Critical Feminist Theory Research Articles

The meaning of patient-nurse interaction for older women in healthcare settings: A Qualitative Descriptive Study.

The purpose of this study was to explore the meaning of patient-nurse interaction for older women receiving care in healthcare settings. Older women are often overlooked or misunderstood by the nurses caring for them. Some research exists on nurses' perception of their interaction with patients, yet few studies have described the meaning of such interaction from the patients' perspective. This was a pilot study using qualitative description as a methodology. Data were filtered through a lens of critical feminist theory to interpret interactions taking place in healthcare settings that are often characterised by paternalism. Seven women between the ages of 66 and 81 were interviewed using a semi-structured guide. Participants had a distinctive perspective on the experience of caring. Their expressions include stories of being cared for themselves by nurses as well as historical recalls of being the one-caring for family members. In these combined stories, the contrast between the nurses who held caring in primacy and those who were distinctly uncaring sheds light on the importance of cultivating a moral ideal of caring and respect for personhood. A population of older women who potentially face disabling conditions must rely on direct, meaningful, interaction with nurses to successfully navigate the healthcare system. The findings suggest that these women did not have consistent access to such interaction. The gathering and interpretation of new narratives about patient-nurse interaction for older women could lead to a deeper understanding of power and civility as it impacts a caring relationship. Further research using a theoretical lens of critical feminism has implications for improving healthcare delivery for older women worldwide.

Schizofreniczna materia. O produkcji ciał, pojęć i podmiotowości

Agential realism is a perspective situated within the new materialism and posthumanism which combines philosophical and physical issues. Karen Barad, feminist thinker and creator of agential realism, mixes poststructuralist ideas (Michel Foucault) and feminist critical theories with quantum physics, in particular with the thesis of Niels Bohr, one of the founders of this field. The main purpose of this article is to show the relations between agential realism and ideas presented by Deleuze and Guattari in one of their most famous books – Anti-Oedipus. The author of the paper focuses on the presentation of a processual ontology (especially on an explanation of how bodies, concepts, and objects are produced) resulting from the engagement of both perspectives.

Gender as a Useful Category for School Finance

ABSTRACTSchool finance scholars focus attention on the roles that race and class play in the provision of educational opportunities. Recent school finance research, however, ignores the role that gender contributes in providing students equitable and adequate educational outcomes. Gender—originally included in school finance studies—has disappeared from recent work in school finance. This article engages feminist critical theory to describe the social context of gender in finance studies, and uses secondary data to illustrate how the inclusion of gender can be helpful in highlighting the need for more adequate funding in order to provide equal educational outcomes.

Reproductive Justice as Intersectional Feminist Activism

Reproductive justice activists have dynamically used the concept of intersectionality as a source of empowerment to propel one of the most important shifts in reproductive politics in recent history. In the tradition of the Combahee River Collective, twelve Black women working within and outside the pro-choice movement in 1994 coined the term “reproductive justice” to “recognize the commonality of our experiences and, from the sharing and growing consciousness, to a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression.” Its popularity necessitates an examination of whether reproductive justice is sturdy enough to be analyzed as a novel critical feminist theory and a surprising success story of praxis through intersectionality. Offered to the intellectual commons of inquiry, reproductive justice has impressively built bridges between activists and the academy to stimulate thousands of scholarly articles, generate new women of color organizations, and prompt the reorganization of philanthropic foundations. This article defines reproductive justice, examines its use as an organizing and theoretical framework, and discusses Black patriarchal and feminist theoretical discourses through a reproductive justice lens.

Mobilização Feminista, Violência de Gênero e Práticas Judiciais no Brasil: Reflexões à Luz da Teoria dos Sistemas Sociais

The critical feminist theory of law have characterized the Brazilian legal system as refractory with regards to women´s demands and as yet another mechanism that upholds traditional gender archetypes. Recently, the Law 11.340/06 (The Maria da Penha Act) encourages new reflections on legal decisions regarding so-called gender conflicts in Brazil. Influenced by standards laid out in international decrees regarding the women´s rights, this Law introduces innovative elements such as the definition of “gender-based violence”. This study reflects theoretically and empirically on the role of the judicial system in the application of the Law 11.340/06, and discusses how the category gender-based violence is being used by those pertaining to the legal system. The contributions of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory are useful to illustrate the understanding of judicial practices and their impact on the realization of the outlooks surrounding efforts focused on the implementation of the Law 11.340/06.

Foreclosure and dispossession: The case for a feminist critical theory for public administration

Using Marcuse and the 2008 economic crisis as a starting point, this work proposes a feminist critical theory for public administration that could inform how public administrationists can see themselves as defenders of human values against a status quo which favors masculine and market forces. Through an exploration of Marcuse's concepts of one-dimentionality, foreclosure, masculinization, and feminist socialism, this work asserts the need for a feminist critical theory for public administration theory and praxis that responds to current social injustices and explores a more complex analysis of the subject as subjugated and dispossessed. The conclusion proposes some directions that such a theory might take in the future.

Decadence and the Reinvention of Modernismthe Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley

Decadence and the Reinvention of Modernismthe Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley

Techno-Social Change Agents: Fostering Activist Dispositions Among Girls of Color

Abstract Discourse about girls and women of color in technology has followed the familiar path of using a single-unit analysis to explain disparity. Consequently, approaches to “motivate” girls of color overemphasize gender and engage in technological fetishization without fully considering how race, gender, class, and technology are co-constituted. Drawing on critical feminist theory, social justice education, and science and technology studies, this essay offers a critique of neoliberal approaches to technology education for girls of color and provides a broad overview of the conceptual catalysts that shape the approach of COMPUGIRLS, a National Science Foundation–funded technology program. The overview demonstrates how intersectionality and education activism can nurture the dispositions of girls of color to become techno-social change agents. The essay ends with a primer lesson on the representation of intersectional identities in online spaces that illustrates our theoretical and pragmatic approach toward education, activism, and girls of color in a digital age.

RELAÇÕES DE GÊNERO E CONHECIMENTO EM PSICOLOGIA: CONTRIBUIÇÕES DA TEORIA CRÍTICA

Este trabalho apresenta algumas discussões recentes levantadas pela teoria crítica feminista, que contribuem para problematizar a objetividade científica da psicologia. Denuncia-se, primeiramente, falsa neutralidade de gênero que, embutida na ideia de um ser humano genérico, conduz a uma necessária revisão de conceitos supostamente universais. Um desses conceitos é aquele de justiça, que permeia estudos sobre moral em psicologia do desenvolvimento. Ao mesmo tempo, discute-se a predominância de determinado gênero nas universidades, instituindo e legitimando experiências específicas no processo de construção de conhecimentos na área. Exploram-se artigos de autoras feministas identificadas com o campo teórico-crítico, com foco na questão da identidade, bem como nas implicações políticas das concepções de linguagem envolvidas em suas posições. Por fim, dialogando-se com autores da primeira geração da escola de Frankfurt, propõe-se a consideração da dialética entre conceito e experiência para a construção de novos saberes e estratégias visando à igualdade de gênero. Espera-se mostrar que a crítica feminista atingiu pilares importantes da psicologia, que, como ciência, não pode permanecer inerte frente aos desafios que lhe vêm sendo colocados. Os diversos campos da psicologia precisam se mobilizar na construção de estratégias emancipatórias, capazes de assegurar a própria validade dos conhecimentos produzidos pela área.

Using mistreatment to persist academically

This study demonstrates adult women college students overcoming challenges due to mistreatment in order to succeed academically. Asking each participant to tell her life story allowed the researcher to find common narratives of mistreatment among them, while using critical feminist and constructivist theories for analysis. As a result, the culmination of the stories showed the power in having protective factors to build resilience and persist in life, as well as in college.

Working for Inclusion? Conditional Cash Transfers, Rural Women, and the Reproduction of Inequality

AbstractThroughout the global South, conditional cash transfer programmes (CCTs) are used to promote socially inclusive development. CCTs are widely evaluated for their capacity to build children's human capital. In contrast, this paper aims to hold “social inclusion” to account by elucidating the impacts of Peru's CCT “Juntos” on the poor, rural mothers who are expected to meet programme conditions. Grounded in extensive ethnographic research in households, clinics, schools, and village halls, the paper interrogates the work of social inclusion in spaces where uneven development manifests itself in privation. Considered in light of critical feminist theories of performativity and social reproduction, the findings shed light on a far less optimistic reality for the work of social inclusion. This paper contributes a rich empirical account to critical literature on cash transfers and the discourses that drive them, and suggests that the circumstances under which women are required to fulfil programme conditions challenge the substance of contemporary “inclusive” development.

Feminist Standpoint and Question of Women Participation in Decision-Making, in Nepal

Feminist standpoint theory emerged in the 1970s. As a feminist critical theory it focuses on the relationship between the production of knowledge and practices of power. It can be considered as a blended form of Marxist feminist, critical theory and a range of social scientific disciplines. Feminist standpoint helps to understand and explain the world through marginalized, subordinated and oppressed women's point of view in the society considering them as knowledgeable. It is the process of mainstreaming their knowledge, skill and experiences. Feminist standpoint focuses on power relations, which is broadly cultivated on cultural values and assigned gender role. In this context, feminist standpoint could be a theoretical basis to mainstream women's knowledge, skill and experiences, instead of conventional way of thinking and doing things with taking into account the knowledge and experiences of dominant groups.

Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation

In 1992, Farzaneh Milani’s groundbreaking Veils and Words brought into dialoguethe fields of Iranian studies and feminist critical theory – two areas ofhumanist inquiry that, in some sense, need each other. Moreover, with workslike Hamid Naficy’s The Making of Exile Cultures (1993), interdisciplinarycritical theory has informed many humanist and social science approaches toIranian literature and culture. These links between integrated critical theoryand Iranian studies can produce compelling and insightful analyses. However,the cadence of such work might be more in tune with one subfield than another.While the content and subject of these studies might include Iranian society,culture, or art, it is often the case that the critical method being deployedis more important than the historical, literary, or social content to which it isapplied. Methodology eclipses the subject of analysis.This is the case with Leila Rahimi Bahmany’s Mirrors of Entrapment andEmancipation (Mirrors). Bahmany’s work tells us more about the feministcritical genealogy brought to bear on the work of Sylvia Plath (d. 1963) andForrough Farrokhzad (d. 1967) than it does about the works and lives of thesepoets themselves. But if, as I note above, these fields do “need” each other,then this book is worth exploring for both feminist scholars and Iranian studiesspecialists. Beyond specialists, however, the work does little to draw in areader not already at least slightly familiar with debates in psychoanalyticfeminist theory of the twentieth century.Bahmany begins her book with the highly suggestive images of Narcissusand Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. However, she quickly movesfrom this basis in classical western mythology to the relevance of these imagesfor psychoanalysis and feminism. Thus, she rapidly establishes a ...

Three performativities of innovation in public transport planning

ABSTRACTThe article scrutinizes planners’ stories of innovation in contemporary public transport planning in three Scandinavian contexts (Denmark, Sweden and Norway). This analysis is accomplished by adapting Judith Butler’s post-structural feminist critical theory on performativity to the planning context. This theoretical framework is used to illuminate how planning is dynamically renewed, revised and consolidated over time by the individual routine actions of planners. From this perspective, the research identifies a set of repetitive acts – as recognizing specific windows of opportunity, anticipate and respond to political signals and create arguments and means of communication and persuasion – that constitute the contemporary transformation of professional practice in relation to planning politics. This analytics of performativity reveals how professional planning practices engage with transformative capacities of reshaping, re-enacting and re-experiencing guidance for the future within a set of meanings and forms of legitimation. These findings are intended to contribute to present and future planning practice and education in Scandinavian countries and elsewhere.

Making Hope and History Rhyme

This article draws on our backgrounds as adult educators in Ireland and our experience at Highlander in 2014. We review our development as critical educators, exposed to deep inequalities in Irish society. We explore role of popular education in fostering social change, beginning with the commitment to equality and freedom, whereby, we produce emancipatory knowledge with students and participants. This learning process is more explicitly political and collective than individual psychological concepts of learning. The Highlander experience provided the opportunity to interrogate related assumptions that underpin the concept of leadership, pointing toward a more collective and political framework. The article uses feminist critical theories as lenses for this interrogation, holding that equality and freedom are mutually constitutive principles of critical practice. Popular educators foster critical thinking and reflection. The Other’s Tools, drawing on the precept that traditional thinking reinforces the status quo. These critical thinking tools are vital to question the assumptions that power and control in society as individualized or de-politicized. We take this learning into our practice in Ireland.

From a Politics of Dilemmas to a Politics of Paradoxes

Transformational learning is a process resulting in deep and significant change in habitual patterns of identity, thought, emotion, and action, enabling new approaches to role enactment. This article explores how moving from a framework of dilemmas, which require solutions and one-sided choices, to a framework of paradoxes that embraces tensions and contradictions can contribute to meaningful transformational learning in the context of women’s leadership development. Drawing on recent theories of paradoxes and on critical feminist theory, we propose a critical feminist pedagogy of paradoxes for developing women’s leadership of social change enterprises. This perspective is put forth based on our analysis of an experiential course in a graduate gender studies program wherein participants take on leadership roles and interrogate them, by integrating theoretical discussions, reflection, and practical engagement in social activism. We use case studies from our students’ experiences in the field and in the classroom to demonstrate and explore the use of paradoxical thinking for teaching complex modes of leadership. We then show how fundamental, unresolvable paradoxes can be generative of novel ways of enacting social change leadership. We suggest several advantages and implications that this critical feminist pedagogy of paradoxes can have on the development of women’s leadership.

Structural Subjugation: Theorizing Racialized Sexual Harassment in Housing

This Article identifies and analyzes the structural forces that permit and ignore racialized sexual harassment in housing. Although scholarship on sexual harassment in housing is sparse, the existing research and resulting body of law generally advances a narrative focused on the female tenants’ economic vulnerability and violation of the sanctity of her home. The narrative advanced in scholarship and advocacy, along with the resulting jurisprudence, presents an archetype of a deviant male landlord abusing his authority to take advantage of women sexually who, because of their economic circumstances, have no alternatives. This Article terms it the “dirty old man” narrative. Drawing attention to the racialized sexual harassment that lies beneath the stock story for many African American female tenants, this Article dismantles that narrative. The purpose of the scholarship is two-fold. The first is to expose, for the first time, the undercurrent of racialized sexual victimization that is absent from the “dirty old man” narrative. To do that, this project methodically examines court filings in sexual harassment cases brought by the Attorney General under the federal Fair Housing Act and analyzes the entire body of federal and state court opinions assessing residential sexual harassment claims. The second objective is to identify the structural factors — cultural acceptance of the “Black Jezebel” myth, legal rights, access, and generational economic and racial hierarchies — that operate together to perpetuate racialized sexual harassment in rental housing, an analysis that draws on social science research, along with critical race, critical feminist, and intersectionality theories. This Article contends that those structural forces are the same factors that have operated to permit and hide the sexual subjugation of Black women in the private sphere throughout history — during slavery, as domestic workers, and in the present-day failure to prosecute sexual assault against Black women. Ultimately, it argues that the prevailing “dirty old man” narrative risks silencing both the individual stories of racialized sexual harassment at home and the larger conversation about the structural forces permitting and ignoring the abuse.

Building Bridges for Refugee Empowerment

After the Syrian Humanitarian Crisis, the people of Turkey have long-established informal organizations to accommodate refugees. These local agencies often take responsibility as a cultural bridge between the refugee and the host community to establish peaceful relationships between two communities. In this paper, I examined the activities of one such local women’s organization in the Central Anatolia region. The organizational structure of this network of women was critically examined based on the principles of critical feminist theory. The findings showed that this organization challenged the dominant narratives of refugees as victims and helpers as liberators. In contrasts to much of the literature on refugee and migration studies, which avoided questioning the position of helpers, it unveiled some of the unacknowledged benefits accrued by the local women and presents an alternative humanitarian endeavor for improving refugees’ life standards.

From Women's Struggles to Distorted Emancipation

This article develops a critical analysis of transformations of the idea and practice of women's emancipation in late-modern western society under the influence of globalizing advanced capitalism. It builds on analyses of feminist critical theory and critical globalization studies and argues that global capitalism initiates processes in which the practice of emancipation is distorted. Distorted emancipation refers to the social consequences of the marketization and commodification of areas of social life that were previously excluded from market relationships. Care practices, which have been a fundamental issue in women's emancipatory struggles, are used as a reference point. The article argues that even if commodification creates certain possibilities for financial rewards of care, it institutionalizes a double misrecognition of care as both nonproductive work and paid work that cannot be a source of social recognition. Furthermore, distorted emancipation makes positive moments of changing gender patterns available only for some groups of women in socioeconomically, geopolitically or culturally privileged positions. These positive moments are dependent on transnational care practices, which are understood as a manifestation of distorted emancipation.

Achieving Procreation: Childlessness and IVF in Turkey by Merve Demircioğlu Göknar

Reviewed by: Achieving Procreation: Childlessness and IVF in Turkey by Merve Demircioğlu Göknar Ferhan Guloglu Merve Demircioğlu Göknar, Achieving Procreation: Childlessness and IVF in Turkey. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015. 214pp. Reproductive healthcare practices are the focal point of a contentious debate between the state, medical practitioners, scholars, feminist groups, and in particular, women, who are both decision makers in and targets of the reproduction controversy. Studies of these practices in Turkey have become a flourishing scholarly field with valuable contributions by Delaney (1991), Gürtin (2009, 2011, 2012), and Balsoy (2013). Merve Demircioğlu Göknar’s Achieving Procreation, which is the first anthropological manuscript on fertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Turkey, builds on this rich existing literature. Achieving Procreation examines the social meaning of childlessness and its correlation with the demand for IVF treatments in Turkey. Drawing on critical feminist theory and reproduction literature on the Middle East and Euro–America, the author examines the conceptual significance of children in women’s lives through ethnographic research in multiple settings, including two IVF clinics in Istanbul and two Anatolian villages. To address the social meaning of procreation, she analyzes the phenomena through multiple lenses such as religious rhetoric, kinship relations, and popular media representations of assisted reproductive technologies (ART). This study is a welcome addition to studies of masculine subjectivities in Middle East. Following Inhorn’s (2009 in Middle East. Following Inhorn’s (2012) studies in the Arab world, Demircioğlu Göknar pushes scholars to transcend the academic and popular focus on IVF as solely women’s experience by demonstrating the totality of the experience of infertility through strong ethnographic evidence. Her analysis of masculinity is hybrid, as exemplified through discussions of popular media representations, such as the characters in the [End Page 1265] Turkish sitcom series called “Çocuklar Duymasın”(The Children Should Not Hear This). The author theorizes these contested, contingent, historically situated, and fluid forms of manhood with the concept of “multiple masculinities” (138), not to underline dominant masculinities but to show many simultaneously existing alternatives. She deftly maps out inherent power structures embedded in different categories of masculinities, such as the abilities of penile penetration or impregnation. Another contribution of the book is its claim to consider IVF as an empowering technology for women. Demircioğlu Göknar emphasizes the agency of women as the initiators of the process, in contrast to previous works that are critical of this technology for disempowering women either by reifying motherhood (Arditti, Klein, and Minden 1984) or by framing IVF as a masculine technology (Stolcke 1988). Most of her interlocutors narrate how “they produce a child themselves” (159), calling attention to the social, physical, and psychological labor, in addition to their biological involvement in procreation. Deciding to undergo IVF treatment, persuading their husbands (in Turkey, IVF is only legal for heterosexual, married couples), actively partaking in the medical component of the treatment, such as doing the injections themselves, and keeping up with the stressful IVF process are some examples of women enacting agency. Demircioğlu Göknar starts the book by questioning reasons behind the desire to have a child. In a context in which this desire is “naturalized,” she explores how the widely circulated metaphor of a “tree without a fruit” is deployed to reinforce and create stereotypes of infertile women as undesirable or incomplete. While underlining the significance of these metaphorical entailments to depict the meanings of motherhood, the book warns us against essentializing the experience of childlessness by overemphasizing symbols such as the fruitless tree, since, in practice, many childless marriages survive the dominant discourse against infertile women. The second chapter highlights the centrality of the religious discourse in understandings of infertility by exploring how “religion as a discourse and practice” (68) both intensifies and alleviates the suffering of childless women. In her analysis, Demircioğlu Göknar evokes Asad’s (1986) understanding of Islam as a discursive tradition and Burke’s (1969) theory of rhetoric to suggest that the use of religious rhetoric as a means of self-persuasion is predicated on the main discursive pillars of Islam, Quran, and hadith. Understanding their inability to conceive in terms of a...