Feminist Community Research Articles

Pemetaan Strategi Komunikasi Pergerakan Feminis Indonesia di Ruang Digital

This research aims to explore the communication strategies of the digital feminist movement in Indonesia in using social media as a space for message propagation. In the digital era, social media has become the main instrument for feminist communities to deconstruct common gender narratives and advocate for issues related to gender equality and women's empowerment. Using the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach, this research analyzes several relevant literatures to identify the communication strategies applied by Indonesian feminist communities. The results show that these communication strategies include decentralization of information, increased interactivity with audiences, utilization of social media-specific features such as hashtags and highlights, and the use of multimedia content to increase audience appeal. The findings highlight how social media is becoming an influential tool that enables inclusive and collaborative advocacy in the digital space, with challenges of limited internet access and intergenerational differences in understanding how to operate social media features

Building feminist communities in the digital economy: algorithmic affordances and feminist dilemmas

ABSTRACT Increasing numbers of individuals and groups are turning to subscription-based platforms like Patreon to create smaller, more private digital spaces, and income streams less contingent on social media platforms. Within this shift, feminist groups are notably visible, from private community platforms to messaging groups. In this paper, I consider this shift by reflecting on findings from a three-month digital ethnography with the Anti Diet Riot Club, a UK-based group who in 2021 launched ‘The Community’, a subscription-based online community. Drawing on ethnographic data, I explore how in contrast to experiences of social media platforms and algorithms as fast-paced, exhausting, tiring and boring, being in a space which was algorithmically simpler, slower and sparser was experienced by participants as enabling, agency-building, and connective. Yet, ‘The Community’ ultimately sits behind a paywall, and this generates powerful tensions between building participatory feminist communities, and the kinds of consumer, service-oriented expectations and relationships that emerge. I conclude by considering the opportunities slowness and sparseness afford for building feminist networks of community and support, while critically reflecting on how subscription-based memberships entangle feminist initiatives within the neoliberal digital economy and the challenges this poses for creating and sustaining feminist digital spaces.

Let’s keep boys out: promoting exclusion as a means to actualize feminist digital citizenship in China

ABSTRACT Although exclusion is often perceived as antithetical to civil society, many feminist activists advocate for excluding men from their spaces to prevent conflicts and create safer environments. This tension prompts a deeper exploration of exclusion’s role in civic engagement. This study aims to examines the role of exclusion in feminist digital activism through a textual analysis of how members of an online Chinese feminist community promote exclusion. The findings challenge traditional perspectives by suggesting that exclusion can be a crucial tool for feminists to participate in civic life, protect their rights, and assert their agency. This study also reveals that exclusion plays a significant role in the ongoing formation of feminist identity. While the exclusion of men may initially appear to reinforce binary gender norms, it can also serve as a catalyst for exploring and embracing the fluidity of gender and political identity.

Women's rescuers network: Community support for self-managed abortion in Argentina

The availability of medications to induce abortion, especially in contexts of restricted access, has transformed practices and allowed women and/or their community organizations to assist other women in obtaining abortions, whether or not they interact with the healthcare system. This study recovers the experience of a feminist community organization that, from the province of Neuquén, extends throughout the country, creating a network of community care. An exploratory descriptive study with a qualitative approach was conducted to analyze the experiences of women who facilitate access to permitted abortion in Argentina. Through in-depth interviews with three leaders of the feminist collective La Revuelta and semi-structured interviews with 33 members of the socorrista groups, conducted between November 2019 and December 2020, we describe their history and processes of work and growth; we explore their motivations and feelings and characterize the interactions of these organizations with public and private health systems. The results of this work align with the international conversation and bibliographic production about these organizations and their particularities, and with the need to incorporate these forms of care into institutional health systems.

National Wounds and Gendered Harm: Reframing Abortion Pain in The Worst of Times

In light of abortion’s recurrent political centrality in the United States, examining abortion narratives remains critically urgent. This article analyzes the abortion narratives found in the 1993 anthology The Worst of Times compiled by Patricia G. Miller, which collects individual stories of illegal abortions from the post–World War II years. It analyzes these narratives in the context of the postwar period’s growing sensational political fascination with abortion pain, alongside the second-wave feminist positioning of abortion as the paramount feminist issue and inherent basis of feminist community. Against these discourses, the semi-anonymous narrators of The Worst of Times disrupt hierarchized, universal, and exclusionary models of pain. Rather, this article argues that, in constructing life writing centered around the painful experience of illegal abortion, the narrators’ experiences cohere into relational clusters that evince commonalities while also maintaining differences. In engaging with their painful abortion experiences, these narratives reshape the medical, national, and feminist power structures that attempted to define the pain that abortion signified. In a moment when abortion legislation faces continued assaults, these narratives invite a consideration of how the embodied, personal pain of abortion can facilitate creative models of community that rethink the power structures that restrict reproductive autonomy.

Embodying sound: body, territory, and community in the music of Mare Advertencia and Cynthia Montaño

ABSTRACT Rap and urban music have become increasingly relevant in the study of alternative practices of art, activism, and resistance in Latin America. This article examines how Mare Advertencia Lirika (Zapotec) and Cynthia Montaño (Afro-Colombian) use rap to build community and women’s agency through staging Indigenous and Afro ancestral knowledge in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Cali, Colombia, respectively. Grounded on an analysis of their albums and the conduct of ethnographic work in Oaxaca and Cali, I contend that these artists’ rap art embodies alternative forms of Indigenous, Black, and grassroots expressions from a feminist community perspective. By embedding their work on ancestral knowledge, community practices, and an interwoven sense of cuerpo-territorio, both at the sound and lyrical levels, these artists challenge patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist violence. This study aims to understand better the intersections between music, women of color’s agency, and social movements in local/global scenarios.

The feminist community of podcast producers in Brazil: mapping the profile of women

This paper goes beyond celebrating podcast growth in Brazil, analyzing 511 Brazilian podcast producers (2015-2020). Using a semi-structured form, the survey focuses on outlining the profile of female producers. Drawing from gender, cultural, and political science literature, it explores how producer presence aligns with intersectional practices in Brazilian feminisms. Results indicate that women podcast producers in Brazil mostly have a college degree, variable income and identify as feminist, contributing to a unified community that engages with and challenges the political and human rights agenda, expanding discourse through communication access.

More Than We Can Chew

Western cultural norms resulting from patriarchal oppression contribute to the development of eating disorders in women. As represented by various philosophers, social factors can contribute to self-discipline of the body, which characterizes most image-based eating disorders. Critics of fundamental texts argue over the best way to engage in feminist discussion concerning these eating disorders, given that anorectics are often excluded from mainstream discourse. This paper proposes that the feminist community must approach conversations about eating disorders in three steps: recognition, sympathy, and acknowledgement. This is the only way that we can move towards addressing the cultural causes of individual pathologies.

“Together, We Empower. Together, We Are Enough”: Radical Healing Among Pinay Scholar-Activists

Filipinas face barriers to psychological wellbeing that stem from interlocking oppressive systems, like racism, sexism, capitalism, and colonialism. This article explores how Pinay scholar-activists cultivate radical healing through an intergenerational mentorship program for Filipina/x/o youth in Southern California. We apply a critical collaborative autoethnography drawing from the Psychological Framework for Radical Healing (French et al., 2020) and Pinayism, the theoretical framework to conceptualize the social, political, and economic oppression and struggle for growth faced by Pinays (Tintiangco-Cubales & Sacramento, 2022). We explore how Pinay scholar-activists heal from oppression by fostering loving relationships with the self and community and critically reflecting on and acting against oppression and toward social change. We conclude with considerations for radical healing through feminist community development and ethnic studies education.

History, Nationalism, and Lesbian Cabaret

Abstract This article, entitled “History, Nationalism, and Lesbian Cabaret: Agnieszka Weseli ‘Furja’ and Maria Konopnicka,” traces the role that nineteenth-century Polish Positivist author Maria Konopnicka has played in the twenty-first century Polish LGBT rights movement, as well as the backlash against her newfound status as an LGBT icon from nationalist factions. More specifically, I examine how activist-historian and performance artist Agnieszka Weseli-Furja has reimagined nineteenth-century queer and feminist history through her performances as Konopnicka as part of the lesbian cabaret troupe Barbie Girls. Through my analysis of her sketches collectively titled “From the Album of Maria Konopnicka,” I argue that Furja utilizes a form of feminist revisionist historiography to navigate the historical Konopnicka's ambiguous sexuality and her association with twentieth- and twenty-first-century Polish nationalism (often hostile to the LGBT community). Through these performances, Furja attempts to decouple patriarchy and heteronormativity from Polish national belonging, producing an alternative vision of Polish patriotism based in feminist community and same-sex desire.1

Curation as the Cure for the Archive

Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV) is an independent artist run center in Montreal “dedicated to the promotion of videos created by women (in its most inclusive definition) by distributing and presenting them” (GIV website) At the crossroads of longevity, consistency, commitment, and the precarity that accompanies most forms of feminist labor, GIV is one of the most important “accidental” archives of feminist organizing and expression in Quebec. Their curatorial practices resist any archiving separated from the practice of everyday life. This article focuses on the thirty-year history of Vidéo des Femmes dans le Parc (VFP), GIV’s annual public and outdoor screening of new works from an open call. We trace how this event serves to “call in” artists to build feminist community and continually change GIV’s definition of who their community is.

Feminism in Question: A Survey of Feminist Stance in Me Too Movement on Social Media

This survey-based study investigates the diverse range of feminist viewpoints regarding the MeToo movement on social media platforms. These movements have played a key role in shedding light on issues of sexual harassment and gender inequality. The positive features include the empowerment and strengthening of survivor voices, the call for accountability, and the increased awareness of issues related to consent and harassment. However, it has also prompted powerful debates, with varying viewpoints within the feminist community. This research aims to provide a complete summary of the positive and negative assessments of this movement by feminists. This research used the propaganda model of communication from the social media perspective to build this study. The researcher has adopted a quantitative approach to study the positive and negative aspects using the survey method to capture the voices of feminists with a wide range of opinions, 400 respondents from youth aged between 18 to 30 years living in Lahore and Faisalabad. The study has applied correlation and regression analysis to check the dependency of variables on each other. This study would help women better understand what feminism is, and it will help clarify the fact that the purpose of feminism is to provide equal rights to women. It will also reflect the fact that women cannot justify the misuse of female rights in the name of feminism.

Whose feminism is it anyway? Reinterpreting digital media and feminisms from the non-metropolitan global south

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to reflect on the ways in which a non-metropolitan academic feminist community engages with digital media to reimagine the discipline of Women’s Studies, and consequently feminist politics. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Women’s Studies Centre at a university in Tamil Nadu, India, this paper moves away from the framework of the digital as simply enabling or empowering, and instead seeks to examine these digital cultures as shaped by the particularities of their geographic coordinates, and as part of a larger media environment which is characterised as much by continuities as it is by innovations. In doing so, it attempts to understand feminisms as media phenomena that are actively shaped by and shaping media technologies and discourses. It argues that Women’s Studies scholars in these locations, operating from hybrid geographical and digital places, enable the possibility of decentring feminist scholarship and thus allow for a reframing of the digital. To do this, it focuses on three distinct areas of engagement—the co-creation of knowledge in Tamil language Wikipedia, interactions on social media platforms, and their engagements with little magazines in their online avatars.

The Archival Phase in Feminist Organizations: Methodological Suggestions

The article is based on a series of interviews (61) and a multi-sited ethnography conducted during 2019–2021 which traced archival records of 20 feminist organizations in Israel: local women’s peace organizations (FPAs) and Rape Crisis Centres (RCCs). We describe the study and the complex methodological concerns and meta-questions relating to the study of feminist community archives in relation to content (types of testimonials or records), method of organization (archival practices like cataloging or digitization) and activists’ perspectives concerning future preservation and access. In order to overcome these challenges, we suggest six methodological principles which may apply to the study of civil society organizations that were established between the 1970s–1990s: the importance of identifying researchers’ positionality vis a-vis the archive; the politics of knowledge and intersectional identities; avoiding judgment of informal archival practices; identifying who sets the rules; silence and self-silencing; and recognition of invisible labor.

IN SEARCH OF SOLIDARITY: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF BELARUSIAN FEMINIST ACTIVIST PROJECTS

The article explores the interlink between the digital transformation process of Belarusian feminist activist projects and solidarity within the feminist community. The article aims to characterize the process of Belarusian feminist activist projects’ digital transformation, as well as to answer the question, how the digital transformation of Belarusian feminist activist projects influences the solidarity of the Belarusian feminist community as an ability to maintain horizontal networking and practices of care, as well as to form autonomous political subjectivities and unite for collective action. The article theorizes the concepts of feminist solidarity, the essence of digitalized activism and approaches to defining feminist civil society in Belarus. Building on existing scholarship and semi-structured interviews results, the article identifies how feminist projects underwent digitalization, presented by sixteen interlocutors, and contributes to understanding feminist solidarity, its challenges, and its further potential. The results provide an overview of the most significant features of feminist projects’ digital transformation in Belarus, including evidence of the uniqueness of the online space for the birth of a new generation of Belarusian feminists and related intergenerational transfer of knowledge both within and outside the community, overcoming the digital divide and boosting the dissemination of feminist values among Belarusians through the digitalization of feminist projects, rethinking the possible ways to strengthening solidarity within the community, and the need to constantly defend the feminist language within the political process of democratization in Belarus highlighted through digital activism.

Feminist Community Psychology and the Advancement of Women in South Africa

In this presentation, I offer a brief personal reflection of my entry and introduction to psychology. I start from positionsing myself to highlight how we do not come into institutions of higher learning and our disciplines as empty vessels but with histories that shape how we view the world. Drawing from social justice scholars and my earlier work, I point to how psychology needs to shift from locating ‘problems’ within individuals but instead acknowledge the structural imbalances that contribute to individual and collective dis-eases facing society. I go on to call for a decolonial feminist psychology that acknowledges the multiple oppressions faced by people in many formely colonised nations such as South Africa, with a particular focus on women. I further show how visual methodologies such as embroideries offer the potential for epistemic justice and decolonial possibilities by centering community members as co-constrctors of knowledge. I conclude by highlighting how hope carries the potential for psychological healing.

Auto(bio)pornografia Preciado, czyli od feminizmu do queerowania i z powrotem

The article focuses on Paul R. Preciado’s book <i>An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing</i> and the concept of being a gender dissident. “I am not a man and I am not a woman and I am not heterosexual I am not homosexual I am not bisexual,” [sic] declares Preciado and thus dissolves the dualism of sexuality and psychosexual identity. Queer loses its definitions and simultaneously consolidates them. In the face of this gesture, feminism must once again rearrange its perception of gender performativity, while trying to maintain its intersectional style. The text also examines to whom Preciado’s collection is addressed, and how self-writing and “bringing a piece of the horizon” instead of the margins fits into the network of such publications that have been translated into Polish. Where are we in queer studies? Do we have a text created in Poland and grounded in realities that would transcend the “feminist community”? Keywords: queer studies, feminism, gender, literature

The pleasure, joy and positive emotional experiences of abortion accompaniment after 17 weeks’ gestation

Research documents how abortion can be emotionally difficult and stigmatising, but generally has not considered whether and how involvement in abortion may be a source of positive emotions, including pleasure, belonging and even joy. The absence of explorations that start from the possibility of abortion pleasure and joy represents an epistemic foreclosure. Moreover, it highlights how social science literature has tended to emphasise the negative aspects of abortion care in ways that produce or amplify normative negative associations. In this paper, we investigate the positive emotions, pleasure and joy of abortion involvement by drawing on interviews conducted in 2019 with 28 abortion accompaniers in Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador about their experiences accompanying abortions after 17 weeks’ gestation. Abortion accompaniment is a response to unsafe and/or inaccessible abortion whereby volunteer activists guide abortion seekers through a medication abortion. Interviewees described how the practice of accompaniment generated positive emotions by building a feminist community, shared intimacy among women, and witnessing aborting people claim their strength. Importantly, these positive emotional experiences of involvement with abortion were not distinct from the broader marginalisation of abortion but were, instead, rooted in its marginalisation.

Locking and Unlocking: The potentialities for intra-storying-activism in “this” baglady collective.

In this article we disrupt extractivist and privileged individualised knowledge production by decentering the human ‘I’ to ‘we’ through storying. By entangling more-than-human bodies, ‘we’ is re-configured through a posthuman praxis of an iterative metamorphosing Baglady storying collective. Starting with the provocation of locking and unlocking, we story as a way to make sense of political and ethical affectivities that disrupt and interrupt everyday materialities and spatialities. From here, we speculate with movements of response-ability as “intra-activism” (Renold & Ringrose, 2017, 631). For us, storying puts in motion intra-action, speculation, calls to act, relationality and feminist community building that we frame as intra-storying-activism. Making and re-making stories with intra-storying-activism navigates non-hierarchical post-authorship to re-imagine, speculate-with and trouble the human from extractivist positions. By foregrounding relationality as a multiplying storying, we create playful, dynamic and generative spaces for knowledge making as a collective that both welcomes and provokes calls to act. 
 

Radio of Flesh and Bone: Community Radio in the Authoritarian and Patriarchal Context of Today’s Nicaragua

Abstract In A Passion for Radio: Training of Trainers José Ignacio López Vigil asserts that community radio “is (made) of flesh and bone” (2015, p. 25). In the context of authoritarianism and patriarchy in today’s Nicaragua these words suggest at least three meanings. One recalls threats to the lives and livelihoods of Nicaraguans that work for Nicaragua’s surviving independent media, including community radio, particularly following the political and humanitarian crisis that began in April 2018. Community radio as “flesh and bone” also relates to the bodies of its listening public and is examined in this paper through the prism of the feminist community radio station, Radio Vos (Radio You 101.7 FM). Radio as “flesh and bone” also serves as a metaphor for community radio’s material and operational existence, a body that functions via multiple interworking parts and systems. In discussing the challenges facing community radio in Nicaragua, this essay incorporates excerpts from an interview with Argentina Olivas, the director of Radio Vos.