Critical Feminist Approach Research Articles

“I didn’t raise a d#@k!” How parents perceive and address gendered bullying with children

ABSTRACTThis is an exploratory study that uses a critical feminist approach to examine how parents perceive and respond to gendered bullying with children. Past research conceptualizes bullying from a feminist perspective and previous studies examine how parents perceive bullying. This study moves beyond earlier investigations by integrating these sites of inquiry. The author engages five fathers and eight mothers to participate in this study (n = 13). Data collection includes semi-structured individual interviews and the data analysis is based on a critical feminist approach to phenomenological inquiry. The data analysis shows how the majority of parents, in this study, do perceive and address bullying from a critical feminist perspective, in particular, according to three categories: (a) challenging binary thinking b) understanding identities/positionalities and c) perceiving/addressing gendered power relations. The results lay the foundation for practice and policy implications aimed at bullying prevention and future research to further examine social phenomenon related to gendered bullying.

Why we need to study (US) militarism: A critical feminist lens

Responding to the special issue call to examine security and militarism alongside one another, this article adopts a critical feminist lens to explore what is at stake when critical scholars study security rather than militarism – and why, for critical feminists in particular, studying one without attention to the other is not helpful. Anchoring the discussion of (US) militarism in ongoing debates about women in combat, the article proposes that studying security without attention to militarism leads scholars to miss the deeply militarist orientation of security studies. It further suggests that feminist scholarship, because it treats militarism and militarization as an integral part of feminist security studies and considers the everyday a crucial site for inquiry, is well suited to studying militarism and security alongside one another. The article then lays out what a critical feminist approach to studying militarism entails and presents some feminist insights on militarization, focusing in particular on what attention to gender can reveal about shared norms of manliness and war. Overall, the article shows why feminist perspectives offer such strikingly different insights into the relationship between militarism and security and what we miss when feminist scholarship is ignored or marginalized in scholarship on these issues.

The weight of (the) matter: A new material feminist account of thin and fat oppressions.

Critical feminist approaches to eating disorders and "obesity" have recently come under criticism for relying too heavily on textual- and image-based analyses of health, identity and body weight, shape, and size. In this article, we examine qualitative interviews with self-identified anorexic and "obese" women using a new material feminist lens-particularly the work of Karen Barad-to see what this perspective contributes to conceptualizations of weight-based oppressions. In addition to outlining how the material world actively participates in ongoing processes of oppression, we also highlight how the body presses back, offering up potentially less oppressive processes of materialization. The article concludes on a cautiously optimistic note, pointing to how a new materialist framework may draw attention to micropolitical processes of becoming otherwise.

Forms of Patriarchy in Amoris Laetitia and in the Papacy of Francis

Almost all of the considerable attention, both negative and favorable, thus far given to Pope Francis’s lengthy Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia has centered on a single footnote discussing access to the sacraments for the divorced and remarried, and, more broadly, on Francis’s treatment of those living in what Catholic orthodoxy deems irregular unions. In this chapter, taking a critical feminist approach to Amoris Laetitia and to other key elements of Francis’s papacy to date, I will be putting the emphasis elsewhere, on what I see, not as promising new innovations, but as disturbing reaffirmations of a patriarchal vision of both the family and the Church, in each of which women are at risk of being seen as under male headship, even as the Church proclaims their conceptual equality with men. It is possible to chart a more optimistic course for feminism through the text of Amoris Laetitia and more generally through the papacy of Francis, as I shall also briefly discuss, but there is a certain ambivalence to be found in even the most affirmative of signals sent to date.

The impact of an “equal opportunities” ideological framework on coaches’ knowledge and practice

This study focuses upon UK professional coaches’ experiences of equity training and the impact of the conceptualisation of equity as a matter of equal opportunities on this education and subsequent coaching practice. The research employs a critical feminist approach to connect the ideological framing of gender equity by sporting organisations to coaches’ ability to understand, identify and manage issues of gender equity, equality and diversity. The discussions are based on interviews with four coaches, Jack, Peter, Charlotte and Tony, who had all recently undertaken equity training, and all of whom represented sports and different stages of the coaching pathway. The data highlights that seeing gender equity through an “equal opportunities” lens results in a narrow conceptualisation of such issues by coaches, fails to challenge dominant and discriminative ideologies, and does not enable coaches to address equity within their practices. Consequently, coaches struggle to understand the importance of and manage such issues. The participants’ experiences reveal that gender relations, intersected principally with religion and ethnicity, underpinned their everyday coaching practices. The findings illustrate the need for sporting organisations to redefine how they approach equality and equity and for a more sophisticated sociocultural educational programme for coaches.

Resistance and Relearning: Women’s Experiences Choosing Midwifery and Home Birth in Ontario, Canada

Using a critical feminist approach, and with attention to participants’ broad life experiences, this qualitative study explores seven women’s learning in their challenging, transformative decisions to give birth at home with midwives in Ontario, Canada. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with women who had recently planned midwife-attended home births to shed light on how they learned about these childbirth possibilities and gained the confidence to plan a home birth. Participants’ narratives revealed that to make these choices, they had to become active and informed decision-makers, and resist the dominant view of birth as inherently risky, and of women’s birth experiences as unimportant and incompatible with the birth of a healthy baby. Replacing myths and misconceptions about midwifery, and especially about home birth, with more current and evidence-based information was critical to participants’ resistance and relearning, as were their own life experiences and those of women they trusted.

Connecting Trauma and Health for Mothers in the Child Welfare System

This qualitative study focused on disadvantaged women in the child welfare system who have lost their parental rights. Utilizing a critical feminist and eco-developmental approach, the study was aimed at understanding how experiences of complex trauma influences parenting, health, and well-being. This sample consisted of 31 primarily ethnic minority, low income women. Findings identified how early and ongoing traumatic experiences (complex trauma) can contribute to health issues and inadequate functioning that can lead to child neglect, family disruption, and temporary or permanent loss of parental rights. Attending to the multi-layered needs of mothers in the child welfare system will facilitate better parenting and overall care for children.

The recruiter and the sceptic: a critical feminist approach to military studies

To be a critical military analyst is to be a sceptically curious military analyst. Using a critical feminist approach to studying the military can help to generate more reliable explanations and more realistic accountings of the creation and role of any given military and of broader processes of militarization. This article moves from a memorial of an army recruitment stand in Somerville, Massachusetts, to broad questions on the strategies of military recruitment and the ways in which masculinities and femininities are used by recruiters. These questions are central for recruiters in meeting their quotas, yet are regularly ignored by military analysts. These questions include: which genders, ethnicities, sexualities and classes are targeted and excluded for recruitment and reenlistment? How are narrow perceptions of manliness used to encourage enlistments? How are the mothers, girlfriends and wives of potential enlistees engaged with by recruiters? These speak to broader questions on how militaries are created, sustained and deployed. The calculations made by recruiters are usually shielded from view to maintain perceptions of legitimacy within the eyes of citizens. A critical approach to military studies brings these calculations into view and calls for scepticism, a deepening curiosity and a serious engagement with feminist questions.

A critical feminist approach to social inclusion and citizenship in the context of the co-curriculum

Issues of social inclusion and difference within the co-curriculum are crucial. This article draws on themes central to a critical feminist framework of social inclusion and citizenship in HE to argue that the way in which co-curricular opportunities are traditionally structured at universities may exclude those students who are marginalised. It also suggests how we may minimise institutional, cultural and economic discrimination, thus giving most students an opportunity to flourish. Keywords: Social inclusion, critical feminist citizenship, co-curriculum, higher education, first generation students

Getting Intersectional in Museums

Museum professionals have long grappled with the problems of identity-based exclusion within museum exhibits, programs, and collections. Considering the diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in our communities, including the stories of all the identities that make up our communities has proven to be a challenge. The idea that identities do not operate alone but intersect with each other in dynamic and complex ways—that identities are intersectional—presents new possibilities for solving the challenges of identity-based inclusion. This article briefly introduces the foundations of intersectional theory and how this theory addresses challenges faced by museum professionals. Specific examples of how this critical feminist approach might function in museum spaces are presented. Building on these examples, this essay investigates the practical possibilities for addressing the challenges of identity-based inclusion in museum work.

Researching the War on Terror in Swat Valley, Pakistan: Grapplings with the Impact on Communities and the Transnational Knowledge Industry

Drawing on a study of the War on Terror in Swat Valley, Pakistan, the article explores what it means to conduct research in a politically charged conflict situation when the researcher is aligned against the dictates of imperialism. How can the impact of research—in terms of its efficaciousness in serving communities as well as in supporting a larger understanding that can bring in peace—be evaluated? The article grapples with the effects of the study at two levels: the community or local level in Swat; and, as a project of interethnic and transnational knowledge production and dissemination. The article highlights the limits and contradictions of a critical feminist approach in the face of multilayered power relations. Ultimately, the article makes a case for sustained attention to the value of research as transformative, even when its impact remains ambiguous given the scale of the War on Terror.

‘We are not Victims, we are Protagonists of this History’

This article centers on the Mexican and Argentinean ‘Dirty Wars’, examining the limitations inherent in human rights and women's human rights responses to these epochs of violence. I situate Argentina's report on the dictatorship, Nunca más (1984), in conversation with Elena Poniatowska's text on the 1968 Mexico City massacre, La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), to trace the rise of a global human rights discourse that has become the dominant manner of conceptualizing human rights violations and gender violence in the latter half of the twentieth century. While feminist critiques of human rights have centered on the lack of gender-specific focus of violence committed against women, this article questions whether the women's human rights discourse disengages the historical, economic and geopolitical realities from which these violations were committed and instead focuses on women's sexual violations to garner international condemnation of gender violence. By turning to these texts, this article centers on the possibilities and limitations of women's human rights discourse and the impact this has on the shaping of women's political agency. This article calls for a critical feminist approach to women's human rights in order to document narratives of women survivors of human rights abuses without obfuscating their political subjectivities.

Nurturing “Critical Hope” in Teaching Feminist Social Work Research

Despite the congruence between critical feminist values and the cardinal values of the social work profession, feminist research in social work has lagged behind its feminist cousins in the social sciences, particularly in terms of critical uses of theory, reflexivity, and the troubling of binaries. This article presents as praxis our reflections as researchers, teachers, and feminists inside social work. We draw from a review of feminist social work research and offer suggestions for teaching critical feminist approaches in social work research. Incorporating critical feminist values and research practices into social work research courses creates the potential for greater integration of research, practice, and the principal values of our profession.

The Subordination of the Feminine? Developing a Critical Feminist Approach to the Psychoanalysis of Organizations

This paper investigates the intersections between psychoanalysis and feminist thinking as they may be applied to organization studies by problematizing sexual difference. By critically engaging with the influence of (primarily Lacanian) psychoanalysis, I explore feminist psychoanalytic approaches with their close attention to patriarchy and phallocentrism. More specifically, I engage with the work of Luce Irigaray, whose influential role in French feminist philosophy has occupied what could be termed a difficult or sacrificial position in Lacanian psychoanalysis. I argue that the focus of psychoanalysis on the Phallus as a primary signifier may be fruitfully problematized through a feminist lens (Grosz, 1990), conceived here through Irigaray, and that its usefulness for organizational analysis depends on an ability to recognize, invite and attend to its gendered core. It is argued that Irigaray brings fruitful resources to this debate. Irigaray is concerned with the significant political and ethical dilemmas resulting from the systematic suppression of femininity and this is why her work is significant for a better understanding of gender relations in organizations relating to the exclusion of women, and for new spaces of symbolization and representation. My discussion reveals that, by scrutinizing sexual differences that constitute the subject, one is able to unearth implications for the study of organizations.

Becoming Resilient: Promoting the Mental Health and Well-Being of Immigrant Women in a Canadian Context

This paper reports on grounded theory findings that are relevant to promoting the mental health and well-being of immigrant women in Canada. The findings illustrate how relationships among settlement factors and dynamics of empowerment had implications for “becoming resilient” as immigrant women and how various health promotion approaches enhanced their well-being. Dimensions of empowerment were embedded in the content and process of the feminist health promotion approach used in this study. Four focus groups were completed in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with 35 racialized immigrant women who represented diverse countries of origin: 25 were from Africa; others were equally represented from South Asia (5), Asia (5), and Central or South America and the Caribbean (5). Participants represented diverse languages, family dynamics, and educational backgrounds. One focus group was conducted in Somali; three were conducted in English. Constructivist grounded theory, theoretical sampling, and a critical feminist approach were chosen to be congruent with health promotion research that fostered women's empowerment. Findings foreground women's agency in the study process, the ways that immigrant women name and frame issues relevant to their lives, and the interplay among individual, family, community, and structural dynamics shaping their well-being. Implications for mental health promotion are discussed.

The training-to-work trajectory: pressures for and subversions to participation in the neoliberal learning market in the UK

The UK government has emphasised the role of lifelong learning in eradicating social exclusion and improving productivity and the skills base. With a neoliberal rationale that normalises economic participation, the unemployed are being offered (re)training to enable a swift transition to paid employment and encourage ‘personal responsibility’. Taking a critical feminist approach framed by the social control model of lifelong learning and Foucault's governmentality, this article explores efforts made to ‘encourage’ mothers to take up training to precipitate a move into the labour market. Drawing on interviews with training providers and mothers, it highlights pressures mothers feel when they have to comply with current training and employment norms, and points to the gendering of official constructions of progression. But using de Certeau's ‘tactics’, it also offers a reading of evasion in mothers' training participation and progression: how mothers exert agency to ensure training better fits with needs, desires and caring responsibilities.

Questioning agency and empowerment: Women's work-related strategies and social class in urban Turkey

Synopsis This article investigates different trajectories of agency and empowerment in diverse “work-related strategies” employed by women of different social classes in Istanbul, Turkey. I define “work-related strategies” as actions developed to cope with the difficulties related to working or not working, employed by women both in and out of the labor force. Based on in-depth interviews I conducted with 60 women from working, middle, and upper classes, both within and outside the labor force in Istanbul, Turkey, I categorize women's work-related strategies as (1) acceptance of (or preference for) traditional gender roles in the availability of resources from family, (2) clandestine acts used to gain maneuverability, (3) negotiations based on concessions, and finally (4) compensating for structural limitations. I argue that women's agency is class-specific because structural factors affect women from different classes differently, thus leading to the emergence of multiple work-related strategies for working, middle and upper-middle class women. These strategies may meet individual women's practical needs, but are far from fulfilling strategic gender needs. By adopting a critical feminist approach similar to those of Molyneux and Connell, I question the relationship between agency and empowerment in terms of women's work-related strategies in urban Turkey.

Beyond psychopathology: Interrogating (dis)orders of body weight and body management

As David Smail and Janet Bostock (1999: p. 78) noted a decade ago ‘[c]larifying the role ofideology and culture as ‘‘distal’’ influences on subjective experience is at once one of themost important and one of the most difficult tasks facing community psychology.’ Itremains equally important and, perhaps, just as difficult today. This special issue comprisesa series of critical explorations of the ways in which subjectivities and subjectiveexperiences are discursively constituted, regulated and resisted in relation to normalisedand pathologised body weights and weight management practices.Traditionally, psychological research has focused on the body image of individuals, byfor example, quantitatively measuring body image dissatisfaction in young women (e.g.Grogan, 2006; Tiggemann, 2004). However, the focus on deconstructing hegemonicnotions of body weight and weight management practices is undoubtedly of particularimportance for community psychology today most obviously because, against a backdropin which Westernised cultural ideas constitute the slender body as healthy, attractive,morally virtuous and ‘normal’ (e.g. Bordo, 1993; Malson, 1998, Malson and Burns, 2009),the World Health Organisation has declared that the Western world is in the grip of an‘obesity epidemic’ (e.g. Branca, Nikogosian & Lobstein, 2007).The now highly familiar and culturally entrenched constructions that equate thin/slimbodies with all things good and fatness with all that is aesthetically and morallyreprehensible are now over-written and further consolidated by a neo-liberal discourse ofhealthism.Framed withinneo-liberal ideology, one’shealthbecomesanindividual concernand solutions to health problems are seen to ‘lie in the realm of individual choice’(Crawford, 1980), so that body size is constructed as a personal attribute free of social,cultural, physical and economic constraints (Rich & Evans, 2008). Within this discoursethe thin/slender body is read as a sign of health and ‘excess’ body weight is constructed asunhealthy and a consequence of irresponsible lifestyle choices.Journal of Community & Applied Social PsychologyJ. Community Appl. Soc. Psychol., 19: 331–335 (2009)

The Micro‐politics of Gendering in Networking

Networking processes contribute to the perpetuation of gender inequalities in everyday practices in organizations. This article examines the implications of the conceptualization of gender as practice for social network theory. The three central elements of this critical feminist approach to networking are the study of agency, identity construction and the micro‐political processes of networking and gendering. To illustrate that networking practices are gendering practices, that there are various manifestations of those practices, and the way in which networking and gendering are intertwined, the networking practices of four white, Dutch female and male account managers are discussed. This micro‐political analysis suggests that networking does not necessarily reinforce gender inequality, which opens up the possibility of examining which combinations of networking and gendering contribute to changing the gender order.

The Objectification and Fetishism of Sporting Women's Bodies: A Critical Feminist Approach to Photographic Coverage of Women's Beach Volleyball Tournament

The Objectification and Fetishism of Sporting Women's Bodies: A Critical Feminist Approach to Photographic Coverage of Women's Beach Volleyball Tournament