Feminist Challenges Research Articles

Pyrotheology, Post-Evangelicalism and the Logic of the ‘One’

This article highlights a particular thread in Peter Rollins’s work that affirms a different quality of life is possible, shows how it constructively connects to the Evangelical/Post-Evangelical communities represented by the Emerging Church, and raises a feminist challenge to it, arguing that a more explicit critique of the aspects of ‘religion’ that create and preserve rigid and stifling forms of church is needed. Rollins centres the enactment of what he calls the magic trick (the transition from ‘religion’ to ‘faith’) around a singular subversive leader, even while calling for his or her disappearance. A postcolonial feminist perspective would charge that it is, rather, in the process of collectively navigating the radical participation of all within the body, when the habit of elevating a particular individual’s role or participation above all others is eliminated, that the magic trick is actually enacted, religion’s patriarchal logic undone, and true faith discovered.

Feminist challenges to sociology in India

This article suggests that paradigmatic changes took place in sociological traditions in India from the late 1970s to the 1990s in a manner similar to the catalytic changes occurring in the same period in different sociological traditions across the globe. In the case of sociology in India, it was feminist questionings of the systems of family, caste, religion and other tradition–modern dualities that introduced key re-conceptualisations. The article suggests that feminist studies posed theoretical and methodological challenges at four levels: first, these theories have argued that institutional and non-institutional forms of power flow through all forms of economic, social and cultural relationships; second, given that in India these inequities were organised during the colonial period, they assert that a historical and an interdisciplinary approach is imperative for the study of the ‘social’; third, these positions outlined a theory of intersection that explored the way economic and cultural inequalities and exclusions were organically connected; and lastly, they suggest a need to complicate the concepts of agency and experience, given that actors/agents can, and do, represent both dominant and subaltern positions in their life cycles. The article contends that the feminist interrogations unsettled the received sociological paradigm on sociology of India in significant ways, creating new possibilities for more eclectic and parallel paradigms to emerge.

The Queer Porn Mafia: Redefining identity, sex and feminism through commodified sexuality

Abstract This article explores the queering of identity and industry in relation to the selflabelled Queer Porn Mafia (QPM), a group of US queer and feminist porn producers and performers. Through in-depth interviews with ten key QPM colleagues, it explores the meanings of ‘queer’ and ‘feminism’ for queer adult film performers and producers. It examines ‘queer’ as both an identity and a politics in the business practices of queer porn and in the relationship between queer porn and the mainstream porn industry. It then interrogates the relationship between ‘queer’ and ‘feminism’ for queer porn performers and producers, arguing that the Queer Porn Mafia is evidence that commercial forms of resistance can be effective tools of representation, visibility and community building. The article concludes with a discussion of how the Queer Porn Mafia’s critique of heteronormative gender, sex and desire illuminates the limitations of feminism as identity and practice for those who queer gender, sex and activism. It demonstrates how the politics of queer porn challenge feminist notions of the relationship between sex and the market as well as disconcerting remnants of gender essentialism in feminist thought.

Feminist Challenge to the Mainstream IR

This study deals with the Feminist challenge to the Mainstream International Relations Discipline (IR) - rationalist theories, especially Realism - and the mainstream's responses to this challenge. It addresses the issue in five steps. Firstly, it sheds light on how Feminism is related to International Relations. Secondly, it examines how Feminist IR theorists criticize the Mainstream IR due to its state-centric approach and argue that being obsessed with anarchic international system prevented analysis of social relations, including gender relations. Thirdly, the study addresses how Feminism exposes the gender biases in central terms such as power, autonomy, rationality, security, and state. Fourthly, it examines how Feminist writing on IR challenges the dichotomies of the Mainstream IR. Fifthly, the study examines how the Mainstream has responded to that challenge. The conclusion argues that although Feminist challenge to mainstream IR cannot be deemed successful in reconstructing IR, Feminism still enriches our understanding of global politics.

Feminist Challenges to the Reframing of Equality and Social Justice

Global mobility and the present economic, political, and refugee crisis have resulted in political contestations and new theoretical challenges. Inspired by several European research projects, in t...

Reproduction and Resistance

In Northern Canada, Indigenous mixed economies persist alongside and in resistance to capital accumulation. The day-to-day sites and processes of colonial struggle, and, in particular, their gendered nature, are too often ignored. This piece takes an anti-colonial materialist approach to the multiple labours of Indigenous women in Canada, arguing that their social-reproductive labour is a primary site of struggle: a site of violent capitalist accumulation and persistent decolonising resistance. In making this argument, this piece draws on social-reproduction feminism, and anti-racist, Indigenous and anti-colonial feminism, asking what it means to take an anti-colonial approach to social-reproduction feminism. It presents an expanded conception of production that encompasses not just the dialectic of capitalist production and reproduction, but also non-capitalist, subsistence production. An anti-colonial approach to social-reproduction feminism challenges one to think through questions of non-capitalist labour and the way different forms of labour persist relationally, reproducing and resisting capitalist modes of production.

How to Talk about Gender-Based Violence?

The articles discusses the challenges for transnational feminists to talk about gender-based violence in an intersectional manner.

A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars by Andrew Hartman

A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, by Andrew Hartman. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2015. 342 pp. $30.00 US (cloth), $19.00 US (paper). What were the culture wars? Andrew Hartman provides a fairly bounded definition of this amorphous phenomenon, which is not the least accomplishment of this thorough study. His first chapter depicts the challenge to posed by the liberating trends of the 1960s and the new (meaning the United States) they spawned. next two chapters introduce the intellectual reaction of neo-conservatives and the popular resistance spearheaded by the Christian Right. following six chapters cover the culture wars per se, largely in the 1980s and 1990s. They examine the conflicts over racial issues and theories; feminism and gay rights; the media and pornography; and public schools; postmodernism in the academy; and interpretations of American history. A brief conclusion declares that the culture wars over these issues ended with the twenty-first century or perhaps were transcended. Hartman calls the 1960s a watershed decade. initial challenge to normative America came from the New Left, radicalized by the struggles for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. By the 1970s, this challenge had morphed into the identity movements, principally Black power and feminism, but also advocacy for gay rights, Chicanos, and Native Americans. Unlike radical confrontations of the sixties, these movements constituted ongoing organized efforts to alter the status quo, and were soon rooted in federal regulations, university practices, and popular media. An intellectual reaction among former liberals, soon dubbed neoconservatives, opposed the New Left assault on traditional values and institutions. Evangelical Christians had more tangible grievances against secular humanism in public education, the feminist challenge to the family, and gay liberation, among other things. Their impassioned resistance made partisans like the Reverend Jerry Falwell into media favorites. These developments foreshadowed the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. progressive Left was the proactive agent in the subsequent clashes; while these initiatives were opposed on the Right with both intellectual arguments and attempts to mobilize public opinion. Hartman's material ranges from television shows to Supreme Court decisions, but he succeeds in keeping the intellectual content in the foreground. In this respect, the volume provides a valuable contribution to the intellectual history of these decades. chapter on The Color Line, for example, begins with the transition from advocacy for colourblind policies to affirmative action and the controversies it spawned. chapter further analyzes critical race theory and its allegations of institutional racism, biological theories of racial difference and the Bell Curve, culture of poverty explanations of economic deprivation, and the implications for welfare. Spike Lee's movie, Do the Right Thing, dramatized some of these latter issues, provoking conflicting views. …

Looking through Misogyny: Indian Men's Rights Activists, Law, and Challenges for Feminism

From faint beginnings in scattered solitary actions in the 1990s, Men's Rights Activists (MRA) have emerged in India as a well-organized social movement, with careful political outreach through social media, legislative lobbying, and street action. They represent a range of ethnic and religious groups, include several prominent women leaders, and reflect some diversity of class positions. Their common target is the cynical misuse of civil and criminal laws relating to marriage and domestic violence, in particular, the simultaneous deployment of multiple laws. Based on my ethnographic work with these groups, I profile MRA understandings of law, equality, and gender in this article. Rather than focus on their obvious misogyny, I examine their arguments in order to explore the internal and external challenges to feminist jurisprudence thrown up by this mobilization. These include attending to unanticipated fallouts of protective legislation and the connotations of symbolic equality standards. I argue that MRA discourses are a crucial site for tracing contestations of gender and the formation of subjectivities.

Feminist Challenges to Austerity

As soon as Britain's new Coalition Government announced its emergency budget in 2010, feminist economists and activists raised concerns that its programme of austerity would hit women the hardest. ...

Defining Domestic Violence and Women's Autonomy in Law

This paper explores the complex relationship between Indian feminism and the law and legal systems, as reflected in the recent (2015) Bombay High Court judgment on domestic violence. It is divided into two sections. The first section looks at feminist interventions in marital disputes and domestic violence through grassroots efforts, and outlines the multidimensional and hybrid feminist understandings of domestic violence, discusses change strategies and ethical principles that underpinned their action, and addresses the enactment of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (PWDVA) as one such strategy against domestic violence. This section also focuses on feminist dilemmas and foregrounds the issue of women’s autonomy in situations of domestic violence. The mainstreaming of feminist legal interventions through the PWDVA has brought new challenges for feminists and the second section discusses this issue by focusing on judicial intervention in deciding the boundary of counselling and mediation practices by protection officers under the PWDVA. We suggest that as seen in the 2015 judgement, while the judiciary has upheld some aspects of feminist practice and disallowed reconciliation in situations of serious physical domestic violence, its over-emphasis on equating physical violence with domestic violence and its protectionist stance has limited women’s autonomy and gone against feminist counselling principles and politics undergirding feminist interventions in situations of domestic violence. We suggest that this judgment can be read as a dialogue within a section of feminist groups in India who endorse feminist political ideals of liberty, individual rights, and equality and seek to institutionalize these within the law. This paper is an analytical and interpretive piece and not an empirical inquiry into legal practice or a survey of case law developments of the PWDVA. It focuses on normative questions of theoretical and policy relevance arising from feminist engagements with law.

Celebrity ‘rape-rape’: An analysis of feminist and media definitions of sexual violence

In 2009 a US-based television programme,The View, discussed the arrest of film director Roman Polanski. Polanski was wanted for six outstanding charges related to the rape of Samantha Gailey in 1977. During this episode of theThe View, Whoopi Goldberg made a controversial statement that Polanksi was not guilty of ‘rape-rape’. This statement along with the long history of Polanski’s avoidance of incarceration, illustrates the ongoing challenges for feminists to confront the trivialisation of sexual coercion and violence. Goldberg’s comments initiated an enthusiastic response on online forums and reinvigorated debates around definitions of rape. In this paper, I analyse online discussions on a feminist blog using discourse analysis (Parker, 2014) and the importance of considering the interrelated concepts of consent/non-consent, pleasure/distress and power in understanding the complexity and diversity of experiences of sexual violence.

Mainstreams and Cutting Edges

In this think piece, the author argues that the “grand American narrative” has remained surprisingly impervious to several decades of the feminist challenge. She muses about why this might be the case, notes some political implications of sustaining a traditional narrative, and offers several metaphors to help historians re-imagine a new history.

Educación moral en la ética de la razón cordial para la emergencia de nuevas masculinidades. Los Men’s Studies en la agenda política feminista

The growing interest in studying masculinity from a gender perspective is a new challenge for feminism and a new space to build gender equality. For this reason, the feminist movement should establish moral commitment to promote new ethical masculinities. Indeed such masculinity models can contribute to achieve an egalitarian society. Hence, their promotion should be based on moral values which would allow gender prejudices to be banished. We believe that both the bases of feminist political theory and the ethica cordis of philosopher Adela Cortina, can contribute to the collective construction of new masculinities through citizens’ moral education.

Confronting connectivity: feminist challenges to the metropolis

ABSTRACTGoogle suggests that connectivity is the new paradigm for politics in the digital age. I argue that the effect of connectivity is a shift in the operation of power from the centralized institutions of the state to the decentralized logistics of inclusion of the digital metropolis. Explaining this power's features, I elaborate a media theory of inclusive disjunction and a feminist theory of pornographic exposure. Locating cultural resistance to connectivity, I look to feminist artistic responses to the city, from which I explore the feminist imagining of connectivity through the metaphor of the storm to reclaim their bodies as sites of contestation.

Feminism, interrupted? Gender and development in the era of ‘Smart Economics’

This article assesses feminist accounts of co-optation and appropriation in gender and development policy. Today women and girls are the public faces of anti-poverty policy and occupy an important position in the development discourse; however, the ambiguities of the neoliberal gender agenda have provoked an ongoing debate about the extent to which feminist aims and language have been and de-politicized by mainstream institutions. Have feminist aims been co-opted to legitimize anti-feminist policy goals, or does the current visibility of gender issues reflect the success of particular strands of (neo)liberal feminism? I explore these conflicting accounts by examining the current ‘Gender Equality as Smart Economics’ policy agenda, exploring its major themes and institutional form through a focus on two transnational business initiatives. The article concludes that, although accounts of feminism’s cooptation are flawed in their misrepresentation of a diverse and dynamic movement, the transformations wrought by neoliberal-compatible feminisms present troubling challenges for feminists concerned with intersectionality and the links between gender and economic justice.

Feminist Challenges to the Constraints of Law: Donning Uncomfortable Robes?

Legal judgment writing mobilises a process of story-telling, drawing on existing judicial discourses, precedents and practices to create a narrative relevant to the specific case that is articulated by the presiding judge. In the Feminist Judgments projects feminist scholars and activists have sought to challenge and reinterpret legal judgments that have disadvantaged, discriminated against or denied women’s experiences. This paper reflects on the process of writing as a feminist judge in the Australian Project, in an intimate homicide case, R v Middendorp. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler on intelligibility, iterability and the communality of violence and vulnerability, this article argues that feminist judgments necessarily require some uncomfortable compromises with unjust gendered institutions. While ‘donning the robes’ may be an uncomfortable process, a feminist re-articulation of the law’s carceral power serves to unsettle and challenge some aspects of gendered oppression, even though it cannot unsettle the operation of the institution. The article concludes that effective feminist interventions by members of the judiciary may require donning robes that are not entirely comfortable in order to persuade and advocate for change.

‘Guys don’t whale away at the women’: etiquette and gender relations in contemporary mixed-doubles tennis

This article examines recent developments in etiquette in contemporary mixed-doubles tennis (MDT), to position different behavioural expectations for men/women in the broader context of shifting gender relations. Content analysis of coaching guides published from the 1960–1980s revealed that historically rooted gender distinctions in terms of court positioning, tactics, and playing roles/expectations were reaffirmed, continuing to undermine and marginalize females yet privilege males based on assumed innate differences in physical attributes. Etiquette norms in this era were compared to those found in the early twenty-first century (2000–2010s), through content analysis of online forums/blogs for recreational and elite-level MDT. It was found that while gendered tactics related to court positioning and playing roles were sustained, an important shift in etiquette norms related to chivalry occurred, but was not comprehensively accepted among all players. This development was attributed to third-wave feminist challenges to male chivalry, alongside the burgeoning ‘crisis of masculinity’ that increasingly pushed men towards adopting a ‘hybridized masculinity’ to assuage public critiques of hegemonic/orthodox masculinity in sport.

Reparation for Betrayal of Trust in Child Sexual Abuse Cases: The Christian Duty of Care, Vicarious Liability and the Church of England

Feminist challenges to the traditional principles of vicarious liability highlight the difficulties facing claimants seeking redress via a doctrine largely developed in relation to the corporate model reflecting masculine traits of institutional power and control embedded in the traditional enterprise employer/employee relationship. This article explores the ways in which the recent spate of claims made against UK religious authorities regarding present and historic acts of child sexual abuse perpetrated by clergy have forced a paradigm shift requiring the courts to consider influences on the legal process associated with tropes of restorative justice, powerfully supported and explained by feminist legal theorists. The position of the Roman Catholic Church, however, is shown to be very different to that of the Church of England, highlighting the need for the paradigm shift to develop further and to consider the role of validation and vindication as elements in reparation, institutional as well as individual.

The challenge of hyper-sexual femininity and binge drinking: A feminist psychoanalytic response

In this article I examine the issue of binge drinking and the presentation of hyper-sexual femininity. Such displays present a challenge for feminism: on the one hand ‘new’ femininities have been articulated as a form of female agency and sexual empowerment, yet on the other hand it has been suggested that hyper-sexual femininity does not challenge gender hierarchies enough or in the right way and is a provocation to feminism. By taking a psychoanalytic approach (specifically Jessica Benjamin’s work) we gain explanatory strength in understanding hyper-sexual femininity through the concept of ‘splitting’. Polarities in behaviour and dress are symbolic of a deeper need for recognition in young women and are a perfectly legitimate solution to a number of contradictions, particularly in the British context. Feminist thought can therefore benefit from an engagement with psychoanalytic thought that understands why change does not happen and why normative sex roles hold considerable power.