Critical Feminist Lens Research Articles

Cultural Production of ‘Invisible Privilege’: Critical Reflections on the Figure of Pratima Barua Pandey in Goalpariya Folk Music of Assam

This article will look at the figure of Pratima Barua Pandey, one of the icons of Goalpariya folk music in Assam, through a critical feminist lens. Basing the study on the qualitative method of interviews, especially with musicians, singers and other stakeholders associated with the folk form in question, we will try to locate her persona within a framework of contradictions, as someone who had transgressed the constricting spaces of caste/class/gender to be where she was, with deep and caring relationships with local practitioners of the folk form, and also as someone who co-opted and sanitized the form at the same time, given her social location and the larger politics of culture within which she was located. By including the first-hand narratives of our research participants throughout the article, we attempt to arrive at a ‘thick description’ of the concerned theme of study. Such an understanding will help to critically interrogate the conventional image of Pratima Pandey as the ‘hero’ of Goalpariya folk music.

Patriarchy in the preschool classroom: Examining the effects of developmental ideologies on teachers’ perspectives and practices around play and gender

Child development ideologies have long informed early childhood education, shaping teachers’ perceptions of children and their classroom practices through teacher education programs and education policies. Following the rise of post-developmental perspectives in the early childhood literature, the author uses a critical feminist lens to examine the gendered implications child development ideologies have had on teachers’ perspectives and practices in a Canadian metropolis. Drawing on data collected in four preschool classrooms, the author argues that the preschool teachers’ reliance on child developmental logics inadvertently perpetuated a patriarchal culture in their classrooms, as gendered power dynamics went unnoticed and unaddressed in children’s play. The author concludes by exploring the possibilities that MacNaughton’s concept of the feminist pedagogic gaze may afford early learning practices and future directions for research.

An evaluation of a Housing First program for chronically homeless women

Housing First is rapidly developing as a promising practice for ending homelessness. However, concerns have been raised regarding application for particular populations, such as women. Using a critical feminist lens, this evaluation assessed a Housing First program delivered in a mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada. The evaluation included interviews with program participants, program providers, and community key informants. Ultimately, the program proved successful in housing a small group of chronically homeless women, demonstrating that Housing First works with women, and works best when designed with the unique needs of women taken into consideration. The program achieved moderate fidelity to the Housing First model, and a number of recommendations are provided to better meet the unique needs of women. In particular, the issue of unresolved grief and loss in the context of child apprehension was identified as a root cause of ongoing trauma. Consideration is also given to the intersection between mental health services and Housing First programs.

A Motherwork Challenge to Dominant Discourse: A Review of Immigration, Motherhood, and Parental Involvement: Narratives of Communal Agency in the Face of Power Asymmetry

In Lilian Cibils dissertation-turned-book, Immigration, Motherhood and Parental Involvement: Narratives of Communal Agency in the Face of Power Asymmetry (2017), the stories of seven Mexican immigrant mothers provide insight into what motherhood looks like outside the mainstream ideology of parental involvement. Using a critical feminist lens, Cibils employs the concept of motherwork as an alternative to a cultural deficit approach for understanding Mexican immigrant motherhood.

Feminist social studies teachers: The role of teachers’ backgrounds and beliefs in shaping gender-equitable practices

Gender inequity is a persistent problem in the United States. While the high school social studies classroom should be an important space for addressing gender inequity, there is significant underrepresentation of women in the curriculum. Thus, it is crucial that we understand how self-described feminist social studies teachers present women and gender-equity in their classrooms. In this mixed-methods study, the researchers examined the beliefs and practices of six feminist-identifying teachers. The results reveal commonalities across teachers related to classroom discourses, curricular modifications, and professional practice, yet there were compelling differences based on whether or not the teacher subscribed to a critical feminist perspective or a liberal feminist perspective. While all the teachers in the study saw themselves as change agents, teachers who operated from a critical feminist lens focused more on structural gender inequity as a means to eliminate sexism, whereas teachers who operated from a liberal lens focused more on individual acts of sexism and greater inclusion of women—often individual women—in the curriculum. This study contributes to the scarce research on feminism in social studies and provides tools for practitioners who want practices that are more inclusive.

“‘Eat, Pray, Love’ Bullshit”: Women’s Empowerment through Wellness at an Elite Professional Conference

Professional women’s groups and conferences aim to improve women’s status in the workplace through networking and the exchange of resources. This article applies a critical feminist lens to one women’s conference, illustrating how the collective space paradoxically individualizes women’s career experiences. Drawing upon participant observation at the Innovative Women in Business Conference, I explore how the conference’s goal to connect businesswomen is replaced by a focus on women’s empowerment through individual control and wellness. The conference encourages women to engage in wellness practices such as egg freezing to improve their personal market value. By focusing on strategies to “have it all,” the conference reconfigures the feminist value of empowerment to convert gender inequality to an individual affair. While most women embrace the neoliberal feminism of the conference, I find that many women attendees employ tactics to resist the wellness demands, or what one attendee refers to as “‘Eat, Pray, Love’ bullshit.” This women-only conference represents a neoliberal, entrepreneurial intervention contributing to the (re)production of a self-regulating, feminist subject.

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.

‘“It’s sport, why does it matter?”’ Professional coaches’ perceptions of equity training

The purpose of this study was to stimulate debate as to the current value and form of equity training for UK coaches and how it impacts coaching practice. Adopting a critical feminist lens, the discussions are based on in-depth interviews with four coaches who had recently attended the ‘Equity in your Coaching’ workshop run by Sports Coach UK. Data analysis yielded four pertinent themes related to: coaches’ language; the impact of the course on becoming a reflective practitioner; the format of the workshop; and the minimal impact on coaching practice. Through undergoing this training, coaches understood the value and worth of such education. However, in its current form, the workshop was experienced as irrelevant and too removed from practice to be of worth to these coaches. The findings illustrate the need for coach developers to more adequately understand the complexities and intricacies inherent within the coaching context.

Contested Practice: Political Activism in Nursing and Implications for Nursing Education.

Canadian nurses have a social mandate to address health inequities for the populations they serve, as well as to speak out on professional and broader social issues. Although Canadian nursing education supports the role of nurses as advocates for social justice and leadership for health care reform, little is known about how nurse educators understand activism and how this translates in the classroom. A comparative life history study using purposeful sampling and a critical feminist lens was undertaken to explore political activism in nursing and how nurse educators foster political practice among their students. Findings from interviews and focus groups with 26 Ontario nurse educators and nursing students suggested that neoliberal dynamics in both the practice setting and in higher education have constrained nurses' activist practice and favour a technical rational approach to nursing education. Implications and strategies to inspire political action in nursing education are discussed.

Reproducing Social Conditions of Poverty: A Critical Feminist Analysis of Social Assistance Participation in Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACTThis study uses repeated Cox Proportional Hazards models to explore the characteristics significant in predicting social assistance (SA) exit rates in Ontario, Canada. The results indicate that gender, age, immigration status, family structure, and presence of children significantly affect the likelihood of SA exit. Interpreting these findings through a critical feminist lens, I highlight the structural barriers that potentially influence people’s trajectories. Social policies that might better address the lives of women and other groups are explored, and a human rights framework is discussed as one avenue to advance poverty reduction efforts.

‘I had one year in junior and then I was too old:’ structural age rules and the girlification in Canadian elite women’s figure skating

Young girls or young women with girlish figures now commonly enter into women’s elite figure skating. This ‘girlification’ can be partly attributed to the structural age rules, the rules that govern the age-specific training advancement in figure skating. The purpose of this research was to explore how the female elite Canadian singles figure skaters experienced the structural age rules during their careers. To examine the skaters’ experiences, 10 former elite Canadian women singles skaters were interviewed. A critical feminist lens was used to interpret the interviewees’ experiences with the structural age rules that might sustain domination of girls in the women’s event.

Feminist Reflections on Labour: The 'Ethics of Care' Within Maternity Laws in India

The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017 has recently been passed by the Parliament of India. While this Act is a progressive step for women, there is a need to question the theoretical foundations of the law, rather than merely its consequential ramifications. Through this paper, we attempt to critique the individual rights-justice model that is integral to conceptualising maternity laws and labour laws in India. We employ a critical feminist lens to argue that such a model reproduces the public-private dichotomy and devalues the work of care within the private sphere- suggesting that it is not “transformative” labour, but “merely reproductive”. We draw from the feminist philosophy of care to argue that child-rearing must be recognised by the State as a form of labour in itself. Further, we root these theoretical suggestions in the contemporary Indian context by providing certain tangible suggestions in terms of legislative and judicial changes that would further the responsibility-care approach to the issue of maternity in the Indian legal framework. Through this paper, we argue for broadening the scope of “labour” to include the work of care-thereby creating a space for care, relationships and connectedness within the law.

Canadian Police Mothers and the Boys’ Club: Pregnancy, Maternity Leave, and Returning to Work

This article explores police mothers’ perceptions of their workplace experiences during pregnancy and maternity leave and returning to work. Using Charmaz’s (2014) constructivist grounded theory with a critical feminist lens, qualitative interviews were conducted with 16 police mothers in the province of Ontario, Canada. Our analysis reveals that policewomen work inordinately hard to prove physical and emotional strength in an attempt to be accepted into policing’s boys’ club; encounter negative workplace responses to pregnancy; are often demoted or reassigned during maternity leave; and need to re-prove themselves as officers upon returning to work. Our research aims to enhance retention and foster changes that will best support police mothers, police organizations, and the communities they serve.

How Activism Features in the Career Lives of Four Generations of Canadian Nurses.

Recent nursing research using a critical feminist lens challenges the prevailing view of political inertia in nursing. This comparative life history study using a critical feminist lens explores the relevance of activism with four generations of Canadian nurses. Purposeful sampling of Ontario nurses resulted in 40 participants who were diverse in terms of generation, practice setting, and activist practice. Interviews and focus groups were completed with the sample of Ontario registered nurses or undergraduate and graduate nursing students: 8 Generation X, 9 Generation Y (Millennials), 20 Boomers, and 3 Overboomers. Factors such as professional norms and personal and organizational supports shaped contradictory nursing activist identities, practices, and impacts. Gendered norms, organizational dynamics, and the political landscape influenced the meanings nurses attributed to critical incidents and influences that prompted activism inside and outside the workplace, shaping the transformative potential of nursing. Despite its limitations, the study has implications for creating professional and organizational supports for consideration of health politics and policy, and spaces for dialogue to support practice and research aligned with social justice goals.

Structural impact on gendered expectations and exemptions for family caregivers in hospice palliative home care.

Evidence of gender differences in the amount and type of care provided by family caregivers in hospice palliative home care suggests potential inequities in health and health care experiences. As part of a larger critical ethnographic study examining gender relations among clients with cancer, their family caregivers and primary nurses, this article describes gendered expectations and exemptions for family caregivers within the sociopolitical context of end-of-life at home. Data were collected from in-depth interviews (n=25), observations of agency home care visits (n=9) and analyses of policy and home care agency documents (n=12). Employing a critical feminist lens, a gender-based analysis revealed that structural discourses emphasizing an artificial divide between public and private spheres constructed end-of-life at home as private and apolitical. Associated with care of home and family, women were most impacted by these public/private discourses underpinning neoliberal values of cost-efficiency. Findings suggest that a critical perspective is needed to assist policy makers and healthcare providers to view how caregiver experiences are shaped by structures that control the availability of resources. Thus, instead of focusing on caregivers' deficits, interventions should be directed at the social, political and economic conditions that shape gendered experiences.

The breast cancer fanfare: Sociocultural factors and women's health in Ghana

ABSTRACTTraditional notions of the “full” woman and sociocultural beliefs about gender roles contribute to a unique experience of breast cancer in Africa. I used the critical feminist lens to analyze dis-courses about breast cancer in mainstream Ghanaian media. I found that breast cancer awareness is promoted amidst fanfare and that cultural notions of the female breasts, including their sexual appeal, are implied in breast cancer discourse. This obscures a nuanced understanding of the disease and women's health globally, limits the power of women to name their experiences, and contributes to the late presentation of the dis-ease in sub-Saharan Africa. I discuss the implications of the findings for international, interdisciplinary scholarship.

Towards a Critical Feminist Practice with Children and Families: Child Sexual Exploitation as an Exemplar

This article argues for a critical feminist practice in relation to social work with children and families, this being urgently required to provide help and support to such service users in male-privileged, neoliberal and managerialist times. Such practice is especially pertinent as far as teenage girls and their families are concerned. As an exemplar we focus on child sexual exploitation (CSE), and in turn adolescent girls in local authority care who are over-represented in cases of CSE. Through a critical feminist lens we also critique aspects of current policy and practice in relation to a phenomenon that has recently moved up the political and child protection agenda in the UK.

Towards a Model of Positive Youth Development Specific to Girls of Color: Perspectives on Development, Resilience, and Empowerment

This paper presents a feminist theoretical model of adolescent development for girls of color, a model that can be used to critique and resist the dominant deficit-oriented perspectives about girls of color that appear in research and educational contexts. We integrate ecological, phenomenological, and critical race feminist perspectives on development and socialization and emphasize that girls’ emerging identities are complexly heterogeneous. Our model adapts the competencies of the existing positive youth development model (Lerner et al. in J Early Adolesc 25(1):10–16, 2005) by infusing them with a critical feminist lens that emphasizes critical consciousness, resistance, and resilience and allows us to specify the model to fit the experiences of and contexts in which girls of color develop. This paper includes a presentation of our conceptual model and uses qualitative data to examine how components of our model map on to the everyday experiences of Black and Latina adolescent girls and their development.

Gender justice and the Millennium Development Goals: Canada and South Africa considered

The expiration of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015 means that the global development industry has been working towards crafting an MDG 2.0, for the post-2015 context: the Sustainable Development Goals. There is both an explicit and an implicit gender focus in both the MDGs and SDGs. Three of the eight MDGs were directly targeted at women and girls, while there was a stated understanding that all eight goals apply equally to men and women. Despite robust PR, the 2010 and 2012 United Nations (UN) Reports on the MDGs cited persistent violence against women, and continued discrimination in access to education, work, and participation in governance. In other words, the MDGs and their metrics appear to have reaffirmed existing gender norms and relations rather than challenging the status quo. We survey critical explanations of this failure, in the Canadian and South African contexts, and apply a critical feminist lens to suggest an alternative framing of gender justice. We suggest that one cannot understand the limitations of the MDG model of empowerment for women without considering the broader socio-political and ideological contexts that shape developmental interventions: an understanding that is critical to the design of the SDGs if they are to transcend the shortcomings of the MDGs.

Gendered Processes in Hospice Palliative Home Care for Seniors With Cancer and Their Family Caregivers

There has been limited investigation into the processes that shape gender (in)equities in hospice palliative home care. As part of a larger critical ethnographic study, we examined how and why gender relations occur in this context. Using a critical feminist lens, we conducted in-depth interviews with clients living with terminal cancer, their family caregivers and primary nurses; observations of agency home visits; and review of institutional documents. A gender-based analysis revealed that gender enactments of Regulating Gender Relations were legitimized through ideological processes of Normalizing Gender Relations and Equalizing Gender Relations (Re)produced through institutional discourses of individualism and egalitarianism, these gendered processes both advantaged and disadvantaged men and women in hospice palliative home care. Findings suggest that to promote equity, health care providers and policy makers must attend to gender as a prevalent social determinant of health and health care. Implications for policy, practice, education, and research are discussed.