Critical Gender Research Articles

When Draupadi says #MeToo: Indian comics reimagining gender justice

ABSTRACT Comics are a familiar and widespread form of popular culture within India and throughout the diaspora. They offer a unique format for the examination of new landscapes of gender relations and can broaden, albeit in an exploratory way, the boundaries and expressions of power and agency. Visual storytelling, through a set of graphic texts, presents a particularly evocative context for gender critique of sexual violence and for analyzing terrains of social inequality and injustice, especially when read with an eye toward the contemporary backdrop of the #MeToo movement. In this article, I analyze three distinct but interconnected Indian comics/graphic novels which endeavor to retell sections of the Mahabharat, an Indian epic involving a pivotal female character named Draupadi, whose unique life and trauma have served as creative muse for literature, theater, art and media. The contemporary resonance of these women-centered retellings, and the subject matter they explore highlight precise forms of gendered violence, the social construction of gender, and gendered manifestations of rage. They demand closer engagement with the visual texts themselves and the cultural milieu that shapes the politics of their production and reception.

Patriarchy and progressive politics: gendered resistance to mining through everyday social relations of state formation in Intag, Ecuador

Over the last decade, the Ecuadorian government, following regional trends, called for social and environmental progress through state-controlled resource extraction. Scholars have demonstrated that this neo-extractive model warranted further investigation regarding its progressive aims. Specifically, this paper examines gendered critiques of state-led extractivism linked to expanding governmental and social programs. Even as women asserted their political recognition and rights in state politics, they still confronted patriarchal relations in their everyday lives. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic research over 6 years in campesino communities of Junín and Chalguayacu Alto, I argue that women in Intag challenged patriarchal state relations of extractive capitalism. This paper offers a novel contribution to literature on neo-extractivism and gendered forms of resistance. Women held the state accountable for its promises of social welfare and infrastructural development through which it generated public support for controversial mineral projects. These symbols of state paternalism revealed expanded patriarchal structures that underpinned their daily lives, with significance for a gendered politics of resistance.

Gender and entrepreneurship: past achievements and future possibilities

PurposeThe purpose of this short commentary reflects upon how feminist theory might be used to advance the contemporary gendered critique of women’s entrepreneurship. Drawing from gender theory, a diverse and complex critique has arisen to challenge the discriminatory discourse of entrepreneurship that fundamentally disadvantages women. To progress debate, the author suggests that greater attention should be afforded to feminist theories as explanatory analyses for such subordination and particularly to challenge contemporary postfeminist ideas which fuel a false promise of entrepreneurship for women.Design/methodology/approachA conceptual paper drawing upon extant literature to develop suggestions for future research .FindingsConceptual arguments challenging current approaches to analysing the relationship between women, gender and entrepreneurship.Research limitations/implicationsSomewhat controversially, it is suggested that such a critique might encourage us to refocus research such that it challenges, rather than seeks to confirm, the axiom that under current conditions, entrepreneurship is “good” for women and society so ergo, we need more women entrepreneurs. Greater acknowledgement of feminist theory will also facilitate a stronger intersectional analysis, vital if we are to acknowledge how socio-economic and contextual diversity constrains or enables entrepreneurial behaviour.Social implicationsThis article challenges contemporary researchers to reconsider current thinking regarding the value of entrepreneurial activity for women.Originality/valueThe commentary concludes by identifying how the next generation of scholars might take such ideas forward to build upon established foundations.

The Eliza effect and its dangers: from demystification to gender critique

ABSTRACT This essay provides a gender critique of the Eliza effect. It delineates the way in which the Eliza effect is operationalised in AI research even as it is ostensibly demystified, for example, in the writings of Douglas Hofstadter and Joseph Weizenbaum. It then exposes the gendered assumptions embedded in the nomenclature used to name this misperception of the computer as having capabilities equivalent to the human. It traces the genealogy of that nomenclature back through Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. A close reading of the play is deployed in order to reveal the structural inequities of gender, class, and who or what gets to be human, that are both explored in the play and encoded in the operation and operationalisations of the Eliza effect. It concludes by attending to that operation and operationalisation in relation to today’s Virtual Personal Assistant’s, and makes a case for the importance of critique in order to expose the inequitable structures of power obscured and compounded by the Eliza effect – both its name, and that which it names.

Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples by Erica Lagalisse

Reviewed by: Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples by Erica Lagalisse Sam Stoeltje Keywords Western esotericism, occultism, anarchism, communism, Zapatista movement, Occupy movement, conspiracy theory, history of ideas, Enlightenment, hermeticism, Illuminati, Freemasons, Karl Marx, Marxism erica lagalisse. Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples. Oakland: PM Press, 2019. Pp. xix + 138. Erica Lagalisse's compact but brilliant The Occult Features of Anarchism involves a series of interlinked arguments about an unacknowledged inheritance of European occult and esoteric thought within modern and contemporary leftist theory. Published by the politically radical PM Press, Occult Features makes its primary (and at times quite critical) address to leftists and [End Page 160] anarchists of the West or Global North, but it will be accessible and compelling to a broad readership. This includes scholars of medieval and Renaissance esotericism, who will appreciate the careful intellectual genealogy indicated by the title. Lagalisse, an anthropologist, has been engaged in years of participant observation within anarchist communities, connected with both Zapatista solidarity and the Occupy movement. She offers two anecdotes that serve to illustrate her motivation in producing this volume. The first recounts an instance of an activist giving away his sympathy for an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, while the second describes a panel series in which leftists condescended to an indigenous activist, due to the synthesis of her politics with "irrational" spirituality (namely, Catholicism). These two anecdotes correspond to the two major impulses of the book. Lagalisse's objectives are: 1) to illustrate the occult and esoteric influence on early anarchist and communist thought, and 2) to better understand the (still rising) phenomenon of all manner of conspiracy theories in a post-Internet media and political landscape. (The possibly opaque connection between these two objectives eventually becomes clear). While working somewhat outside of her disciplinary purview as a social scientist, Lagalisse deftly accomplishes her historical-discursive task through precise genealogical work. She follows the emergence of the Corpus Hermeticum and its influence on emergent European secret societies, tracing a lineage that includes both scholastic alchemy and the order of the Freemasons, as well as the early utopian social theory of the Enlightenment, and eventually European idealists like Hegel. Her analysis, though Eurocentric by necessity, remains consistently attuned to gender critique and anticolonial politics; in this sense, its clearest forebear is the feminist-materialist genealogy of Silva Federici, whom she cites, and whose Caliban and the Witch argues for the economic function of the medieval witch trials along with the mutually constituting gendered and ecological violences of land enclosure. (The accuracy of Federici's historiography, it should be noted, is a matter of dispute.)1 All genealogies are, in some sense, narratives, and Lagalisse's story begins with the fifteenth-century "discovery" of the Hermetica. Citing canonical historians such as Frances Yates, she traces the influence of Hermetic concepts of correspondence and microcosm on natural magic and other Renaissance metaphysics (22–23). A rather dizzying network of intellectual correspondences (pun intended) brings together figures like Giordano Bruno, Robert [End Page 161] Fludd, Rene Descartes, and even Leibniz; "I offer" (she explains) "these surveys simply to demonstrate that the 'disenchantment' we often hear about in relation to the European Enlightenment is but a tale" (29). Her argument thus resembles an abbreviated, or crystallized, form of the one made by Jaron A. Josephson-Storm in his ambitious The Myth of Disenchantment, although Lagalisse's emphasis on the masculinist quality of the medieval and Renaissance occult, and her understanding of the witch trials as its misogynistic counterpoint, make for an at times more politically trenchant analysis.2 A first chapter on the Hermetic underpinnings of the Enlightenment is followed by two chapters on the similarly occult foundations of the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and other European "revolutionary brotherhoods" (although Lagalisse is firmly skeptical of the "revolution" they had in mind). The following three chapters demonstrate the subsequent influence of these brotherhoods upon the International Workingman's Association (I.W.A.) and upon Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, thus making Lagalisse's case: that major anarchist thinkers like Proudhon and Bakunin, along...

Reassessing the 1930s South ed. by Karen L. Cox, Sarah E. Gardner

Reviewed by: Reassessing the 1930s South ed. by Karen L. Cox, Sarah E. Gardner Nancy K. Berlage Reassessing the 1930s South. Edited by Karen L. Cox and Sarah E. Gardner. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. viii, 261. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6921-6.) This collection of thirteen essays from contributors with backgrounds in history, art, and literary studies offers a broad and engaging examination of the 1930s South. At the same time, it interrogates notions about the South and the ways those notions were formed. It is an expansive topic that editors Karen L. Cox and Sarah E. Gardner take on, and the volume makes a valuable [End Page 214] contribution in fleshing out the conversation. The essays successfully push back against what the editors describe as the artificial but culturally powerful binary that has either pathologized or romanticized the South and instead reveal the complexity, contradiction, and tension in southerners’ responses to change. It seems to me that the volume’s true value is its probe into how notions of the South are constructed and produced, although that aim is not explicitly framed as such. Readers see this process through the examination of various forms of cultural media, including art, literature, documentary writing and film, theater, visual arts, academic accounts, and news reporting. Additionally, the focus on culture allows the authors to assess new as well as familiar topics from fresh perspectives, helping explain the heft and longevity of particular constructs about the South. Several essays describe contemporary perspectives that gestured toward southerners’ need for a radically different South. Emily Senefeld shows how the Highlander Folk School helped build support for the labor movement, and she convincingly positions these activities as central to a broader culture of southern radicalism. Robert Hunt Ferguson takes a fascinating look at the radical social vision of William R. Amberson, a physiologist and Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union leader who rejected the entrenched agricultural system and New Deal rural programs. As an alternative, Amberson helped found the Delta Cooperative Farm on the principles of collectivism and interracial cooperation. Coauthors Rebecca Sharpless and Melissa Walker discuss the fieldwork of social scientists Ruth Allen and Margaret Jarman Hagood, who documented rural women’s labor and asserted a powerful gendered indictment of southern economic and social systems as the root of women’s poverty and disempowerment. The essay will be useful for historians interested in comparing this fieldwork with that conducted in other regions by home economists in agricultural extension service, who also pressed gendered critiques. Technological change shaped conceptions of the South in relationship to modernity, as several chapters illustrate. Two essays closely examine cultural production associated with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Lisa Dorrill offers a fresh take on post office and courthouse murals; they showcased dam engineering, electricity, and conservation measures but failed to depict those affected, thus glossing over social issues the TVA supposedly addressed. Ted Atkinson urges readers to rethink southern encounters with modernism, previously interpreted as antagonistic. He compellingly argues that the documentary The River (1938) and the play Power (1937) exemplified “TVA modernism,” a perspective that viewed technology and infrastructure as crucial to the transformation of the South and its unification with the nation (p. 125). While federally supported cultural production could serve New Deal objectives, Scott L. Matthews illustrates that southerners sought to control notions of place and identity for their own purposes. In response to an alarmist photo essay published in 1938 by Collier’s magazine on sharecropping in Greene County, Georgia, local elites, federal photographers, and sociologist Arthur F. Raper developed an alternative narrative in newspapers, a congressional speech, and Raper’s Tenants of the Almighty (New York, 1943). Douglas E. Thompson also disrupts notions of the South as backward by suggesting that southerners eagerly adopted automobiles but in ways that “fit their understanding of themselves as possessing independence, self-reliance, and freedom” (p. 108). Another important theme in this collection is race. Nicholas Roland’s excellent essay examines how the organizers of the 1936 Texas Centennial [End Page 215] Exposition sought to project values of modernity and racial harmony despite the reality of ongoing discrimination, the denigration of black people’s cultural...

The Dead, the Living, and the Sacred

AbstractThis article focuses on the antinuclear and antimilitarism politics of Patsy Takemoto Mink (1927–2002), the first Japanese American female lawyer in Hawai‘i, the first woman of color to become a U.S. congressional representative, and the namesake for Title IX. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Mink challenged the use of the Pacific lands, waters, and peoples as sites of military experimentation, subject to nuclear and chemical testing as well as war games. Mink’s political worldview, shaped by her experiences and understanding of the interconnectedness between human and nonhuman life as well as water and land, reflected a Pacific World sensibility. She worked with, but also articulated political priorities that differed from, indigenous peoples of the Pacific. Focusing on these connected yet divergent Pacific imaginaries provides an opportunity to explore the significance of these antimilitarism campaigns for the study of transnational feminisms as well as Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. First, the protests of Mink and Native Hawaiian activists against U.S. militarism in the Pacific represented gendered critiques of U.S. empire, although in different ways. Second, Mink’s advocacy via political liberalism provided opportunities for coalition formation yet also constrained the range of her gendered arguments and limited possible solutions beyond the U.S. polity. Third, the coalitional possibilities and incommensurabilities reveal the points of convergence and divergence between Asian American demands for full inclusion and Pacific Islander calls for decolonization and sovereignty.

Social Context in Development Communication: Reflecting on Gender and Information and Communication Technologies for Development in Ghana

This essay, an example of work that builds on Dr. Ascroft’s lessons, reports collaborative research on information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) in Ghana. We highlight two parallel dialogues—on ICT and on gender—that have been advanced globally. New ICTs are prone to the same biases as the older ICTs. Further, the dialogue on ICTs may use the rhetoric of inclusivity; but in practice, women and girls remain at the margins of decision-making and implementation. This research addresses the promise of new ICTs and the need to account for gender roles. We summarize the major events that helped spark global and regional attention to ICT4D, as well as Ghana’s initiatives in relation to these events. We include critiques and initiatives resistant to facets of ICT4D, emphasizing gender critiques.

A Seat at the Table: Notes of an Institutional Creature

In this article, occasioned by the fiftieth-anniversary of the Whitney Independent Study Program, art-historian Huey Copeland considers the vexed intersections of blackness, gender, and institutional critique in the contemporary art world as modeled both by his own practice and that of David Hammons.

Race in the Crucible of Literary Debate

AbstractBoth Caroline Levine’s Forms (2015) and Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) use Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory to help them theorize reading practices for analyzing the interrelationships between literature and sociopolitical experience. In doing so, both disavow powerful understandings of the “social” produced across race and gender critique in African American and ethnic literary studies. This essay traces a connection backwards from Latour to the sociologist Gabriel Tarde to critiques of sociology by W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois’s understanding of the social and literary dimensions of “environing” critique assumptions embedded in the idea of networks, highlighting crucial experiences of being made not to act as constitutive of the social. The argument turns to brief syntheses of work by Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Lisa Lowe, and Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong for models of thinking literary and social experience, suggesting that they need to be brought into these discussions of the normative values and methods of literary study. The essay concludes by reconsidering Winfried Fluck’s examination of these normative values in relation to dominant philosophies of history and questioning his assumptions about conditions of unfreedom.

The Menace of Intimacy: Domestic Noir, Feminist Criminology, and Emily Maguire’s *An Isolated Incident*

Viewed through the lens of feminist criminology, how does the subgenre of domestic noir dramatise domestic violence through generic or subversive elements of craft? Drew Humphries asserts that feminist criminology has challenged, reframed and improved legal definitions and data collection regarding women and violence (as both victims and perpetrators), and that those changes have been registered more widely in the community via media both in journalistic choices and in the themes and features of literary genres (xi). Drawing on this conceptual framework, my research analyses representations of domestic violence in domestic noir novels with reference to feminist criminological theories, including gender critiques of Life Course Theory and the General Strain Theory of Deviance. This article presents a textual analysis of Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident (2016) as a literary crime novel with domestic noir features centring on the use of domestic violence to build narrative interest and deliver dramatic tension, while also identifying the subversion of generic elements to enable thematic consideration of intersectional feminist concerns. I demonstrate that the rise in popularity of domestic noir occurs against a backdrop of an increased culture of interest in domestic violence, arguing that domestic noir narrative strategies leverage the complexities of feminist gains in criminology and criminal justice to give voice to women’s and girls’ experiences of gendered violence.

Applying a gender lens to employment relations: Revitalisation, resistance and risks

Employment relations is on the defensive. A gender lens provides opportunities for revitalisation through bringing in social reproduction alongside production, introducing intersectional identities alongside class, developing gendered critiques of ‘neutral’ markets and recognising the ‘doing of gender’ within the workplace. However, resistance within research and practice is evident in gender blindness, marginalisation of gender issues or preference for male interests. Three risks associated with a gender lens are identified: first, feminist critiques may be used by employers or neoliberal policymakers to deregulate employment; second, by making gender visible, gender differences may be used to legitimise gender inequalities; and third, in representing workers’ interests many pitfalls need to be navigated in steering a path between excessive fragmentation and reproducing hierarchy, whether by class, gender or race. Nevertheless, the costs of not embracing a gender perspective go beyond missed opportunities for renewal and leave employment relations at risk of further decline.

Sexual Difference and Decolonization: Oyĕwùmí and Irigaray in Dialogue about Western Culture

In this article we aim to show the potential of cross‐continental dialogues for a decolonizing feminism. We relate the work of one of the major critics of the Western metaphysical patriarchal order, Luce Irigaray, to the critique of the colonial/modern gender system by the Nigerian feminist scholar Oyĕrónké Oyĕwùmí. Oyĕwùmí's work is often rejected based on the argument that it is empirically wrong. We start by problematizing this line of thinking by providing an epistemological interpretation of Oyĕwùmí's claims. We then draw Irigaray and Oyĕwùmí into conversation, and show how this bolsters and helps to further illuminate and contextualize Oyĕwùmí's critique of gender. But the dialogue between these thinkers also reveals significant limitations of Irigaray's philosophy, namely her presumption of the priority of sexual difference, its rigid duality, and her failure to take into account the inextricable intertwinement of gender and race in the Western patriarchal order. Relating Irigaray's critique of Western culture's forgetting of sexual difference to Oyĕwùmí's critique hence demonstrates to what extent Irigaray's philosophy remains typically Western and how she therefore fails to escape the paradigm that she is so critical of.

Ways to Be Concerned with Gender in Philosophy

In this paper, some (non-exhaustive) ways in which philosophy can tackle gender are presented and examined. Starting from mainly negative critical stances and proceeding towards more positive approaches, the following ways to tackle gender are distinguished: the critique of gender through discourse analysis; the critique of gender essentialism; research on how gender concepts work; reflection upon how gender issues relate to issues of intersubjective recognition. The first three ways, although giving important contributions about how gender is conceived of, do not seem to give firm grounds to the rejection of gender discrimination, the refutation of essentialist beliefs about the genders, and the neutralization of the normative import of gender concepts. As a fourth way, I propose considering gendered subjectivity in the context of the dynamics of intersubjective relations, framing it in a view of intersubjective recognition as a basic process in human life. In this perspective, gender issues constitute a context in which people’s capability and willingness to recognize others as subjects, and specifically human persons, is tested.

Sisterly Disaffection: Women's Colleges, Theatre and the Limits of Dissent

This essay explores contemporary cultural practices of feminist politics emerging within the women's college campus at the University of Delhi. Through the study of two examples of a public demonstration and campaign against high prices of certain essential provisions and a formal performance outside the campus, the essay tries to map cultural practices, transgressions and political potentials, but also the limits and shortcomings. The essay intends to read these examples through a gender critique and alternate registers of sisterhood, collective imagination and solidarity.

Arabella’s Valentines and Literary Connections [dot] com: Playing with Eighteenth-Century Gender Online

This article describes two digital assignments that ask students to imaginatively embody characters from eighteenth-century texts written by women in order to cultivate a greater awareness of the critical role of gender and gender critique in these works. The first of these assignments, “Arabella’s Valentines,” asks students to translate dialogue from Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote as humorous Internet memes. The second assignment, “Literary Connections [dot] com,” asks students to imagine how characters from the course archive might represent themselves on an internet dating site. Through creative role-play facilitated by these digital genres, students engage with the texts in stimulating and playful ways that extends their consideration of writers’ works beyond the page. In the article I explain how these activities were deployed using PowerPoint and Tumblr, and for the second assignment, Google Forms, with step-by-step instructions for replicating the technological aspects of the assignments, and add reflections on the outcome of these assignments for student learning.

‘Straight-looking, straight-acting’: countering effemiphobia in acting training

What is to become of the ‘effeminate’ actor? This essay focuses on the subject of gender-based discrimination with reference to male acting students, and proposes that, despite the huge social and legal gains made on behalf of various sexual minorities, the professional theatre in Canada and the US ‒ including the training institutions that support and feed it ‒ is engaged in the practice of reinforcing normative performances of gender. As David Eulus Wiles argues in his essay in The Politics of American Actor Training, we have imported the discriminatory patterns of the ‘entertainment industry’ into the theatre programmes of academic institutions that explicitly forbid such discrimination. The article proposes that part of addressing this problem in a meaningful way would entail transformations in the approach to the training of actors, in particular replacing classic text-based approaches with psychophysical methods, such as Laban Movement Analysis. Exploring the research into gender construction by performance artist and drag king Diane Torr, the paper speculates about how such transformations in training would necessitate concomitant changes in the practice of the art form itself, ushering in a new plurality of approaches and expressions, in particular in the realm of department productions. This argument is supported with reference to a consideration of how a renewed connection with the theory of Bertolt Brecht could serve the aims of gender critique, referring to positions taken by Jill Dolan, Sue-Ellen Case, Richard Schechner and Elin Diamond.

Revisiting the Early Modern Philosophical Canon—ADDENDUM

In the above mentioned article on page 376, in the third paragraph, after the sentence ‘These prejudices are not simply the inevitable consequence of our imperfect knowledge, but rather are akin to, in contemporary terms, implicit biases.’, the author would like to add the following footnote: Amy Schmitter, in her “Cartesian Prejudice and Critique of Gender in Poulain de la Barre,” presented at the Pacific APA in March 2016, helpfully aligns Poullain's notion of prejudice with implicit bias. The responsibility of all errors and omissions rests with the author.We sincerely regret this omission from the original text and any problems that have resulted for the authors and readers.

Alimentary ethics in Némirovsky, Kofman, and Duras

In their writing war, Irene Nemirovsky (Suite francaise, 2004), Sarah Kofman (Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 1994), and Marguerite Duras (La douleur, 1985), each articulate an alimentary ethics, through a novel, an autobiographical memoir, and an auto-fictional memoir, all published four to six decades after the Occupation. An alimentary ethics is constituted variably in the texts, taking form in food collaborations and complicities; ideological affiliations, of Resister or collaborator; moral meanings of food; and motivations for and the manifestation of individual virtue. The principle of hospitality, offered or refused to the guest/foreigner, intersects with a critique of gender, of the maternal function of feeding and nourishing. Read together, the texts of these three authors provide a micro-history and social analysis of the relationships of the civilian population to food in wartime through a praxis of the everyday, namely women’s strategies in procuring and distributing food; struggles over the definitio...

Gender, Power, and Satire in Will Self’s Cock and Bull

While Will Self’s Cock and Bull has rightly been seen as a satirical critique of gender and sexuality, this article argues that critics have tended to overlook the intertwining critique of power that accompanies such themes. Placing Cock and Bull within the larger context of Self’s subsequent writings and intellectual influences, this essay examines how these two early novellas self-consciously borrow from and engage with the tradition of British satire, which has long been concerned with questions of gender, sexuality, and power.