Feminist Allies Research Articles

Toward New Feminist Aesthetics

Toward New Feminist Aesthetics

The ‘Vulnerable’ Hindu Woman, Love-jihad, and the Indian Courts: The Hadiya Case - Commentary on Asokan K.M. v. State of Kerala (2017) 2 KLJ 974

In Asokan K.M. v. State of Kerala (2017) at the behest of a disgruntled Hindu father whose daughter had converted to Islam and married a man of her choice, the Kerala High Court (HC) cast the daughter, Hadiya, as a ‘vulnerable’ woman before annulling her marriage. In this article, I place the infamous Hadiya case within a broader history of love-jihad – an ascendant Hindu nationalist conspiracy in India that asserts that Muslim men wish to convert Hindu women to Islam by feigning love and seducing them, thus posing a threat to all Hindu women, and by extension to the community and the nation itself. I then analyse the public perception and the media discourse around the trial, before turning to the Indian Supreme Court’s (SC) judgment in the case. I argue that by denouncing patriarchy and ostensibly finding in favour of Hadiya, the SC judges portrayed themselves as feminist allies, yet by allowing the National Investigation Agency to continue their ‘terror’ investigation against her husband, they not only insidiously undermined Hadiya’s decisions, but also revealed the shallowness of their feminist stance. In the last section, I appraise the rewritten feminist judgment offered by Urmila Pullat and Sandhya PR who situate themselves as the dissenting judges on the Kerala HC bench.

“Consent Is F#@king Required”: Hashtag Feminism Surrounding Sexual Consent in a Culture of Postfeminist Contradictions

Hashtag feminism exists in a time of postfeminist contradictions marked by the simultaneous existence of popular feminism and popular misogyny. In one such contradiction, popular feminism has led women to expect the successful negotiation of sexual consent, while popular misogyny permits the circulation of traditional sexual scripts that disregard the necessity of consent. In this study, we analyze messages conveyed through digitized narratives of sexual consent posted on Tumblr, a social media site that is popular among feminist activists, to identify the ways that users construct meaning around the dissonance between expectations for consent and the inequalities that inhibit its negotiation. We specifically explore whether hashtag feminism navigates postfeminist contradictions in a way that simultaneously calls out misogyny and calls on feminism. We find that the Tumblr posts in our sample did both, albeit in a manner that failed to offer tangible solutions to the problem at hand. Calls on feminism were largely limited to tagging feminist allies and recirculating existing feminist campaigns. Thus, we argue that the hashtag ultimately became a handoff to a larger feminist abstraction. Future research should explore conditions under which activists link tangible issues, actors, and agendas to an otherwise abstract popular feminism.

Male Feminist Allies in West African Fiction: W. E. B. Du Bois and Ethical Pedagogy

Male Feminist Allies in West African Fiction: W. E. B. Du Bois and Ethical Pedagogy

Seeing the Invisible Knapsack: Feminist Men’s Strategic Responses to the Continuation of Male Privilege in Feminist Spaces

Privilege has been primarily conceptualized as invisible to those whom it benefits, but research on whiteness has suggested this is an oversimplification. Through interviews with fifty-two men who engage in gender justice projects and twelve women who work with them, this article investigates the complex ways some men do see, understand, and critique male privilege, as well as the ambivalent feelings and strategic decisions of both the men and women in response to the continuation of male privilege in feminist spaces. Many describe a “pedestal effect,” wherein men receive disproportionate rewards for their work as feminist allies. Emergent themes include five types of benefits, as well as internal conflict among interviewees who recognize that these added benefits conflict with their egalitarian ideologies. These men negotiate the contradiction between their anti-sexist commitments and the unequal appreciation they receive for these commitments in situationally specific ways and tend to be more satisfied with their responses at the microlevel than at the macrolevel. These results support a retheorization of privilege to recognize that it operates at multiple analytic levels and that individual action is often insufficient to address structural privilege.

Gender mainstreaming revisited: Lessons from Poland

This article explores the dynamics and impact of the gender mainstreaming reform conducted within the European Social Fund in Poland in 2007–2013. It is based on qualitative interviews carried out with gender mainstreaming practitioners, both feminists and state administrators. The article examines factors enabling and hindering successful implementation of gender mainstreaming and discusses its potential positive spin-off effects. The analysed case suggests that civil servants’ strong professional ethics do facilitate progressive changes, whereas bureaucratic norms and non gender-specific values of particular public policies eventually hinder the effectiveness of the strategy. However, gender mainstreaming reforms, even if limited in time and undertaken in a technocratic manner, may serve for feminists as a unique entry point to state institutions, and further allow for changes to public organizations’ gender regimes. Gender mainstreaming may lead to an increase in the number of feminist allies within public administrations and give more legitimization to feminists’ demands on the state. Thus, the strategy may produce a destabilizing impact on public administration gender regimes.

Some Men. Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women

Some Men. Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women

Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women

Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women

Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women

Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women

Book Review: Some Men: Feminist Allies & the Movement to End Violence against Women

Book Review: Some Men: Feminist Allies & the Movement to End Violence against Women

Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women. By Michael A. Messner, Max A. Greenberg, and Tal Peretz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.SlutWalk: Feminism, Activism, and Media. By Kaitlynn Mendes. London: Macmillan, 2015.The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention. By Sameena Mulla. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

<i>Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women</i>. By Michael A. Messner, Max A. Greenberg, and Tal Peretz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.<i>SlutWalk: Feminism, Activism, and Media</i>. By Kaitlynn Mendes. London: Macmillan, 2015.<i>The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention</i>. By Sameena Mulla. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Feminist allies and strategic partners

Western political parties have been in decline in recent decades and they continue to be viewed as male institutions. Despite this, electoral politics is important to the women’s movement as a means by which to advance feminist interests. This article builds upon feminist critiques of political parties by analyzing original qualitative data undertaken with feminists in the United States and United Kingdom in order to explore how activists view political parties. The research finds that although many hold negative views, in line with broader debates concerning disengagement, they also recognize the importance of electoral politics and the need to work with individual politicians. Party and feminist ideology shapes those views, whereby politicians on the left are viewed as feminist allies and those on the right are framed as strategic partners.

Book Review: Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women by Michael A. Messner, Max A. Greenberg, and Tal Peretz

Book Review: <i>Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women</i> by Michael A. Messner, Max A. Greenberg, and Tal Peretz

Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women. By Michael A. Messner, Max A. Greenberg, and Tal Peretz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi+256. $99.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

In Some Men Michael Messner, Max Greenberg, and Tal Peretz provide a sympathetic account of men’s work on men’s violence against women in the United States since the 1970s. The book’s most interesting contribution is as a collective historical account of men’s antiviolence work. The book is based on interviews with 52 men who have worked in the field and a dozen of their female coworkers and mentors. It is focused on the United States, but there are a couple of Canadians in the mix. Some Men divides interviewees into generational groups based on shifting entry points into antiviolence activism: from social movements to university education and public health to intersectional community work.

Forks in the Road of Men’s Gender Politics: Men’s Rights vs Feminist Allies

How do men respond to feminist movements and to shifts in the gender order? In this paper, I introduce the concept of historical gender formation to show how shifting social conditions over the past forty years shaped a range of men’s organized responses to feminism. Focusing on the US, I show how progressive men reacted to feminism in the 1970s by forming an internally contradictory ‘men’s liberation’ movement that soon split into opposing anti-feminist and pro-feminist factions. Three large transformations of the 1980s and 1990s – the professional institutionalization of feminism, the rise of a postfeminist sensibility, and shifts in the political economy (especially deindustrialization and the rise of the neoliberal state) – generated new possibilities. I end by pointing to an emergent moderate men’s rights discourse that appeals to a postfeminist sensibility, and to an increasingly diverse base for men’s work to prevent violence against women.

Some men: feminist allies in the movement to end violence against women

Some men: feminist allies in the movement to end violence against women

Connecting Gender and Trade: Gender Framing in the Anti-Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement Movement

This paper examines the dynamics of the "gender framing" process in the women’s Anti-Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreements (CSSTA) movement in Taiwan. The anti-CSSTA movement established a gender frame for its action against the CSSTA, including the diagnostic frame of dubbing CSSTA as "gender blind", and the prognostic frame of demanding a Gender Impact Assessment (GIA) as a solution. By proposing a parallel gender frame, in addition to the major claims decided on by the core caucus of the Sunflower Movement, the women’s anti-CSSTA movement maintained its alliances with both feminist allies and the caucus. During this framing process, law played a significant role both as a resource and as a constraint. The developing proposals and practices under international trade and human rights provide rich resources for the gender frame. Nevertheless, Taiwan’s local legal framework limits the options available for possible solution.

Review of &lt;em&gt;Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women&lt;/em&gt;. Michael A. Messner, Max A. Greenberg, and Tal Peretz Reviewed by Deborah Mullin

Review of &lt;em&gt;Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women&lt;/em&gt;. Michael A. Messner, Max A. Greenberg, and Tal Peretz Reviewed by Deborah Mullin

Cultural missionaries, maternal imperialists, feminist allies: British women activists in India, 1865–1945

Beyond memsahibs and religious missionaries, there were British women outside the formal imperial establishment who went to India because of their concern for the condition of Indian women. Five such women whose careers in India paralleled the development of British imperial power from firm self-confidence to approaching demise are Mary Carpenter (1807–1877), Annette Akroyd Beveridge (1842–1929), Margaret Noble-Sister Nivedita (1867–1911), Margaret Gillespie Cousins (1878–1954), and Eleanor Rathbone (1872–1946). An examination of their careers reflects how the categories of race and gender influence efforts to promote social reforms within an imperial relationship. Once in India these women functioned as cultural missionaries preaching a gospel of women's uplift based largely on models adapted from their experience in Britain. At least three of them became maternal imperialists who treated Indian women as daughters whom they were preparing for adult responsibilities as modern women. All five women were most able to cross the boundary of race as feminist allies when their skills most suited the needs of Indian women.