Neoliberalism, feminist resistance, and the marketed self: A corpus-assisted critical feminist analysis of the childless cat lady phenomenon on Chinese social media

This paper explores the impact of generative AI (GAI) on higher education, framing it as an ‘endangerment’ of established practices and values. It challenges the dominant utilitarian perspective, which prioritizes the usefulness of tools and technologies, arguing that this approach overlooks the transformative potency of GAI, and its impact on historical learning practices, such as reading and writing. Drawing on Arendt’s distinction between values and instruments, and Dewey and Rorty’s pragmatism, the paper advocates for a more experimental and less prescriptive approach to using GAI. This involves embracing the unexpected outcomes and ‘glitches’ that can arise from using the technology, promoting a more situational and less pre-determined understanding of its role in education. The paper concludes by suggesting that an experimentalist approach, informed by pragmatism and Ahmed’s feminist critique, is necessary to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by GAI and thereby it is possible to renew the values of higher education. The paper is conceptually exploratory and essayistic-philosophical in nature.

By reviewing how social science researchers have utilised the triad of sport, gender, and violence, this article identifies variations, changes, and continuities in how these elements have been understood since the 1980s. Based on searches in two databases, the ten most-cited articles from each decade were analysed. The review shows that critical perspectives on men and masculinity were foregrounded in the 1980s, while research connecting sports participation and violence has expanded since the late 1990s. The findings reveal a spectrum of approaches that either challenge or reproduce static understandings of gender and violence. The review demonstrates that the triad, developed as a structural feminist critique and later expanded into research on causal and intervention-oriented models, widens the field’s analytical and political horizons and raises questions about where responsibility for violence in and around sport lies. The concluding discussion highlights the importance of normative guidance where violence occupies a grey area.

This article critically examines how to understand the backlash against gender in Iraq. The international policy and development world adopts a predominantly essentialist approach to gender in Iraq, and in most of the Middle East, viewing any gender clamp-down as a manifestation of age-old patriarchy. The postcolonial feminist perspective, on the other hand, rightly questions the applicability of Western explanatory frameworks to non-Western contexts, refusing the Western hegemonic conception of progress and inviting a complex analysis of power. While acknowledging the validity of postcolonial feminist critiques, this article argues that what is considered ‘Western’ may not be that different from the ‘non-Western’. It suggests that there are shared dynamics even across seemingly disparate contexts. Drawing on extensive empirical data, it demonstrates that the backlash in Iraq simultaneously shares characteristics with, and exhibits unique features from, the backlash elsewhere, shaped by specific long-term contextual factors. This nuanced perspective is crucial: oversimplified ‘difference’ arguments inadvertently bolster claims by backlash proponents who frame feminism and gender equality as alien, Western impositions, thereby hindering effective advocacy for gender rights.

ABSTRACT As empirically shallow and politically polarised discussions on the Muslim social stratification have failed to adequately theorise the Muslim caste associations within the larger trope of inequality and underrepresentation, there emerges a greater need to locate the Pasmandaa Muslim women within the larger political rubric of dominant “Ashrafization” (Muslim caste supremacy equivalent to the Hindu Brahmanical supremacy), foregrounding their associational engagements with social exclusion, declassing and political assertion. The article will critique the intra-Muslim caste mechanisms through a feminist intersectional framework, addressing the multiplicative matrix of oppression, while challenging not just the efficacy of the Indian Pasmandaa movement but also the growing Hindutva ascendency (using the Muslim woman figure as central to its politics of hate), as critical feminist resistance to subvert the communally fascist agenda in India. The paper will engage in an exploratory study of a cross-section of Pasmandaa Muslim Women’s engagements within feminist protest paradigms, like the Anti-CAA/NRC protests of 2020, through intensive interviews with those who challenge the conventional notions of “being political” and “doing political,” in an attempt to regenerate Indian democracy through an alternative subaltern-feminist political agency as a counter to Hindu authoritarian majoritarianism.

In their first 10 years (2015–2025), augmented reality (AR) filters have transformed from a nascent social media novelty to a ubiquitous affordance across most social media platforms. The ascendance of AR filters as a beautifying technology has implications for how women present themselves whilst reflecting (and contributing to) developing beauty ideals that are increasingly unrealistic, homogenous and Eurocentric. Using a critical feminist lens this paper maps a historiography of this important image-altering technology across Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok during its first decade. The timeline is shaped by what I term a ‘digital beauty template’: a visual framework that is used to locate and bound eras of filter use through the identification of distinct aesthetic and beautification trends, which is in itself both reactive to and influential of cultural tides, policy/governance changes, and platform-specific technological advances. This paper identifies seven digital beauty templates: beginning with Snapchat’s playful filters I then trace beautifying filters on Instagram through five templates, following the increasing sophistication and proliferation of this technology under the shadow of continual governance challenges. Finally, I discuss TikTok’s innovative (and controversial) AI-AR filter ‘Bold Glamour’ and its gender essentialist and colourist problematics. In their first decade, filters can be seen drifting further towards a singular, imperceptible, uncanny beauty ideal that has only been accelerated by the introduction of AI. Following Meta’s dissolution of their AR filter development technology Spark AR in 2025, this paper offers a timely examination of an ephemeral – yet ubiquitous – technology in flux.

ABSTRACT This paper presents the first structured scoping review of the new generation of feminist activism in China, synthesizing scholarship published between 2012 and 2024. The analysis maps the evolving landscape of Chinese feminist discourse, practices, and critiques. It contextualizes Chinese feminisms as plural, locally grounded, yet globally entangled practices. Findings reveal a strategic shift from early confrontational, highly visible street protests to a more strategic, pragmatic, and digitally mediated movement shaped by state repression, censorship, and renewed patriarchal norms. While feminist activists have fostered new feminist counterpublics and contributed to legal and cultural shifts, their feminist practices face scholarly critiques regarding elitism, overgeneralization, and the marginalization of rural, working-class, and minority women. Drawing on feminist standpoint theory, intersectionality, and traveling theory, this review examines how these critiques vary among domestic Chinese, Western-based, and transnational feminist collaborations, highlighting the situated nature of knowledge production and the importance of reflexive, context-sensitive scholarship. The study underscores Chinese feminists’ adaptive creativity despite persistent challenges and hostile environments. It offers insights into digital feminist resistance in authoritarian contexts and enriches global feminist theory from a non-Western perspective.

Drawing on 14 in-depth interviews, this study examines how feminist content creators on Douyin navigate platform visibility, governance, and gendered censorship to disseminate feminist discourse. Findings show that participants position themselves as knowledge cultivators rather than influencers, emphasizing dialogic engagement and collective understanding over authority or personal idolization. To reach broader publics, creators strategically engage with platform visibility logics through practices such as trendjacking , while orienting their work toward what we conceptualize as critical visibility— valued for its capacity to foster reflection and dialogue rather than mere exposure. We introduce the concept of topic density to describe the structural barriers of conveying feminist ideas under conditions of audience skepticism, fast-paced short-video consumption, and political constraint. To remain visible, creators adopt extensive pre-publication self-censorship practices that function not merely as individual accommodations but as a depoliticizing force constraining what feminist critique can become publicly legible on the platform.

As a core representative of Cuban-American literature, Cristina García focuses her creations on the exile experiences of Cubans after the Cuban Revolution, and profoundly depicts the identity predicament and intergenerational transmission of trauma faced by the Cuban-American “one-and-a-half generation”. Taking her representative works Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and The Agüero Sisters (1997) as the research objects, this paper systematically analyzes the specific manifestations and transmission mechanisms of generational trauma in the two novels, as well as its profound influence on the identity construction of the Cuban-American one-and-a-half generation from the interdisciplinary perspectives of postcolonial theory, feminist criticism and trauma studies. The study finds that García adopts narrative strategies such as female lineage inheritance, memory politics and cross-cultural conflict to reveal how Cuban exile trauma transcends generational boundaries and shapes the “in-between identity” of the one-and-a-half generation who neither fully belong to Cuba nor integrate into the United States. It is further pointed out that the process of the one-and-a-half generation experiencing, negotiating and reconstructing generational trauma has become an important path for them to construct a unique hybrid cultural identity.

The correlation between domestic violence and masculinities has been confirmed by many studies. In China, although there is already relevant research examining domestic violence from the perspective of masculinity, they have seldom prioritized women's perspectives, which feminist scholars argue are crucial for exposing the mechanisms of patriarchal power. Prevailing theories of masculinity, particularly Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, are rooted in Western contexts, and how her theory can be applied to the Chinese context is a question worth discussing. Our study indigenizes Connell's framework to investigate how Chinese women on the social media platform Weibo construct and critique masculinities in the context of domestic violence. A dataset of 1,514 comments related to three high-profile domestic violence cases was collected and analyzed through the lens of four memetic discourses: "Moms' Boys," "Phoenix Men," "Soft Rice Men," and "Puxin Men." The key undesirable masculine traits identified by women include "irresponsibility or excessive filial piety to the original family," "traditional rural background," "economic dependence," "gender superiority," and a rejection of "violence" and "disrespect toward women." This study further theorizes contemporary Chinese masculinities by bridging Chinese masculinity studies with digital feminist critiques of domestic violence, highlighting how shifting gender expectations intersect with class, economic status, the urban-rural divide, and gendered power dynamics in contemporary China, shaping women's critiques of male perpetrators. It also reveals contradictions within feminist discourse in the Chinese context, where women simultaneously reject traditional male dominance while upholding certain gendered expectations that may inadvertently reinforce patriarchal ideals.

ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely promoted as a neutral and efficient solution to organizational bias, yet its deployment often intensifies gendered and intersectional inequalities. Existing literatures provide partial accounts: algorithmic management emphasizes control without addressing gender; bias research treats discrimination as a technical anomaly; and feminist critiques diagnose patriarchy but lack a mechanism‐based explanation of how AI embeds inequality. To address this gap, we theorize feminist algorithmic rationality, a regime in which AI reconfigures managerial logics upstream through three mechanisms: the protocolization of gendered work, the quantification of subjectivity, and corpus feedback loops that normalize exclusion as organizational common sense. By situating this framework historically alongside Taylorism and platform governance, we highlight both continuities in masculinized rationalities and ruptures in the bureaucratization of language and data. Building on these insights, we propose a FeministAI governance framework grounded in intersectionality, transparency, and care ethics, moving beyond technical fixes to reimagine organizational rationality. We argue that, without feminist intervention, AI‐enabled decision systems risk institutionalizing inequality by embedding gendered assumptions into organizational categories, metrics, and routines, which we conceptualize as algorithmic patriarchy, where inequality becomes an upstream condition of evaluation rather than a downstream error to be corrected.

Qualitative inquiry often positions voice as something that can be clarified or protected through reflexive practice. Feminist and post-structural critiques have challenged these assumptions, yet methodological discourse frequently returns to reflexivity as ethical reassurance. This article offers an alternative by conceptualizing voice as relational, structurally conditioned, and unsettled. Drawing on arts-based and educational research encounters, I introduce entangled voicings as a feminist methodological orientation that frames expression and silence as co-produced through shifting positionalities, institutional authority, and affective conditions beyond researcher control. The article offers methodological provocations that position discomfort, silence, and vulnerability as necessary epistemic conditions.

The Walt Disney Company created a musical animation film, Moana (2016), inspired by the Polynesian culture and history. It was commercially successful, and Moana II was released in 2024. This article examines Disney’s Moana film series with regard to feminism, postfeminism, and political correctness. It begins with the definition and discussion of feminism and postfeminism as analytical frameworks, and confirms the background of feminism and political correctness related to the Walt Disney Company. Moreover, this article comparatively analyzes the feminist critique of Moana film series and feminist/postfeminist elements at the same time. Prior research has shed light on aspects of racial and cultural prejudices as well as coloniality of the film series in a critical manner, and these aspects will be reexamined as well. Likewise, a debate on so-called cultural appropriation is to be highlighted in the light of political correctness. This research argues that Moana film series has feminist/postfeminist elements and that although there are some racial/cultural prejudices in the film series, it would be an overexaggeration to jump to the conclusion that the film series is based on the coloniality and cultural appropriation.

Realism occupied an important place in Tamil cinema, especially as a counter-movement to dramatic and commercial film traditions. Among its leading practitioners, Balu Mahendra was widely recognized for his naturalistic cinematography, intimate storytelling, and emotionally nuanced female characters. His films were often celebrated for their aesthetic minimalism and psychological depth. However, while their realism was critically acclaimed, limited research examined how contemporary youth audiences interpreted their gender politics through a feminist framework. In particular, a gap existed in reception-based studies exploring how Generation Z audiences re-evaluated these narratives in the context of modern gender discourses. The study adopted a qualitative, interview-based research design involving 40 Gen Z participants aged 18-27. Following the selected film screenings, semi-structured interviews were conducted, and responses were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings revealed a significant generational reinterpretation of realism. While participants appreciated the emotional authenticity and visual subtlety of the films, they also identified examples of patriarchal undertones, sacrificial femininity, and the male gaze embedded within the narratives. The study revealed that realism was not ideologically neutral but was open to critical feminist rereading. By integrating audience reception theory with feminist film studies, this research contributed to expanding contemporary discourse in film and gender studies.

ABSTRACT This paper questions the form of power attributed to migrant women entrepreneurs often emanating from their pre-established social positions, which limits their engagements to mere reaction and adaptation to dominant power holders (i.e. specific groups, contexts, structures). Drawing on the life stories of four migrant women entrepreneurs of Turkish origin in Sweden and the Netherlands, we examine how they experience power as an embodied and affective phenomenon through a multiple case study approach. Going beyond the positional power attributed to women, we adopt a critical feminist perspective on power and demonstrate how migrant women entrepreneurs actively exercise different ‘modalities of power’ (power-over, power-to and power-with) and build ‘power agility’. The study contributes to migrant women’s entrepreneurship by uncovering their power as an emergent attribute rather than as a fixed parameter and by articulating how this ‘agility’ is at the core of migrant women entrepreneurs’ capacity to generate transformative effects crossing over individual, relational, contextual, and systemic aspects and levels.

Purpose This study aimed to reconstruct the silencing of narratives about Lampung's female heroes in historiography shaped by the coloniality of knowledge and patriarchy. Method This study used a qualitative approach with a literature study and critical historiography to analyze colonial archives, official Lampung history, writings about female figures, and literature on oral traditions containing collective memories about them. It employed decolonial feminist critique to examine the relationship between gender, memory politics, and local knowledge. Result/findings This study showed that Lampung's historiography produces narratives of masculine heroic figures. This was showed by a historiography that centered on male figures as heroes, while the contributions of women such as Poeti Alam Naisjah Moeloek, Putri Mentawai, Ratu Mas Lamban Gedung, and Hj. Inci Hindun Rauf were reduced, silenced, or marginalized to the domestic and cultural realms. Oral tradition needed to be seen as an alternative epistemic medium and archive preserving the collective memory of the role of female heroes outside of written colonial archives and state narratives. Conclusion This study concluded that silencing was read as a form of layered epistemic injustice between the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of gender. It also offered a framework to reconstruct Lampung's history in a more inclusive, gender-just manner, grounded in community knowledge.

Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-48) has been considered one of the most powerful novels ever in the eighteenth century and the cornerstone of the discourse of gender, virtue, and moral authority. In the last several decades, the novel has gained much attention of feminist critics who have discussed its portrayal of female agency, patriarchal domination, and the construction of virtue in the culture. This review provides a critical analysis of significant feminist approaches to Clarissa, the way in which academics have dealt with the character of Clarissa Harlowe and her struggle against social and family forces acting on her. Through the analysis of key arguments presented by the critics like E.J. Clery, Nancy Armstrong and Lois Chaber, the paper draws attention to the various ways feminist criticism has viewed the virtue, autonomy and moral resistance of Clarissa. Another issue that the article addresses is the fact that there is still a debate as to whether or not Richardson novel ends up challenging patriarchal ideology or plays into it. By means of this review, the paper shows that Clarissa still holds an important role in feminist literary scholarship and in the discourses about gender relations in the eighteenth-century fiction.

Over the past decade, there has been a subtle but noticeable increase in the visibility of both older women actors and characters in the film industry. Even though many portrayals of older women in cinema continue to be characterized by sexist and ageist stereotypes, there has also been a rise in their more diverse and complex depictions. Drawing from critical feminist gerontology and feminist film studies, in this paper, I examine the portrayals of older women through a critical feminist thematic analysis of two recent films: My Favourite Cake [Keyke Mahboobe Man] from Iran and Fate [Mukadderat] from Turkey, both released in 2024. Each film is centred on an older widowed woman, Mahin and Sultan, who defy negative stereotypes about older women and restrictive social norms associated with widowhood by reclaiming agency to pursue their interests. Mahin decides to seek companionship after many long years of living alone, whilst Sultan pursues remarriage after her husband’s death but eventually decides to work instead. However, the possibilities and challenges for reclaiming agency are shaped by variations in the intersection of gender and age with nationality, socioeconomic status, and rural-urban settings. These films showcase varied facets of exercising agency for older women and their different strategies for overcoming societal constraints. This study provides valuable insight into not only the changing depictions of older women but also how they can exercise their agency based on their capabilities over the life course, even in socio-political landscapes with conventional norms around aging and widowhood.

Girl, Woman, Other (2019) by Bernardine Evaristo offers a complex literary exploration of race, gender, class, and sexuality within contemporary British society. This study investigates how the novel represents intersectional identi-ties through its innovative narrative form. While previous scholarship has often examined the thematic dimensions of intersectionality in the novel, fewer studies have analyzed how narrative structure contributes to intersectional meaning. Addressing this gap, the present study explores how Evaristo employs polyphony, fragmented narration, and character perspectives to portray identity as dynamic, relational, and socially constructed. The research adopts a qualitative interpretive approach based on close textual analysis and so-cio-political literary criticism. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of in-tersectionality and Black feminist criticism, particularly the works of Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins, the study examines characters, including Amma, Carole, Morgan, and Yazz. These characters illustrate how race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect to shape experiences of marginalization, agency, and social mobility. The findings reveal that Evaristo’s polyphonic narrative structure not only represents diverse identities but also embodies intersec-tionality by allowing multiple voices and perspectives to coexist without a single authoritative centre. In doing so, the novel challenges linear narrative traditions and dominant identity discourses. This study contributes to contemporary literary criticism by demonstrating that intersectionality in Girl, Woman, Other operates not only as a thematic concern but also as a narrative and aesthetic strategy that reflects the complexity of Black British experiences.

This article argues that International Women's Year was a crucial moment in the women's movement's awareness of the power of the mass media. Australia's commemorations of IWY, which offered funding for media and cultural projects, sharpened feminist thinking on media's role in perpetuating women's oppression. Based on a close reading of a range of media sources and a range of Australian feminist culture produced both before and during 1975, this article charts the development of Australian feminist critiques of the media and examine how, and why, the women's movement regarded the media as a tool of feminist transformation in International Women's Year.