ABSTRACT Classical Confucians, contemporary feminists, and comparative philosophers have argued that roles and relationships constitute our agency and autonomy. These philosophers argue that who we are, including our desires, intentions, and values, can be explained by our relationships—e.g. to family, peers, or friends—and roles—e.g. as teacher or daughter. However, some argue relational views fail to robustly explain autonomy in a way that captures the harms of oppression. I argue that Classical Confucian understandings of relational agency, which endorse a weak source normativity and emphasize the importance of normative ‘checks’ on relationships and roles, can help answer this worry. Rituals, relationships, and roles help to shape, direct, and express natural attitudes and affects in accordance with normatively primary understandings of relational human nature and harmony. Classical Confucianism can thus shed light on the construction of relational agency and offer insight into how oppressed subjects may undermine oppression.

In (a) Critical Condition: Reconsiderations of Krisis, Critique, and Theoria through Research Co-creation

This paper explores the transformative potential of feminist research-creation through the lens of krisis and collaborative world-building, positioning research-creation as both a method and an ethic of care. Revisiting the ancient Greek concept of krisis—a moment of judgment and discernment—as a framework for inquiry, the author contrasts her prior scholarly work embedded in traditional frameworks of critique, often rooted in metaphors of violence, with the reparative methodologies developed through her work with the Decameron Collective. Over four years of iterative collaboration, the Collective produced award-winning multimodal digital projects Decameron 2.0 and Memory Eternal, which use storytelling, co-creation, and curation to respond creatively to crises from the pandemic to climate change. This paper argues that research co-creation can redefine krisis as a site of generative potential, where making and theorizing intertwine to produce new forms of knowledge and connection. By centering relationality, materiality, and feminist ethics, the Collective’s work moves beyond solitary modes of inquiry to establish a collaborative, care-driven practice. Situating research-creation within philosophical traditions of theoria and contemporary feminist thought, the paper highlights a number of ways such collaborative creation and curation can sustain communities, foster epistemological innovation, and offer reparative responses to crises. The paper ultimately positions research co-creation and co-authorship integrating storytelling, digital design, and collective reflection in slow scholarship as a vital methodology for navigating complex global challenges and reimagining the role of scholarship in a world facing ongoing crises.

“You turn m/e inside out”: Body models undone in The Lesbian Body

Anatomical body models possess a seemingly contradictory set of attributes. They can be concrete and pedagogical at the same time that they are gruesome and fantastical; they claim objectivity while rhetorically embracing specific theories of human value. Nowhere is this more evident than in Monique Wittig’s 1973 novel The Lesbian Body. Reading the novel alongside Wittig’s materialist feminist theory, this article highlights how Wittig’s conviction in the political and material agency of cultural signs comes forward most dramatically in her treatment of anatomical representations. In particular, it looks to Wittig’s canny manipulation of the unique properties of instrumental and technical images, a class of signs which simultaneously invites and disavows libidinal engagement. The novel provocatively engages the question of whether the visual strategies of hegemonic discourse can ever be successfully deployed against or outside their disciplines. Accordingly, this article argues, The Lesbian Body is a crucial text for contemporary feminist scholars of the visual culture of science, medicine, and pornography.

The Energies of Boyhood

ABSTRACT Boys are figured as both too fast and too slow for what’s expected of them. Too action-oriented for the classroom or for happy domestic containment. Too slow to grow up or too stalled by obstacles to their natural energies to embrace manhood. This article considers the widespread perception of boys and boyhood as characterised by a desirable energy and liveliness but, at the same time, by a problematic excess of energy and a reluctance or incapacity to channel this efficiently into mature competencies. To do so, we consider some long discursive precedents for understanding boyishness as simultaneously energetic promise and management problem: from enlightenment discourses on education through to ‘boys work’ organisations like the Boy Scouts and the YMCA; to resonant imaginations of innate boyhood energy at odds with society in popular texts; and to recent scholarship on the current cultural impasse of boys perceived as unable or unwilling to become men. In coming to grips with the resilience of this discourse on the energies of boyhood, we consider its implications for contemporary feminist analyses of boyhood and make an argument for thinking about boyhood as a more mobile designation for orientations, experiences, and bodies.

The ‘Common Sense’ of Raising Boys: Boys as Objects of Everyday Wisdom in Australian Parenting Advice Books

ABSTRACT This article explores the epistemic underpinnings of parenting advice books about raising boys, with a focus on the work of two best-selling Australian authors: Maggie Dent and Steve Biddulph. Alongside a range of normative claims about boys, biology, and the role of parents in the acquisition of gender, these books advance a claim to boyhood as a phenomenon best known through ‘common sense’. Avowedly anti-expert, these texts present gender as something ‘obvious’ – readily understood through simple everyday observation. Not only are their accounts of gender at odds with contemporary feminist research, but they work to push feminist research out of the conversation altogether. Following Geertz [Geertz, Clifford. 1975. “Common Sense as a Cultural System.” The Antioch Review 33 (1): 5–26. https://doi.org/10.2307/4637616], this article argues that ‘common sense’ can be understood as a semantic field which makes an asset of theoretical inconsistency and ‘thinness’, and positions scholarly rigour as unreliable or suspect. A feminist response to the ‘common sense’ claims of texts like these must therefore grapple not only with matters of fact and accuracy, but also with the implicit claim that parental expertise and everyday observation contain epistemic value above (and in opposition to) scholarly research on gender and childhood.

The Boy Who Looks: Previewing Masculinities and Violence Through Boyhoods on Screen

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of boy witnesses in screen representations of domestic and family violence. Australian cinema has frequently placed a speechless boy at a scene of men’s violence: he might bea figure of innocence against masculinities gone bad, or a proxy for the audience, simulating a point-of-view untroubled by contemporary debates around gender-based violence. This article argues that the figure of the boy who looks is invested with multiple competing meanings attached to masculinity, including idealisations of boyhood curiosity, celebrations of boys as figures of progress, and the racialisation of Australian boyhoods within the context of colonial violence and dispossession. Furthermore, by interrogating the trope of the boy who looks, this article considers the affordances and limitations of contemporary feminist approaches to violence in cinema, and argues for an understanding of domestic and family violence in cinema as inextricably linked to the ways that we think about masculinity, cultural identity, and youth.

The Perpetuity of Matriarchal Condition in Barbie Land of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie

This journal explores the enduring matriarchal condition alongside the dominance of female figures in Barbie Land in Barbie movie. The study investigates the representation of gender roles and the implications of such structure in contemporary feminist discourse in Barbie Land. Through qualitative method and explorative approach, by examining the perpetuity of matriarchal condition, the journal aims to shed light on the broader narrative of female empowerment and its complexities in Barbie Land and Real-World contexts. This journal provides in-depth exploration of the perpetuation of matriarchal condition in Barbie Land, using Heide Gottner-Abendroth's theory of matriarchy as a framework to analyze its cultural and social significances. The analysis includes how matriarchal condition in Barbie Land shapes women as central beings that own properties, do various jobs, and indicates great leadership. In conclusion, through Barbie Land, matriarchal condition is based on cooperation, mutual support, and belief that women can be powerful leaders in their own rights. The movie challenges audience to rethink traditional power structures and to consider the benefits of a society where women are central to leadership and decision-making. It is also noted that movie of Barbie may provide intertwinements of literature and real-world experience regarding gender equality initiatives.

“Problem Girls”: Gender Nonconformity as Resistance in Early Disabled Feminist Life Writing

This article explores white disabled feminist narratives outside of the circumscription of heterosexualized rehabilitation discourses in the early twentieth century. The writers I examine in this essay—Katharine Butler Hathaway and Pauline Avery Crawford—articulated a feminist disability aesthetic that trailblazed for contemporary feminist disability studies and activism.

Thrown to the (Were)Wolves: Sisterhood, Vengeance, and Liberal Feminism in Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle’s Squad

In Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle’s graphic novel Squad, protagonist Becca and her new friends at Piedmont High are not human adolescents but a pack of werewolves who must kill to stay alive and select teenage boys—“the WORST ones” (70)—as their meal of choice. The power of the pack’s “monstrous” bodies is a dangerous privilege and responsibility that Squad suggests is often misused to victimize innocents. The book critiques individualistic Western/liberal feminism—an ideology also critiqued by contemporary feminist writers—that encourages women and girls to gain power for themselves and then use it to perpetuate hierarchies of domination. Through an analysis of the figure of the werewolf and fantasies of revenge, this article suggests that both Squad’s narrative and its comic images guide readers toward an understanding of how liberal feminist ideology impedes collective empowerment. This article ultimately argues that Squad can be wielded as a potential feminist consciousness-raising tool for teaching about the ethics of different feminist ideologies.

HISTORICIZING FEMINIST DATA ACTIVISM: A MEDIA GENEALOGY OF THE WOMEN’S SAFETY AUDITS

This paper historicizes feminist data activism, particularly as it relates to the use of grassroots data by feminist activists to address gendered violence in public spaces. It seeks to address the following question: How did grassroots data become widely accepted as a legitimate means to combat gendered violence in public spaces? This historical perspective allows us to unpack what seems to be a novel action repertoire within contemporary feminist activism. I use media genealogy to trace the history of a particular grassroots data type: the Women's Safety Audit (WSA). The data for this study come from historical records published by the feminist organisation that pioneered the WSA and different UN agencies, spanning four decades since the emergence of the WSA in the 1980s (n=41). I also drew upon modern data initiatives' documents and interviews with data activists and stakeholders who funded data activism efforts. This paper reveals three significant forces that have shaped the WSA and how it came to be accepted as a means to address gendered violence in public spaces: the Crime Prevention through Environmental Design approach, the dominance of evidence-based practices, and the imperative of scalability. Rather than signalling the emergence of innovative epistemic cultures as some scholars suggest, this genealogy of the WSA showed that grassroots data approach has indeed been folded into other hegemonic interests throughout the history. Grappling with this entanglement and the hierarchy of power/knowledge it enacts is crucial for feminist activism to not reproduce the power relations they seek to address.

Can Xue Fiction under Feminism: Dreams, Reality, and Psychological Deep Exploration

As a feminist pioneer in contemporary Chinese literature, Can Xue’s works are known for their unique narrative techniques and profoundly feminine perspectives. This study explores the feminist narrative strategies of Can Xue’s novels based on their unique narrative techniques and profound female perspectives. Through analyzing the interweaving of dream and reality, it reveals the externalization of women’s inner world and its innovative role in narrative; through the exploration of psychological depth, it shows the complex struggle of women in gender roles and identity; through the meticulous analysis of family, body, language, and other imagery, it criticizes sexism and advocates gender equality. The conclusion of the study shows that the novels of Can Xue not only enrich the expression of feminist literature, but also reveal the real situation of women in a patriarchal society through the integration of dream, reality, and psychology, providing ideological support for the reconstruction of gender rights, and demonstrate its unique contribution and value in the field of feminist literature. This study not only expands the theoretical boundaries of feminist literature but also provides a new dimension for interpreting the works of Can Xue, highlighting its unique contribution and value in contemporary feminist literature.

Intimate Betrayals: Uncovering Eugenicist Logics in the Stories of Two Black German Women

This paper draws on data from an ongoing qualitative research study on the educational experiences and identities of Black transnational women to explore the question: “What can be learned about the transnational legacies of eugenicist thought as we examine the stories of two Black German women?” These data are represented in two vignettes crafted from interviews, conversations, and memories to explore the implications of eugenicist logic in the lives of Black German women. Decried as an ableist, racist, misogynistic, and pseudoscientific project that sought to improve “human stock,” the objectives of the eugenics movement of the early 19th century have been rejected in most scholarly fields of the 21st century. However, the narratives centered in this paper show that eugenicist logic, ideologies, and discourses remain persistent, insidious parts of contemporary discourses. Theoretically and methodologically, the paper engages a Transnational Black Feminist approach (Burkhard, 2019, 2021) to qualitative research to attend to the ways in which eugenicist ideologies are narrated and reproduced in intimate moments of everyday life, highlighting the continuous need for contemporary feminist scholarship to consider global, transnational, and local lenses in knowledge production.

A Study on Feminist Perspectives and Gender Role Inverted in Film and Television Works: A Case Study of Anatomy of a Fall

This article focuses on the film Anatomy of a Fall directed by French director Justine Triet, exploring the feminist perspective and the phenomenon of traditional gender role inversion presented in the film. The film takes a feminist perspective as its core, revealing through a seemingly simple family tragedy how women break through traditional gender stereotypes and gain self-identity and liberation when facing challenges in contemporary society and families. This article first analyzes how the female protagonist Sandra takes the initiative and appears as an independent and resilient figure from a feminist perspective. Furthermore, from the perspective of the presentation of gender role inversion, the traditional gender role setting of “male leads outside, female leads inside” was explored. Subsequently, the profound theme of the film was further analyzed from the perspective of narrative techniques. Finally, this article emphasizes the positive contribution of Anatomy of a Fall in promoting the development of contemporary feminist films and facilitating the diversification of gender roles in society.

Empowered Women and Feminism in the Novels of Indu Sundaresan

This research paper investigates the nuanced portrayal of empowered women and feminist ideologies in the novels of Indu Sundaresan. Through a meticulous analysis of works such as The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses, the study examines how Sundaresan reconstructs historical narratives to spotlight female agency and resistance against patriarchal norms. Her storytelling vividly captures the complex interplay of gender, power, and societal constraints within historical contexts. The research highlights recurring themes such as autonomy, solidarity among women, and the intersection of gender and politics, which underpin Sundaresan’s feminist ethos. By presenting women who navigate and often subvert oppressive structures, her works challenge traditional portrayals of women in historical fiction. The paper further explores the development of her protagonists, who emerge as multidimensional figures embodying both strengths and vulnerabilities, thereby making them relatable and inspiring. Ultimately, this study underscores how Sundaresan’s novels not only reclaim the voices of marginalized women but also contribute to contemporary feminist discourse by inspiring a re-evaluation of historical gender dynamics.

Mulheres em série(s): presenças e materialidades femininas em ficções seriadas contemporâneas

This study seeks to highlight, based on collective writing and the result of dissertations developed in the Comunicação, Imagem e Afeto (Cia/UFES) research group, thepresences and materializations of female representations linked to lesbianism, the appearance and aging of female bodies, the loneliness of Black women, and the culture of rape in recent audiovisual productions. Such reflections are considered pertinent to contribute to interdisciplinary research between contemporary feminist theory and criticism and audiovisual studies, especially on serial fiction. The works covered are the telenovela Vai na fé, from 2023, by Rosane Svartman, and the TV series And Just Like That, from 2021, by Darren Star and collaborators, Insecure, from 2016, by Issa Rae, and The Handmaid’s Tale, from 2017, by Margareth Atwood and collaborators. The main objective is to bring diverse female experiences to the fore, based on Balogh and Moura’s methodology for analyzing serial narratives. It can be seen that the works analyzed are part of a scenario of serial narrative marked by greater female protagonism on screen, even if it is still insufficient in terms of intersectionality.

Is domestic labor productive labor: an inquiry based on historical materialism

ABSTRACT An important concern in contemporary feminist Marxist studies is the concept of “domestic labor.” Western feminists present two different positions in the debate surrounding the question of whether domestic labor is productive labor. However, from the perspective of Marx’s critique of political economy, neither position surpasses the basic theoretical framework of the capitalist mode of production. An analysis based on Marx’s theory of the correlation between productive and unproductive labor reveals that this framework alone is insufficient for theorizing domestic labor. To highlight its theoretical significance, it is necessary to examine it within the framework of Marx’s historical materialism.

Feminist media makers in the San Francisco Bay area

ABSTRACT This article documents two long-standing media projects in the San Francisco Bay area. ‘Voices of the Native Nations’, a community radio program, and the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP), training program and film festival, both were based in feminist and decolonial social movements and arose during key media historic moments. I argue that media-in-transition goes beyond a simple consideration of technological changes, and instead includes the complex processes by which emerging groups of social actors claim a specific medium or media assemblage within the space constituted by residual and dominant political and media formations. Media-in-transition includes two different time periods – a group’s emergence within a specific media historic moment or conjuncture of changing movements, residual and dominant political and media ecologies, and media technologies; and the always-in-process ways that these contending groups constitute new subjectivities, media practices and social relations. I conclude by reviewing the legacies of these two projects for contemporary feminist media.

Ubuntu and the More-Than-Human: Lessons from African and African Diaspora Feminists

Abstract: The maxim most closely associated with the African philosophy of ubuntu, "umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu," is attendant to human-to-human relations especially in the fields of African and African Diaspora Feminisms. More pertinent to my research is the larger relationality embedded in ubuntu and which considers the interconnections and interdependence between the living, the ancestors and the unborn, on the one hand, and between the human and other living beings and organisms on the other. To that extent, I engage with ubuntu as an embodied practice grounded both in spirit and in ecology. This paper engages with M. Jacqui Alexander's notion of the Sacred , Patricia McFadden's contemporary feminism , and Mary Kinyanjui's utu feminism to establish how these Africana feminist scholars who acknowledge and work within embodied practices of the Sacred, ecofeminist care, and utu adopt a relationality that resembles the expansive posture of what ubuntu encompasses. They are the forbearers to this work. I describe them as 'relational interlocutors' who have laid the ground for engaging with ubuntu as an inter-being relation that offers emancipatory possibilities for healing.

Challenging Male Entitlement and Patriarchy: Promising Young Woman, Barbie, and Contemporary Feminist Theory

Abstract This paper examines comparatively the potential feminist work done by two recent films, Promising Young Woman (2020) and Barbie (2023). By employing the concepts of (male) entitlement and patriarchy, we argue that pushing the concept of patriarchy to the center of a discourse propagated by means of commercial success can have the effect of strengthening rather than undermining it. At the same time, this apparent acceptance of patriarchy as a debate topic is accompanied by continued reluctance to address entitlement.