Feminist Concepts Research Articles

The V-Girls: Feminism and the Authentic Subject after Post-structuralism

The feminist performance troupe the V-Girls satirized the conventions of academia and trends in deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and feminist thought in their three performances, “Academia in the Alps: In Search of Swiss Mis(s)” (1988-92), “The Question of Manet’s Olympia: Posed and Skirted” (1989-92), and “The V-Girls: Daughters of the ReVolution,” (1993-96). In their earliest two performances, the V-Girls simultaneously identify with and question post-structuralism, suggesting that its critique of humanism’s autonomous subject actually bolsters academics’ claim to individual mastery. By explaining away her beliefs as effects of pre-existing ideologies, the V-Girls suggest, the post-structuralist academic need not risk advancing her convictions or participating in collective action. In their final performance, the V-Girls ask if second-wave feminism provides a salvageable model of the self-identified, authentic subject ready to speak out and work collaboratively. In so doing, they also reveal overlooked parallels between the humanist and second-wave feminist conception of the subject.

W poszukiwaniu kobiecej sprawczości duchowej

In the paper, I explore the issue of female spiritual agency through ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Polish converts from Catholicism to a female dominated, Hindu rooted new religious movement, the Brahma Kumaris. My data show that reasons of conversion include dissatisfaction of gender relations. However, instead of becoming feminists, the women at the center of my research commit to strict ascetic discipline. The changes that this commitment entails totally reorganize their relations within their families and their social lives. Drawing on contemporary developments in anthropological approaches to agency, I focus on theorizing those elements of agency and identity that go beyond liberal feminist concepts of women’s emancipation. The Brahma Kumaris is a marginal group, but the general pattern of analysis of renegotiation of family life and relations beyond the private sphere may apply to other women’s groups.

Feminicidio: TWAIL in Action

Feminicidio is a Mexican adaptation of the radical feminist concept of femicide, usually defined as the misogynous murder of women by men because they are women. In this essay based on original fieldwork, I seek to contribute to Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship by providing a brief analysis of the engagement of Mexican grassroots feminist activists with international human rights law in their struggle against the systematic abduction, murder, and sexual abuse of hundreds of women and girls in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and the widespread impunity enveloping these crimes. As a result of this grassroots activism, these murders became known as feminicidios. Feminicidio expanded the existing concept of femicide by exposing the complicity of the state in the killing of women by sustaining the institutionalization of gender inequality. Indeed, activists consistently claimed that the state’s tolerance for impunity perpetuates the notion that women are disposable, and violence against them is not serious. Moreover, they linked this notion to the patriarchal regime of neoliberal capitalism that supports the maquiladora industry in Ciudad Juárez. Activists further drew on international human rights law. They invoked the due diligence obligation to conceptualize the responsibility of the Mexican state for failing to effectively prevent, investigate, and punish the murder of women—despite evidence of a systematic pattern of gendered violence that could only be understood by taking into consideration the intersecting structural gender and class inequalities that feminicidio revealed.

Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century Amanda D.Lotz. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century Amanda D. Lotz. New York: New York University Press, 2014.In Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century, Amanda D. Lotz provides a gender analysis of what she calls the that have emerged on over the past two decades (51). Through her dissection of a variety of cable serials, Lotz shows a shift in popular understandings of masculinity. Rather than assuming the traditional form of stoic, unemotional provider, the protagonists in the programs Lotz analyzes grapple with what it really means to be a man. Lotz suggests that the fact that these crises are displayed so prominently on is a new phenomenon in popular entertainment (29). In her view, this development signals a cultural shift in the definition of manhood toward what she refers to as a post-second wave understanding of gender in which men are actively trying to reconcile manhood with a more feminist conception of society (23).The masculine identity crisis on display in these shows is one that crosses barriers across family, work, and friendships. Borrowing from Michael Kimmel, Lotz notes in the second chapter that we have no history of men, masculinity, and manhood on television (7) and that in many ways the male-centered serials of the twenty-first century are a unique development as they show the entire life of the male protagonists. In one of the earliest examples of this type of show, viewers see Tony Soprano both as businessman and as family man. And, in fact, she contends that Soprano's actions, illegal and otherwise, come from a desire to provide for his family. Lotz further suggests that, in contrast to the stoic, master of his fate picture of hegemonic manhood, Soprano's masculinity is conflicted and his inner turmoil is on full display throughout the show, not the least of which during his interactions with his psychiatrist.In Chapter 3, Lotz moves beyond the family and work dichotomy and examines the moral and ethical boundaries that many of the protagonists of these shows seem to cross with impunity. From Tony Soprano's mob activities to Walter White's meth lab to Dexter's job as a killer, she shows time and again the lengths to which men in these shows go to renegotiate their masculine identities. While the author acknowledges a multiplicity of reasons for these illegal behaviors, she is quick to assert that in none of the cases are women blamed for the problems that lead to the morally questionable behavior of the male protagonists. …

Una Mujer de los ’60 Atrapada en un Serie de la TV Contemporánea: Claire Dunphy una Ama de Casa en “Modern Family”.

<p class="hppag28TextAbstract">The character of Claire Dunphy from the TV series Modern Family is a married housewife with three kids who is fully dedicated to her home, husband and kids. The present analysis confronts the feminine model proposed by the character with the feminist conception of actual women during the first four seasons of the series. This allows establishing the kind of lifestyle and values that she transmits to the audience. By applying an ethical analysis model which questions about her anthropological spheres, Claire appears as a modern woman who chose her family over her career and has found in her current role, the feeling of a succeeding and loving life.</p>

Touchstones: Editorial Introduction 23(2)

This issue of Feminist Legal Studies (FLS) picks up the conversation between feminism and legality as our contributors think about gender, sexuality and race; kinship and care; courts and diverse legal subjects. We present a range of submissions—papers, an interview and reviews—which critique the doing of law in different jurisdictions—South Africa, the International Criminal Court, England and Nairobi—and reflect on the scholarship which touches and animates feminist critiques. Feminist concepts, abstract and concrete, continue to provide important touchstones for finding a way through the challenges of transformative struggles. In this introduction, I draw on Editorial Board discussion to outline each original contribution and consider some of the touchstones encountered along the way. Bonthuys (2015) article ‘‘Gender and Race in Judicial Appointments in South Africa’’ examines a ‘‘local manifestation of the global interest in women judges’’ as she considers how the debate about transformation of the judiciary plays out. Her analysis critiques the public debate over judicial appointments in South Africa by focusing on the arguments of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC), media commentators, and gender activists over a three year period. She argues that gender and race are being cast in problematically exclusive, non-intersectional terms. In these circumstances, the prioritization of racial transformation of the judiciary has the effect of displacing the need for gender transformation and the occlusion of the need for better representation of Black African women in particular. She also argues that gender transformation is too narrowly focused on the inclusion of greater numbers of women. The judicial and legal institutionalized culture (Albertyn 2014,

The Racial Contract: a feminist analysis

This essay provides a feminist analysis of Charles Mills' The Racial Contract. I begin by describing how The Racial Contract simultaneously embraces and challenges key feminist understandings of the “male gaze” and the corporeal inscription of power. I also illuminate how feminist conceptions of intersectionality inform Mills' theorizing and discuss what an expanded intersectional account of the racial contract might look like. The rest of the essay demonstrates that both The Racial Contract and Mills' more recent “Intersecting Contracts” raise important questions about the relationship between interrogating intersectional experience and fostering progressive politics. I draw on these texts to conclude that social groups who interrogate their experience of oppression are frequently motivated to embrace progressive politics and that these groups' process of interrogation is often informed by anti-progressive politics.

Revisiting Choice and Victimization: A Commentary on Bay-Cheng’s Agency Matrix

This commentary explores questions raised by Bay-Cheng’s “Agency Matrix” regarding girls’ and young women’s sexual agency. Focusing primarily on victimization and agency, I explore past attempts in the field to understand victim’s agency from my own work (Lamb, 1996) and the work of Janoff-Bulman and Frieze (1983) in the 80s and 90s to more recent work directly addressing girls’ sexual expression and its relationship to empowerment in the U.S. In this essay I also address problems inherent in feminist conceptualizations of girls and young women as both agents and responders to cultural forces including their own victimization. I explore the idea that the uber-responsibility we see in girls and women around their own victimization is a moral standpoint that is exploitable in a neoliberal and sexist society. Like Bay-Cheng I discuss the neoliberal agenda and how in a neoliberal context vulnerability becomes a problem and stands in the way of solidarity with other victims. In the end, I propose feminists explore how to rescue ideals around responsibility and choice without buying into neoliberalism, and sexism. I propose we may need to bend towards girls’ and young women’s conceptualization of agency with the goal of helping victims take appropriate responsibility without excusing the perpetrator.

Young Women’s Anger in Romantic Relationships: Gendered Rules and Power

We used a social constructionist and feminist framework to examine how young women negotiate gendered rules for anger in their romantic relationships and how such negotiations are associated with women’s power in these relationships. We analyzed 24 interviews using a grounded-theory methodology. Our analyses indicated five women resisted gendered rules for anger as they accepted their anger, attributed shared responsibility for their anger, and expressed their anger externally and directly. The other 19 young women followed gendered rules for anger as they distanced themselves from their anger, ambivalently attributed responsibility for their anger, and kept their anger in and expressed it indirectly. Women who resisted gendered rules for anger narrated being engaged in egalitarian relationships, while women who followed gendered rules for anger seemed to participate in nonegalitarian relationships. The findings of this study offer a feminist conceptualization of women’s anger in terms of social rules for anger experience and expression.

From Unity to Divergence and Back Again: Security and Economy in Feminist International Relations

In Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, J. Ann Tickner (1992) identified three main dimensions to “achieving global security”—national security, economic security, and ecological security: conflict, economics, and the environment. Much of the work in feminist peace studies that inspired early feminist International Relations (IR) work (e.g., Brock-Utne 1989; Reardon 1985) and many of Tickner's contemporaries (e.g., Enloe 1989; Peterson and Runyan 1991; Pettman 1996) also saw political economy and a feminist conception of security as intrinsically interlinked. Yet, as feminist IR research evolved in the early 21st century, more scholars were thinking either about political economy or about war and political violence, but not both.

Caring for quality of care: symbolic violence and the bureaucracies of audit.

BackgroundThis article considers the moral notion of care in the context of Quality of Care discourses. Whilst care has clear normative implications for the delivery of health care it is less clear how Quality of Care, something that is centrally involved in the governance of UK health care, relates to practice.DiscussionThis paper presents a social and ethical analysis of Quality of Care in the light of the moral notion of care and Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic violence. We argue that Quality of Care bureaucracies show significant potential for symbolic violence or the domination of practice and health care professionals. This generates problematic, and unintended, consequences that can displace the goals of practice.SummaryQuality of Care bureaucracies may have unintended consequences for the practice of health care. Consistent with feminist conceptions of care, Quality of Care ‘audits’ should be reconfigured so as to offer a more nuanced and responsive form of evaluation.

Maternal thinking and beyond: towards a care-full pedagogy for early childhood

This paper explores feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick's concept of ‘maternal thinking’ and considers the applicability and use of her ideas for early childhood pedagogy. This is illustrated through a small-scale case study, undertaken in early years settings in England, in which three dimensions of maternal thinking are evidenced in the work of early years practitioners: preservation of the child, fostering the growth of the child and the child's social acceptance. We argue that ethics of care are central to an articulation of contemporary early childhood pedagogy and must be advanced through engagement with students of early childhood in higher education (HE). This practice is demonstrated in a second case study, reporting a participatory research project with university students. Care-full values, practice and thinking are vital in order to challenge the status quo and emphasise early childhood pedagogy as important work towards the creation of a more equitable and sustainable society.

The female combat soldier

As a result of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, women have increasingly served on the front line, performing combat roles once reserved exclusively for men. This article explores the ways in which Western military culture may have both impeded and facilitated female accession. In line with the feminist concept of hegemonic masculinity, the article explores how female soldiers are often subjected to an institutionalized cultural code that defines them as ‘sluts’ or ‘bitches’, denying them equality and recognition, irrespective of their behaviour. At the same time, some highly competent women have begun to be accepted and a new cultural classification has been developed for them: they are ‘honorary men’. This new status represents an important development for the armed forces and an opportunity for women. Yet, the category is so narrow that it is very difficult for women to maintain it.

Feminism, Feminism Everywhere?

This essay engages with the text The Birth of Chinese Feminism, which centers primarily on the writings of He-Yin Zhen, one of the earliest Chinese feminists, produced at the turn of the twentieth century and translated into English for the first time. He-Yin offered China and the world a unique and forceful theory of women’s enslavement through critiques of conditions in China (past and present), Japan, and contemporary Europe. John’s essay offers a reading of these writings and He-Yin’s arguments in contrast to other Chinese thinkers, as well as the theoretical claims made by the editors of the book. It does so in relation to comparable questions from colonial and contemporary Indian feminism. While endorsing the dangers posed by the current dominance of US academe in terms of its capacity to crowd out alternate concepts and thinking about feminism, especially from colonial spaces, this essay calls for a postnational engagement with the specificities of feminist concepts and vocabularies, whether in the early twentieth century or the present.

Gendered Intersubjectivities in Narratives of Recovery From an Eating Disorder

There is a growing body of qualitative research into women’s experiences of recovery from an eating disorder, however, as yet there has been little attention to the gendered social dimensions of these experiences. This in-depth interview study with eight recovered women was informed by the feminist concept of situated intersubjectivity, which allows for attention to both the discursive and material/lived dimensions of women’s experiences, as well as the intersubjective gender relations framing these. Narrative–discursive analysis revealed three main themes in women’s narratives, namely, recovery as a journey, turning points to recovery, and transforming relationships. Analysis demonstrated how many women’s accounts took the form of quest narratives, drawing on humanist discourses and practices of self-care and self-discovery to construct recovery as a journey to self. However, the study particularly identified shifts in intersubjective gender relations across women’s narratives that enabled other ways of belonging, recognition, self-acceptance, and agency. This article examines the implications of these findings for social workers and other health-care practitioners who support women experiencing eating disorders.

To write/to revolt: Egyptian women novelists writing the revolution

Most of the accounts, whether in Arabic or English, which deal with the first 18 days (25 January – 11 February) of the 2011 Egyptian revolution highlight the unity of the Tahrir days. This paper investigates the homogenous Tahrir experience from the perspective of three Egyptian women writers who lived this experience. I analyse the intersection between the personal and the political in three texts: Ahdaf Soueif’s memoir Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, Mona Prince’s testimony Ismi Thawra (My Name is Revolution) and Donia Kamal’s novel Sigarah Sab‘a (A Seventh Cigarette). All three texts were published in 2012. The paper engages two specific feminist concepts: Judith Butler’s performativity and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s strategic essentialism. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part briefly outlines the theoretical framework. The second part situates the revolution and the writers in the context of Egyptian women’s earlier struggle for the nation, whilst exploring Nira Yuval-Davis and Elleke Boehmer’s studies on the problematic relation between gender and nation. The third part examines the three texts closely in light of the specified feminist concepts.

Progressive Communities, Children’s Literature, and Free to Be … You and Me

Progressive Communities, Children’s Literature, and Free to Be … You and Me Katharine Capshaw (bio) The children’s book version of Free to Be … You and Me became a powerful force in the lives of progressive young people in the 1970s. In addition to the 1972 record that began the Free to Be project and alongside the television special that followed the book’s publication, the children’s book offered textual stability to the feminist concepts offered in all of the project’s incarnations. But what struck me as a young person in the early 1970s was its interracial visual aesthetic, its photographs of various children sitting happily side by side. I was raised in a family that resembled few others at the time. I am white, as are two of my siblings; my brother is African American; and my sister is African American and Vietnamese American. My parents were progressive thinkers and activists and they raised us in Columbia, Maryland, a township founded in 1967 with the goal of social change. We lived in a community that featured interfaith centers rather than churches, “village centers” with housing of varied economic levels, and shared community schools that actively promoted integration. In many ways it seemed an ideal setting for our family. At the same time, Columbia was in fact located below the Mason-Dixon Line, and popular culture and social realities conspired to make us feel conspicuous in many ways. Even in Columbia, Maryland, my siblings and I experienced hostility, especially from other children, for being a “mixed” family. This is part of the reason why Thomas’s book, album, and television program seemed a blessing, an idealized place where children like us could be comfortable in ourselves and in our love for each other. My own work as an academic focuses on African American childhood and social change and I recognize the influence of Free to Be on my own [End Page 287] investments. Through the book and television program, I experienced the transformative possibilities of interracial representation. Here I’d like to consider briefly Marlo Thomas’s book within the context of post-1960s social activism in order to emphasize its coherence with progressive children’s literature at large.1 While the book was certainly distinctive in countering sexist expectations for children’s socialization, its methodology shared certain tendencies with activist children’s literature, particularly that which addressed racism, during the early 1970s. In the wake of the early civil rights movement, after the losses of the “four little girls” in the 1963 Birmingham bombing and the assassinations of Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr., and so many other civil rights figures, the cultural moment of the early 1970s for black communities was tinged with frustration and despair. The response in black children’s literature emphasized continued child commitment to social change. For instance, feminist writer June Jordan urged readers in her photographic children’s book Dry Victories to “do something about this after-mess of aftermath, following on so much tragedy” (1972, 75). The imperative to take action, to intervene in social relations, structured much of the literary work for children within black communities at this moment. Further, the black arts movement (BAM) of the late 1960s and early 1970s encouraged an art that was functional, one that reeducated communities about the harmful effects of white education and literacies. Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), within Larry Neal’s 1968 essay “The Black Arts Movement,” addressed American and children’s literature, as well as the totalizing process of literacy training, by asserting, “We must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane, and other perpetrators of evil” (Neal 1968, 29). In response, BAM writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Jean Carey Bond, Sam Cornish, Tom Feelings, Nikki Giovanni, Rosa Guy, Kristin Hunter, Julius Lester, Sharon Bell Mathis, Sonia Sanchez, and Jean Pajot Smith offered experimental, participatory texts for young people, including poetry, photography, drama, coloring books, and prose narratives. Bolstered by the 1965 Elementary and Secondary School Act, the founding of the Council on Interracial Books for Children in 1966, and the creation of the Coretta Scott King Award by the American Library Association in 1970, black writers for...

The Discourse in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and Foreign Language Teaching: The Decline of Language Learner Anxiety by the Usage of Hedges, Particular Modals and Adverbs as in the Usage of these Structures in Mrs. Dalloway for a Specific Purpose

An already established way, of which frame is limited by the consensus particular to a specific society or rules activated by the way of thinking of that society, is preferably conducted to achieve a demanded goal instead of applying to possible other ways. Fluidity of languages enables novelists, playwrights, poets, politicians as well as ordinary men to apply to some distinct ways to inject appropriate notions or to explain a tenet to a great mass rather than incline to the ways, which have been known to others. This study draws a parallel between the language Virginia Woolf utilizes in her work Mrs. Dalloway for the purpose of clarifying feminist opinion system and the language used in foreign language classrooms to reduce learner anxiety. Woolf prefers implying her interpretation of the place of women in society with the help of hedges, modals and adverbs rather than explaining it directly. Thanks to the infinite statements in and the flexibility of English Language, Woolf characterizes feminist concept by unresolved and continuous alternations contrary to certain statements used by men. It is known that in the Suggestopedia Method, role-play as a technique of teaching is benefitted to reduce learner anxiety. As Woolf employs hedges, specific models and adverbs in Mrs. Dalloway to explain certain thoughts indirectly, the same structures may be applied to foreign language teaching. For the learners of foreign language in secondary schools, usage of hedges, modals and adverbs indicating that the speaker is not concise in his accounts might lessen the anxiety of learners. In this paper, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway has been analyzed from the aspect of its discourse, through which Woolf tries to teach women thought system to the audience, under the spectacle of the probability of reducing language learning anxiety by the usage of specific structures which signify possibility such as ‘could’, ‘might’, ‘as far as I know’, ‘perhaps’, ‘nearly’, ‘about’ and etc. as in Mrs. Dalloway. The main purpose of this study is to clarify that the usage of these structures mentioned above help reduce foreign language learner anxiety.

The subject of rape: Feminist discourses on rape and violability in contemporary France

Rape is a tricky issue for feminists, not least because it poses the problem of how to protect women as violable embodied subjects without assuming a mind/body separation that goes against the contemporary conceptualisation of the embodied subject. This article explores this tension in feminist discourses in France in the 1970s and uses Luce Irigaray’s radical reconsideration of the embodied subject as intrinsically violable and relational in Democracy Begins Between Two to explore alternative models of rape and violability in twenty-first-century France. Analysis of recent rape testimonies, including but not exclusively those recounting the highly mediatised phenomenon of the tournantes, challenges prevailing feminist conceptions of rape ‘victims’ and of an autonomous violable subject. This article mobilises the image of the scar as configured in the rape testimonies in order to rethink (feminist) responses to rape more productively and more openly through acknowledgement of (bodily) violability as the site of potential dialogue and resistance.

A lei sobre o corpo e o corpo sobre a lei: o ideário dos juristas sobre o crime de ato obsceno no Brasil na perspectiva da Sociologia do Corpo

O presente artigo realiza uma análise sociológica das interpretações sobre o crime de ato obsceno, previsto no Código Penal brasileiro. Por meio da análise do discurso, pretende-se compreender o ideário dos juristas sobre corpo e obscenidade, bem como a forma como os autores dos manuais de Direito Penal exemplificam as condutas consideradas criminosas e justificam determinadas proibições. Com base nas teorias feministas e nos conceitos da Sociologia do Corpo, o texto se propõe a compreender as relações entre corpo e poder, bem como identificar o potencial necessariamente dinâmico – e subversivo – das relações sociais mediadas pelo corpo.